On the morning of September 11 (9/11) of 2001, as Bush was in a Florida classroom giving some publicity to his new educational program, everything in American politics would take on a new meaning and direction. 

That fateful morning four commercial airplanes were hijacked by nineteen al-Qaeda operatives.  Two planes flew into the New York World Trade Center buildings, eventually bringing them down, with 2,600 office workers, police and firefighters dying in the tragedy. Another one crashed into the Pentagon building, killing 125 officers and workers there.  And one flight (United Flight 93), alerted via cell phone by spouses that their hijacked plane was undoubtedly headed for a strategic site in Washington, D.C., was brought down near Shanksville in rural southwestern Pennsylvania by very heroic passengers.  All aboard were killed (40 passengers and crew as well as the hijackers).  But either the Capitol Building or White House (the probable goals of the hijackers) was spared the fate of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

The whole thing was a nightmarish shock, not only to Americans but also to much of the world (many Muslims of the Middle East, however, found much to celebrate in the event).

Since 1993, the CIA had been watching al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and had developed a plan to go after the leadership of this enemy organization. Ironically, this plan was more or less finalized just prior to 9/11, but not in time to put the Cabinet on alert to the dangers posed directly to the country by the activities of al-Qaeda.  Certainly however, the CIA recognized immediately the al-Qaeda character of the attacks when they occurred on that fateful day of 9/11.

The world stood in sympathy with the United States.  And quickly a large international coalition (from 42 different countries, most of them from NATO, and within NATO, mostly the British) indicated a readiness to join with the Americans in conducting an anti-terrorist drive into Afghanistan to destroy the terrorists and their camps.

On September 20th, Bush went before a joint session of Congress to announce to the Taliban authorities governing Afghanistan that they must surrender the al-Qaeda operatives or America (and much of the world) would do the job on its own.  But the Taliban refused to cooperate.

With this (expected) refusal of the Taliban, the narrowly-defined surgical operation of taking out bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organization took on a broader goal: to knock out the Afghan Taliban as well, or any other regime giving sanctuary or aiding in any way to such terrorists.  According to what would eventually be termed the "Bush Doctrine," going after the perpetrators of the 9/11 hit was now expanded to liberating all of Afghanistan from the tyranny of all Muslim fanatics, including the Taliban, who had tried to pull the country back into the Middle Ages.

This of course would make the venture something more than just an exercise in enacting justice on the criminal perpetrators of the 9/11 tragedy.  The Bush Doctrine would draw America into the much, much larger challenge of nation-building (at first just Afghanistan), the very thing of which Bush had been so critical of the Clinton Administration.  And Afghanistan, as wildly diverse and as hostile as the various groups making up the country happened to be, would make nation-building a virtually impossible task – as every government working out of Kabul had long known the matter to be.  Afghanistan was not a nation, had never been a nation, and would never become a nation any time soon.

However, almost without giving it a second thought, Bush began immediately to set the larger American goal in Afghanistan as bringing national democracy to the country.  Presumably this loftier, more Idealistic goal would ennoble the American efforts in Afghanistan.  What he seemed not to realize was that this would also open up much larger questions concerning not only American relations with Afghanistan and the surrounding nations, but also the entire Muslim world.  It would hit the country with huge diplomatic questions that would trouble the rest of Bush's presidency.

CIA chief Tenet was ready to go immediately (presuming the operation to be merely taking out bin Laden and his associates).  The CIA began to pay off local Afghan supporters to help them locate bin Laden so that CIA operatives could do their job.  But as the operation began to expand its reach from taking out the criminal perpetrators of 9/11, to taking out all of the many al-Qaeda training camps around the country, to taking out the entire Taliban government, Tenet realized that the CIA needed the U.S. military's help in carrying out its responsibilities.

