Dr Gill’s analysis of 9/11 dissects its geopolitical fallout, debunking conspiracy theories and exposing US intelligence failures, revealing Al Qaeda’s strategic intent and global disruption, exclusively for Different Truths.
The 9/11/2001 attack on New York’s Twin Towers spawned industrial-scale conspiracy theories anchored in the victims’ suffering and public wrath, attributing malafide premeditation to the ineffectualness of intelligence analyses.
The hijackers of the 9/11 attack on civilians in the Twin Towers weaponised themselves, civilian aircraft and their unwitting passengers. They harvested nearly 3000 dead and thousands more injured and shook the world. The domino effect disrupted the world order, still tottering in proxy wars of attrition.
Maud Quessard & Élie Baranetsa of The Institute of Strategic Research of the French Armed Forces (IHEDN), believe that the “‘global war on terror’ was used to justify wars elsewhere in the world, which constitutes a strategic shift, signalling the failure of the neo-conservative movement… China got a free hand to emerge.”
The resulting geostrategic confusion birthed a litter of conflicts blighting the planet.
Despite cumulating an impressively high reactive body count in its ‘war on terror,’ the United States failed to recalibrate the world. The 2021 scramble from Afghanistan confirmed this reality.
If Al Qaeda’s objective was to disrupt the global status quo of 2001, it succeeded, as in a popular Pakistani street aphorism: “if we can’t play, nobody else will.” Beyond that, it only engendered chaos in the Muslim-majority world and discredited it, regressing its economic and human development.
The Quranic Concept of War by Brigadier General S.K. Malik, Foreword by General Zia-ul-Haq
Nonetheless, Al Qaeda attained its goal to instill terror as an end in itself, theorized in ‘The Quranic Concept of War.’
“Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself.
“Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy (sic); it is the decision we wish to impose upon him”. (Ref: 1 below)
Conspiracy theories, Incompetence, Ineffectualness
By the time of the Twin Towers attack, “The Quranic Concept of War” had been in circulation for just over twenty years. During this period, the United States’ Pakistani field proxies successfully applied the doctrine for a decade in the 1980s Afghan jihad, financed by the USA’s dollar inflow.
Then, in the two decades from 2001 to 2021, this doctrine switched targets in Afghanistan and the rest of the world. The United States flipped from paymaster to bullseye, with Russia reportedly offering the Taliban bounties for American heads.
During the Afghan Jihad of the 1980s, the Americans had applauded their jihadi proxies under Pakistani mentors, advisors and direct-action leadership. Between 2001-2021, they refined drone warfare on them. (Ref: 2 below)
Complacency
The USA had underrated the dimensions of the very manual that crafted and propelled their proxies’ field performance in Afghanistan from 1980 to 1989 and overrated their strategic control over them as infinite. The few field officers who deviated from the official self-perception were probably shooed into career dead ends.
The Americans believed that what had worked to their short-term advantage would be theirs forever.
Retrospection suggests that the Americans probably considered the 1980s implementers of The Quranic Concept of War as just hired help raving, ranting and feeding their self-esteem.
Reaction
Consequently, the USA’s accomplished intelligence officers were caught napping on 9/11, 2001, after which they scurried to spin the fallout from this attack as damage control.
The reaction to the shock of the 9/11 attack birthed competing conspiracy theories on a global scale.
There is no hard evidence of a premeditated conspiracy, but clear indications of a fine network of American myopic presumptuousness, which debilitated its ability to anticipate and prevent 9/11.
Much of the media and the public were unwilling to believe that the USA could be attacked with such impunity by a bunch of underdeveloped irregulars who dressed, spoke, ate differently, didn’t use toilet paper and ploughed their fields without tractors.
However, it is good to remember that in 2001, Saudi Arabia ranked high on the Human Development Index — 99% literacy — and was a top-rated US ally.
Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were middle-class Saudis, two Emiratis, one Egyptian and one Lebanese. All countries were US allies. The hijackers were educated, and none had suffered poverty.
Yet, the shock and bewilderment kickstarted a host of conspiracy theories, diverse in their details, but unified in affixing an explicit or implicit ‘must be’ on their theses. The status of conspiracy provided a Band-Aid to the wounded self-esteem of the conspiracists.
Two Premises Sustaining the Core of the Conspiracy Theories
One, that the attackers could not have had the sophistication to plan, organise and execute this attack.
Second, that without the complicity of the American establishment or Deep State, such an attack would not have been possible.
If even one of these core premises is logically challenged, the conspiracy theory becomes untenable.
So, first, the attackers’ ability to hijack.
They represented and were trained by the world’s oldest and most experienced hijackers.
In the thirty-three years between 1968 — the first hijacking by Arab Muslims — to 9/11/2001, they had committed 26 plane hijackings. Operationally, the degree of success was variable. Strategically, they were able to draw attention to their claims by weaponising empathetic media sections and sowing terror, in line with Brigadier General S.K. Malik’s doctrine endorsed by General Zia ul Haq. By 2001, they were the world’s most experienced plane hijackers, who didn’t need American expertise but might have offered it to them if asked nicely!
Second, their ability to coordinate multiple hijackings.
It was no more complicated than a refined and lethal transposition of international friends coordinating flights to meet up on holiday, or transnational friends synchronizing international flights, or an executive secretary coordinating the flights of participants from multiple locations for an international conference.
Distinctive Feature of the 9/11 attack
What distinguished the 9/11 attack was the choice of targets and the attackers’ self-righteous, mass suicide pledge. And the pledge was not a bespoke weapon crafted for the 9/11 attack. In recent history, Islamist militants adopting this form of attack call it Istishhad, loosely translated as “martyrdom operation,” to avoid using the word suicide, said to be proscribed in Islam.
