Remembering 9/11: 25 years, enduring lessons

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the enduring lesson is stark: force can disrupt extremism, but only justice and a more equitable world order can address its deeper roots

It has been twenty-five years since two aircraft struck the World Trade Center, a third hit the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought back. Nearly 3,000 people died in under two hours. The world that woke up on September 12, 2001, was irreversibly different, and much of what followed - for better and for worse - still shapes how nations approach security today. 9/11 rewrote the global rulebook. NATO invoked its collective-defence clause for the only time in its history. Airports became fortresses, intelligence agencies gained sweeping powers, and two long wars followed in Afghanistan and Iraq. A quarter of a century later, the balance sheet is sobering: military intervention degraded specific networks but also destabilised entire regions, feeding the very extremism it sought to end.

Iraq’s collapse birthed ISIS. Afghanistan’s twenty-year war ended with the Taliban back in power. The clearest lesson is that force alone cannot defeat an ideology. Surveillance and firepower disrupt plots, but they cannot dry up the wells - poverty, humiliation, unresolved political grievances, and the sense that international law applies selectively - from which extremist recruitment draws. This is not an excuse for terrorism; nothing justifies the deliberate killing of civilians.

But counter-terrorism that ignores root causes only postpones the next attack. Here, the case for a more equitable world order becomes practical, not idealistic. A global system in which powerful states apply human rights and sovereignty selectively, where reconstruction aid arrives only after devastation, and where bodies like the UN Security Council remain frozen since 1945, cannot credibly ask the disenfranchised to trust its rules. Reformed institutions, consistent application of international law, and sustained investment in education and development in fragile regions are not charity - they are counter-terrorism by other means.

India learned its own version of this lesson on 26/11. When ten gunmen from a Pakistan-based terror group struck Mumbai in November 2008, India discovered that its National Security Guard commandos, based near Delhi, took nearly ten hours to reach the crisis.

The response reshaped India’s security architecture: NSG hubs came up in Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Hyderabad, and the National Investigation Agency was created. Diplomatically, India has spent nearly two decades pressing the world to treat cross-border terror infrastructure with the same seriousness as the act of terror itself. That campaign has succeeded only partially.

The way forward demands sustained investment in de-radicalisation and development alongside intelligence and defence, and multilateral institutions reformed enough to apply their rules consistently. A world order that is fairer, more consistent and less selective in whose grievances it hears will always be the safer one.