When asked to support the CIA, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld balked, refusing such support unless Tenet and the CIA operations were put under Rumsfeld's Department of Defense (DOD).  Furthermore, the taking down of bin Laden and al-Qaeda would have to wait until the Taliban had been defeated through the DOD's military operations.  Tenet was forced to yield, part of the frequent tension that would characterize relationships within the Bush cabinet.

But the DOD had no immediate plans for an Afghan operation.  That would take time to develop.  And the military would not move until they were fully ready.¹ Also any such plans required a lot of diplomatic preparation, especially in getting things organized so that America's military operations were coordinated with the local Afghan troops of the Northern Alliance.  This larger operation took time to get itself ready for action.

Eventually (October 7th, almost a month later) America was finally ready to go. There was a huge American and British attack from the air on al-Qaeda training sites and Taliban strongholds, while at the same time the Northern Alliance provided ground troops (also assisted by U.S. special forces, mostly as liaison personnel coordinating ground and air action), which invaded south into Taliban territory.

But the Northern Alliance would not be led by the highly respected Massoud, for he had been assassinated in a well-planned operation just two days before 9/11.  This had caught the attention of CIA analysts who had been watching Afghanistan and who sensed that something big was about to happen when Massoud was assassinated.  But they were not able to get their concerns passed on quickly enough to put the nation's leaders on alert.  Even then there was probably no way anyone could have expected that these events in distant Afghanistan pointed to what happened two days later on 9/11 – just as Americans in 1941 were on to the fact that the Japanese were planning something big, though it never occurred to them that it would be an attack all the way across the Pacific to Pearl Harbor. [Americans should never underestimate the abilities of their enemies to reach deeply into their national existence to try to break them.]²

Nonetheless, the Northern Alliance managed to hold together despite the loss of its leader.  And with the help of American and NATO air power, they were able to begin driving back the Taliban.  On November the 9th, they captured Mazar-i-Sharif, with its key airport in the north of the country, enabling them to fly in not only military supplies but also food for a desperately hungry Afghanistan. Three days later they took the capital Kabul after the Taliban fled ahead of advancing Northern Alliance forces.

With the fall of Kabul, celebrations broke out in Washington and across America. Laura Bush, the Presidents' wife, delivered an address to the nation describing how the Taliban was in fast retreat and how the Afghans were rejoicing, especially the Afghan women. 

"The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women."  So it was clear.  What America was involved in was in fact the much larger goal of ridding the world of terrorism and bringing new rights and dignity to the people of the world.

Many of the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters retreated into the mountains and caves of Tora Bora, which Americans bombed heavily on the 16th of November.  Finally, CIA operatives and Army Special Forces moved into the area.  But they had hardly enough troops to cover this huge area sufficiently.  Many Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters (including presumably bin Laden and his colleague al-Zawahiri) simply escaped across the border into Pakistan.  Other Taliban retreated south to dig in around their political center, Kandahar, where they were joined by more Taliban pouring in from Pakistan to join the Taliban defense of the Pashtun south.

Once again American Idealism and the hard realities of a complex world would clash violently.  Just the case of "freeing" the women in fundamentalist Afghanistan provides a vivid example of the complexities.  Certainly equal education and equal professional opportunities for women are well-acknowledged rights of every woman in Western culture.  But in traditional Muslim culture such personal rights do not exist.  In fact the whole Western idea of personal rights itself is not the point of Islamic culture, which instead teaches submission as the primary directive in life. Everything, from children up through families, through local clans and tribes, through anointed rulers, to Allah himself, is a construction of correct submission. To talk of personal rights throws the whole sense of Islamic order into confusion. In fact it is one of the major points in the hostility of traditional Muslims against the invasion of their culture by Western values.  When Muslims hear of Westerners crusading in their lands to bring individual rights, this touches the nerves of devout Muslims, not just in Afghanistan but also in other parts of the Muslim world.  And in many cases, it merely makes them all the more deliberate in their sense of opposition to the Westernizing of their culture.