The simplicity and cost-effectiveness of human bombs have made weaponising individuals more widespread than plane hijackings. It is generally estimated that between 1981 and September 2015, 4,814 suicide attacks occurred in over 40 countries.
So, the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks was within the competence of the attackers and, hijackings and suicide bombings had become their tactical mainstay.
Just as the hijackers didn’t need the USA to mentor their operation, the USA didn’t need them as a pretext for putting boots on West Asian sand to control petroleum.
The Americans were doing rather well with their shiny boot toes in Washington and their heels over their West Asian proxies having fun on the French Riviera, raising the stock value of escort services and casinos.
In the 1st Gulf War, under the aegis of the UNO, the United States had delivered a lethal spanking, billed its oil producing proxies, pulled its troops out and was able to continue implementing its West Asian policies through the same proxies. It did not need to plot the deaths of thousands of its citizens in New York’s Twin Towers and face body bags splashed over front pages.
The neo-conservative New World Order was also on course, and neo-cons had no motive to design the mass slaughter of their fellow-citizens to make Muslims a scapegoat, invade and change regimes under flimsy pretexts, contain these countries’ sovereignty, retrograde their development and slake their thirst for oil, of which they reportedly have the largest reserves.
Neither did the USA need another 1898, when the USS Maine ‘mysteriously’ blew up in Havana Harbour, Cuba, justifying American intervention in the Cuban War of Independence to appropriate Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Nor its 1964 created incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, which facilitated its direct entry into the Vietnam War.
As such, the motive for a conspiracy deflates.
Yet, in retrospect, it would appear that after 9/11, opportunists cynically exploited the tragedy to enrich themselves in lockstep with the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower had warned about in his Farewell Address of January 17, 1961. Greed has no limits, no logic, and its wages are death, of which there has been no shortage in the recent past.
In spite of the United States’ vast intelligence apparatus known for its brilliant analysts and bold direct action, its recurring failures feed headlines, feature articles, books and documentaries, at the expense of optical conjunctivitis and keyboard tendinitis.
Self-Congratulation and Awareness
The United States, flushed by its easy victory in the 1st Gulf War and the dependence of its West Asian proxies, felt no need to create an institution to coordinate its multiple intelligence agencies or create new ones, since contingent threats of the magnitude of 9/11 were either not gamed or else filed.
Many middle-grade intelligence and law enforcement officers had understood that, however underdeveloped their proxies might be, they thought of themselves as a former global power, impoverished and deprived of their destiny by their present paymasters.
Incoming clues led American intelligence officers to believe that they would be targeted, especially after the 1993 World Trade Centre failed attack. In 1995, the same mastermind planned the Bojinka Plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II, blow up eleven airliners, and crash a plane into the headquarters of the CIA. When the 1998 simultaneous US Embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, left two hundred and twenty-four people dead and over 4,500 injured, it was downright irresponsible not to expect more on a larger and successful scale.
These officers realised that, flushed with victory over the Soviets, basking in self-righteous smugness, their Jihadi proxies claimed the triumph solely for themselves, crediting their ostensibly superior morals and exclusivity. They were determined to settle scores with the treacherous usurpers of their destiny, whose dependents they had become.
Yet, these middle-grade American officers cried in the wilderness.
Their warnings went unheeded. Bureaucratic complacency won and ensured the official spin. Nobody wanted to risk upsetting the applecart and losing their perch by following up clues, sharing and coordinating information, and lobbying to establish badly-needed counter terrorism agencies that sprang up after the 9/11 attack.
Bolting the Stable Door
The 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers spawned The Patriot Act, Department of Homeland Security, FATF (Financial Action Task Force), FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), the FBI’s 104 NJTTFs (National Joint Terrorism Task Forces), the FBI’s 24/7 Counterterrorism Watch, The National Crime Intelligence Sharing Plan, and a Director of National Intelligence: reinforcing, reequipping and expanding Special Forces and perhaps a few other agencies, the existence of which is not in the public domain.
The stable door was thoroughly secured after the stallion had bolted.
America’s abundance was dramatically neutralised by its opponents’ underdevelopment.
It took the USA a decade to find the ‘cave-dweller’ basking in a villa serenely tucked into the armpit of one of their prime allies, ensconced in the shadow of its military academy. In a partial remake of the April 1980 Operation Eagle Claw to rescue hostages in Iran, a helicopter once again dutifully crashed, reportedly facilitating China’s acquisition of its bits and pieces in the interests of ‘scientific research.’
Frederick Forsyth, of The Day of the Jackal fame, regretted that “if the nine inner US intelligence agencies and the seven outer agencies had been doing their jobs in 2001, 9/11 would never have occurred.”
Indeed, and 9/11 would have been just another day in New York.
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Ref: 1
Brigadier General S.K. Malik, Pakistan Army, in “The Quranic Concept of War,” 1986, p. 59, with an intriguing publishing history.
1979, publishers Wajid Alis, Lahore, listed by Chughtai Public Library, Lahore, and The National Library of Australia, ISBN unknown.
1986, by Himalayan Books, New Delhi, ISBN: 8170020204, as listed in the Indian Prime Minister’s Museum and Library, call number 909.097671.
1992, Adam Publishers and Distributors, Shandar Market, Chitli Qabar, Delhi, 110006.
This manual of doctrinal strategy has been republished twice in India and is still carried by online bookshops.
Ref: 2
Afghanistan: The Bear Trap, by Brigadier General Mohammad Yousaf, head of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Afghan Bureau, 1983-87, published by Leo Cooper, London, 1992, ISBN 0850528607.
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Gill Sahib, you have exploded the myth of the American invincibility in a logical way with convincing arguments.
Thank you, sir!
Thank you, sir!