Twenty-Five Years After 9/11: A Region Still Paying the Price

A quarter century after the September 11 attacks, the Atlantic Council’s retrospective on the War on Terror offers a verdict that resists easy categorisation, and that ambiguity is itself a damning commentary on how the conflict was conceived and conducted. Nowhere is this unresolved legacy more visible than in Afghanistan, where the very threats the war set out to eliminate have not only survived but regenerated under Taliban rule.

A War Without a Defined Victory

Omer Rafiq, a non-resident senior fellow at the Council, captures the central tension of the 25-year campaign. Washington did achieve genuine tactical successes over the course of its counterterrorism operations. But tactical wins are not strategy, and successive US administrations never answered the one question that should have anchored the entire effort: what would victory actually look like, and how would it be recognised when achieved? A war without a defined endpoint is not a war that can be won; it is one that simply continues until exhaustion, political or otherwise, sets in.

The human cost of that open-endedness is staggering. Rafiq’s accounting puts direct violent deaths linked to the post-9/11 wars at more than 900,000, including over 7,000 US service members. For a campaign of this scale and duration, the absence of a clear cost-benefit reckoning is itself a policy failure. Crucially, Rafiq locates the core problem not on the battlefield but in the policymaking apparatus that sent forces there, a failure of political and strategic leadership to translate battlefield capability into a coherent, achievable objective. Tactics without a defined strategic destination inevitably drift, and drift is expensive, in both lives and credibility.

That erosion of credibility now shapes US foreign policy in ways that outlast the wars themselves. The report links the chaotic end of the Afghanistan war, the withdrawal of American forces, and the enduring legacy of the Iraq intervention to a marked scepticism among the American public toward foreign military interventions. Wars fought without clear objectives do not simply end when troops withdraw; they leave behind a domestic political inheritance that constrains future policy choices.

The Outcome on the Ground

If the War on Terror’s strategic ambiguity is visible in Washington’s policy debates, its practical consequences are starkly visible in Afghanistan itself. The Atlantic Council’s parallel assessment is unambiguous on this point: the Taliban’s inability to deter or prevent terrorist groups from operating on Afghan soil represents the region’s foremost counterterrorism challenge today, exposing the regime’s failure to secure the very territory it claims to control.

This failure is not incidental; it is structural. Taliban patronage and alliances with militant organisations have created a permissive environment in which groups can survive, reorganise and expand largely unhindered. Al-Qaeda, battered into near-irrelevance by 20 years of war, has found in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan the sanctuary and breathing room to rebuild, recreating the precise conditions that once allowed it to evolve into a global threat. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), one of the Taliban’s most consequential allies, operates from Afghan bases to strike across the border, converting Afghan territory into a sustained launchpad for terrorism against Pakistan. Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), despite being nominally targeted by Taliban military operations, continues to recruit and train in the country’s ungoverned spaces, including drawing young men from Central Asian states into its ranks.

Nor is this threat confined to South Asia. IS-K recruits of Tajik origin have surfaced in plots and attacks as far afield as Europe, the Philippines and the United States, demonstrating that Afghanistan’s extremist ecosystem now generates threats well beyond the region. The presence of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), aligned with Al-Qaeda and oriented toward Central Asia and western China, further underscores how far the ambitions of Afghanistan-based militancy now extend. Central Asian states are already confronting the consequences: rising extremist recruitment and external operations staged from Afghan territory, compounded by IS-K’s expanding regional reach.

UN assessments and international counterterrorism monitoring bodies have repeatedly corroborated this picture, documenting the continued presence of Al-Qaeda, TTP, IS-K, ETIM and other networks inside Afghanistan. Against this weight of evidence, Taliban claims of having “secured” the country do not withstand scrutiny. Security, in any meaningful sense, requires the denial of sanctuary, not its provision.

Two Failures, One Legacy

Read together, these two assessments describe a single, continuous failure rather than two separate stories. A war launched without a defined endpoint concluded without a secured outcome, and the resulting vacuum in Afghanistan is now the operating environment for exactly the threats the war was meant to eliminate. Twenty-five years and roughly a trillion dollars of military commitment later, the most durable lesson may be the simplest one: military tactics divorced from strategic clarity produce neither victory nor closure, only prolonged uncertainty, borne disproportionately by the states, like Pakistan and its Central Asian neighbours, left to manage the fallout.

The Taliban regime, in this light, is not a postscript to the War on Terror but a direct consequence of its unresolved strategic questions, and, today, an active part of the terrorism problem the war was fought to end, functioning as a hub, sanctuary, recruitment ground and launchpad for threats affecting South Asia, Central Asia and the wider world.

SAT Commentary

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