To be sure, there are many, very many, in the Muslim world who find these Western values attractive.  These are the people that Westerners are most likely to deal with in their contacts with the world of Islam.  It is thus easy to get the impression on the basis of this personal sampling that pro-Western attitudes are much more prevalent in the Middle East than they actually are.

It is thus also hard, very hard, for Americans to understand how Muslims who have lived among us in America (as most of the 9/11 perpetrators had) could hate us as they do.  Do they not see the good in what we stand for?  The answer is obviously "no."  Contact with our culture has made them all the more committed to the idea that the evil ways of our culture must be destroyed – just as we Americans believe that the evil ways of their culture must be destroyed.

Thus it was that in Afghanistan, America became drawn into a much larger challenge, one that had been brewing for a while and was about to become monumental in size.  The war on terrorism in Afghanistan was quickly to become a war of global cultures.

¹Of course this DOD-imposed delay would give al-Qaeda plenty of time to slip into the mountainous fastness of the Afghan Southeast – and from there into Pakistan, where the U.S. would receive no permission whatsoever to go in hot pursuit of al-Qaeda.  In short, Rumsfeld let al-Qaeda get away – while he now focused on taking down the Taliban, a task that would prove to be even more difficult (actually impossible) than the task of defeating the Viet Cong had proven to be in Vietnam.

²Very, very ironically ... in early September of 2001 (as a just-hired history and social studies teacher at a Christian school in Pennsylvania) I was making this introductory point that foreign affairs was not really an option for "Fortress America," despite the huge walls of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that it seemed we could hide behind if we chose to do so.  I knew that there were enemies abroad intending to bring the battle to America itself ... despite those oceanic walls.  I cited as the most obvious example Muslim jihadists, America-haters that I pointed out were certainly going to make another attempt on the highly visible and extremely valuable American national symbol, the New York Twin Towers. However, I had no idea that this prophecy would be fulfilled literally the very next day.  My students never forgot this act of unintended prophecy.  But tragically, I lost two former parishioners in that disaster.  Thus this was indeed horribly painful prophecy, something I would hope never to be called on to do again.

In December a select group of Afghans met in Bonn, Germany, under U.N. sponsorship to put together an Agreement providing for a provisional authority and a constitution drafting committee.  Hamid Karzai, of a well-respected Pashtun political and diplomatic family background, and backed personally by America, was selected to serve a 6-month term as chairman of a Transitional Administration. The Bonn Agreement also called for the convening of a loya jirga (grand council) which by Afghan tradition was required to select any Afghan leader.  A loya jirga of June 2002 in Kabul reappointed Karzai as head (this time as its president) of the Transitional Administration for a term of two years.  The title was mostly honorific since there was little direct government outside of the capital itself but only loose arrangements or alliances with the many Afghan warlords who were in fact the real leaders here and there around Afghanistan.  But Karzai did an excellent job of keeping this rather traditional Afghan political system functioning fairly effectively (that had been the pattern by which the Afghan Shah had once "governed" the country).

There seemed little more that could be done against bin Laden, who had obviously slipped into Pakistan – where the Pakistani government refused to allow American or NATO troops into their country in pursuit of al-Qaeda.  Pakistan allowed supplies for American and NATO troops to pass through its territory on its way to Afghanistan.  But the Pakistanis were unbending in their refusal to allow U.S. troops on Pakistani soil.  In fact, it seemed that at times elements of the Pakistani government, military, and intelligence agency (ISI) were still actively supporting the Taliban.  There seemed to be no way to get either bin Laden or the remainder of al-Qaeda as long as Americans could not enter Pakistan – and as long as Pakistan played a confusing game of conflicting political and diplomatic loyalties.

In 2004 there were actually national elections held in Afghanistan, at least in the parts of the country not still under Taliban control.  And Karzai was decisively elected over his 22 opponents, with victories in 21 of the 34 provinces.  What America and the West understood as "democracy" had finally come to Afghanistan ... or so it appeared anyway.

But by this point, Bush had shifted his priority from Afghanistan to a matter of greater interest to the president: Iraq.  For reasons known only to Bush, he had by this time taken on the goal of ridding the world of Iraq's dictator, Saddam Hussein – and bringing Iraq to "democracy" as his primary foreign policy goal.  He would pour the bulk of America's military assets into this new anti-Saddam campaign. This left the situation in Afghanistan now very problematic.

Thus with the shifting of the diplomatic focus west toward Iraq, the Taliban were clearly able to make a political comeback in Afghanistan – by 2006 able to once again take over villages that they had been chased from, terrorizing the local population back into submission.

At this point there just were not enough American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan to protect the local population from a Taliban return.  America and its allies would send out military missions to retake villages from the Taliban.  Then after a short while these Western troops would have to withdraw because they were needed elsewhere.  And then the Taliban would return – and execute any who had helped the Westerners.  After a while the Afghans simply asked the Americans not to "help" them.  This was Vietnam all over again – although even less likely to find any success as things now stood.

Recent wars have been whole peoples against other peoples, cultures against cultures, popular worldviews violently contending with other worldviews.  Such struggles have been characterized not by the matching of uniformed armies against uniformed armies, but by the participation in one form or another of whole populations – men, women, and children – in the violence of war. Vietnam was a clear example of this problem – where American troops became easily visible targets at the same time that Americans were never sure who were the proper targets among the Vietnamese.  Friendly smiles could turn into murderous design once the backs of American soldiers were turned.  To be sure there were Vietnamese supporters of the American presence.  But how could Americans tell the difference between sincere and faked friendliness?  Mistakes were made – huge mistakes at times – especially when the frustration level of American troops turned explosive.

The American Department of Defense or Pentagon never really worked out a solution to this problem.  Consequently, the problems in Afghanistan were presenting themselves in the same format as the Vietnam war.  If the Taliban presented themselves in some kind of battle array, they were as good as dead in American gun sights.  But when they instead moved in and out of the local population (terrorizing the locals to make sure that no locals identified these Taliban to the Western troops) it was very difficult to hit them militarily.

The CIA had its methods, moving as it did in the "dark areas" of conflict, using bribes, spies and assassins to take out the enemy.  This was fairly effective in this kind of conflict, especially since only the leadership among the enemy needed to be taken out in order to keep the enemy at bay.  But of course these kinds of procedures were exactly what America's sense of the "rules of war" forbade.

To further complicate things, the field of battle was no longer off in some distant field such as Vietnam.  Certainly much of the action was in Afghanistan.  But it was also in Europe and even in America itself.  The enemy was among us – but could not be easily distinguished from friendly Muslims living among us.

They knew who they were of course.  And thus finding out what they knew became important in identifying the enemy so that we could fight them – and not just wait for them to hit us.  But getting such information, which in fact given the nature of the conflict had to be a key part of the war strategy, was not going to please those who felt that we should remain the model of "civilized" warfare.  And thus a deep conflict over information-gathering tactics among the Muslim terrorists arose within our own cultural circles just as it had during the Vietnam War.

Bush attempted to get clarification and ultimately full legal authorization from our own lawmakers in Congress and – given the legislative ambitions of the nation's federal judiciary – that branch of government as well (although, given the ideological diversity of these judicial ambitions, much trickier to negotiate).  At first, it was fairly easy to find political support for an aggressive national-security policy. But with time this support became much more difficult to maintain.

Within little more than a month after 9/11, Congress was quick to extend extensive powers to the President as the nation's Commander in Chief, enabling him to take a wide range of actions designed both to protect the nation from any further assaults of the likes of 9/11 and to go after America's enemies abroad.  The title of this legislation is lengthy and yet very explanatory of its nature: the "USA" portion stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America"; the "PATRIOT" portion stands for "Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism."  Basically the Act gave precise, but broader definition to the term "terrorist"; it gave various government agencies greater power to uncover and track terrorist communications and the movement of their funding through the international banking system; it gave federal authorities wider powers to act to detain and deport suspected terrorists; and it gave these authorities the right (through the use of National Security Letters or NSLs) to demand that organizations suspected of involvement in terrorism turn over their records and data to the federal authorities.

At the time, the anger against al-Qaeda and their Taliban hosts was so deep that there was almost unanimous support in Congress for the legislation.  But as time went along and no new attacks were made on the country, as the Taliban had been chased from power into the wastes of the Hindu Kush mountains, and thus as the sense of immediate danger subsided, civil libertarians (such as the ACLU) began to speak out against the Act.  The act had been put under a "sunset" provision, terminating it as of the end of 2005 – unless it was extended by a new act of Congress.  As that time approached the controversy grew hot.  But in the end Congress extended the Act. 

But the federal courts also got into the debate (of course!), striking down many of the NSL provisions.  Once again, the federal courts took on the role as the supreme, as well as the untouchable, legislative branch of the U.S. government.

Along with these provisions for the empowerment of the federal authority to act swiftly and deeply against terrorism directed against America went the administrative reorganization of the federal agencies immediately involved in the enforcement of these provisions.  Some twenty-two separate governmental agencies were merged into a single administrative department, the Department of Homeland Security, in early October of 2001, in an effort to cut through the maze of different agencies not all that much in touch with each other previously.  There had been a huge breakdown in communications among various agencies responsible for this or that aspect of domestic national security.  Had there been better inter-service communication, 9/11 might have been prevented.  The Department of Homeland Security was created to make sure that this did not happen again.

One more piece of the picture with respect to the changes in American life brought on by this war on terror occurred as thousands of Taliban and al-Qaeda were captured in the first months of the war in Afghanistan.  This presented the quite large problem of what to do with the captives.  It was finally decided to send hundreds of them to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where they would come under military law rather than civil law (and extensive civil protections), where the activist federal judiciary had no jurisdiction.  There they could also be interrogated in order to get information on the whereabouts of al-Qaeda operatives, especially bin Laden and Zawahiri.

Some of the Bush cabinet were squeamish about the methods used to get information and argued heatedly over the issue.  One of the ways out was what came to be called "rendition," that is, sending Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners to another country less squeamish about using torture to get information, usually Egypt, where the government had a deep dislike of Islamic fundamentalism (Muslim fundamentalists had assassinated Egyptian President Sadat in 1981 and had on numerous occasions tried to assassinate his successor, President Mubarak).  Of course this did not solve the moral questions involved by simply passing on responsibility to someone else.

But the problem remained.  Without knowledge about the plans of those who wanted to kill Americans, we really were defenseless.  America had not asked for this kind of warfare.  But insurgency left America with few options if it was going to protect itself.  And with time, failure to do so would only worsen the dangers. Someday weapons of mass destruction (terrible chemical or even worse biological, or even eventually nuclear, weapons) would fall into the hands of terrorists.  Should that happen Americans would find themselves living in a very sorry world.

Meanwhile the international community (joined by Liberals in Congress and in the U.S. press corps) began to complain loudly about the torture of prisoners ("waterboarding" being a particular object of criticism) to get this vital information.

But the Bush Administration remained unmoved.  As Bush saw things, he had a job to do.  There was a war against a dangerous enemy to be won.  And it could be won only through these unwanted means brought on by the way the enemy himself chose to fight.

Another aspect in the changing world of international war and diplomacy was the dangerous proliferation of nuclear weapons, and how it played into the struggle America was having with the world of Islam.  In 1999, just before Bush came to office, America had cut off all further official American economic and military aid to Pakistan, one of its supposed long-time allies.  This was the result of the discovery of the fact that Pakistan had been developing its own nuclear weapons in violation of promises not to go there – though India had also been doing the same, and would suffer the same cutoff of American assistance as a result.  Worse, Pakistan had been doing so in conjunction with a group of other countries, notably China, but also the dark, dark country of North Korea.  Suspicions also were that Pakistan was working with the rogue state Libya, the bitter Iraqi enemy Saddam Hussein, and the country dedicated to the death of America as the Great Satan, the Islamic Republic of Iran.  And behind this all seemed to be the one person considered by all Pakistanis as their greatest scientist and national hero, Dr. Abdul Qadeer (A.Q.) Khan, and his organization, Khan Research Laboratories (KRL).

In 1974 India had exploded its first nuclear device, making it the sixth nuclear power in the world.  Pakistan (India's arch-rival) had also been working on developing its own nuclear capacity.  But after the Indian testing, Pakistan's Prime Minister Bhutto felt the need to push Pakistan's own program ahead more forcefully.  Pakistan began developing a two-pronged approach to the matter: the development of a plutonium-based bomb under the direction of Munir Ahmad Khan and the development of a uranium-based bomb under the direction of A.Q. Khan. Both directors had studied and worked extensively in Europe or America and were able to bring back their expertise to Pakistan to push the program ahead.

Then on May 11 and 13, 1998, India went through a second series of nuclear tests.  Surprisingly two weeks later (28 May), Pakistan exploded its own nuclear uranium device and two days after that its first plutonium device. The quickness by which Pakistan was able to answer the Indian tests immediately raised suspicions that Pakistan had been receiving last-minute direct help in finalizing its own nuclear program, most likely from China (a major rival to India in Asia).

America imposed sanctions on both India and Pakistan, and openly blamed China for helping Pakistan.  Americans had long been suspicious that China and Pakistan (and North Korea) were working together on nuclear weapons development. Evidence of such pushed America to end its economic and military aid to Pakistan in 1999.  But this seems to have only pushed Pakistan even deeper into its nuclear relationship with China.

America and the West watched Pakistan closely because of its status as a nuclear power.  Even more than Russia, Pakistan was viewed as a country vulnerable to a potential loss of control over its nuclear materials.  With Islamic fundamentalism growing ever stronger in Pakistan, fear in the West grew rapidly about the dangers the world might find itself in if some of that material found its way into the hands of Muslim fanatics.

Then it came to light that Dr. A.Q. Khan and his research organization KRL had in fact been offering the sale of nuclear technology to Iraq, North Korea, Iran and Libya, even to al-Qaeda and possibly the Taliban.  In late October 2001 three KRL nuclear scientists close to Khan were arrested as being pro-Taliban.  Then evidence uncovered in an investigation in 2003 and early 2004 pointed fairly clearly to the fact that Iran's uranium enrichment facility came from Khan's plans (which he apparently had sold to Iran for tens of millions of dollars).  Pakistan's former Army Chief of Staff, General Mirza Aslam Beg was also involved in the Iran sale.  In December 2003 two more KRL scientists were arrested.  In that same month Libya agreed to give up its nuclear ambitions.  Inspectors traced Libya's program back to the Pak 1 models of Khan's gas centrifuge.  Three Swiss associates of Khan were arrested by Interpol.  Investigations conducted by the Pakistani government revealed a complex underground tangle involving agents from all around the world, Dutch, Germans, Malaysians, arms merchants from Dubai and Niger, even an Israeli arms merchant.

In 2004 Khan, confessed that he had given Iran, Libya, and North Korea his nuclear plans.  However, he later claimed that Pakistani President Musharraf had pressured him at that point into making what was indeed a false confession, largely to appease America, which was pressuring Musharraf to do something about Khan.

Pakistani President Musharraf walked a delicate line between pressures from America to cut off Khan and pressures from the Pakistanis who viewed Khan as something of a national hero, similar to the complex position in which also America found itself in that part of the world.