The failure to stop 9/11 was a catastrophe. But even bigger mistakes were made in its aftermath
- Written by: Weekend Times
The September 11 2001 terrorist attacks were unlike anything the world had seen before.
For America, and the watching world, September 11 (or 9/11) seemed most like a Pearl Harbour
moment – a devastating surprise attack by distant enemy that demanded a response.
But here the distant enemy was not a nation state in the middle of war, it was a ragtag collection of rebels living in mountain hideouts, long underestimated and widely misunderstood.
It took Hollywood movies to convey the horror of Pearl Harbour. But hundreds of millions around the world watched, via live satellite TV feeds, in disbelieving horror as fully laden commercial aircraft slammed into the first World Trade Centre tower in new York. Hundreds of millions more saw the second tower hit, then witnessed both massive skyscrapers collapsing faster and more completely than seemed possible.
At the time, this felt like a moment that changed everything – a hinge point in history on which so much would turn. Twenty-five years later, that devastating intuition has been confirmed through a cascading series of grim events and tragic mistakes.
Could the September 11 attacks have been prevented?
In September 2026 we live in a world of uncertainty and change. Geopolitics, technology and the physical world are experiencing rapid transformation that fascinates and terrifies in equal measure.
Much of this would have occurred without September 11, but there is a sense in which that day changed all these things.
The collapse of 80 years of global order cannot be be said to simply result from the world’s biggest terror attack, but it certainly played a role in triggering a series of responses that has changed all the nations involved.
Could the September 11 attacks have been foreseen and prevented? Absolutely.
Counterterrorism intelligence has evolved massively over the past 25 years. But international terrorism was not new in 2001, nor was al-Qaeda – the terrorist group responsible – completely unknown and operating without scrutiny.
Well before the 9/11 Commission report was published, it was clear there were multiple “if only” moments that may have prevented the attack. If only those sounding the alarm had been listened to. If only the FBI and the CIA had put aside their rivalries to trust each other, fully share what they knew, and act on it. If only the threat posed by al-Qaeda was taken more seriously. At all of these points, the attacks could have been stopped.
The September 11 attacks were audaciously ambitious, involving global orchestration of planning, training and execution on a scale never seen before. In the decades that followed, there have been dozens of mass-casualty terrorist attacks, first by al-Qaeda and then by its spinoff, Islamic State.
The biggest and most effective have been in conflict zones where explosive material is readily available and the tempo of violence makes stopping every attack impossible. But in stable states there have been multiple massive attacks that have killed hundreds at a time. One year later, in 2002, the October 12 bomb attacks in Bali took 202 lives, 88 of them from Australia.
Lessons have been learnt
One area of lasting success in the past 25 years is the development of police lead intelligence. Police forces are now cooperating effectively across international agencies, which has developed remarkable capacity to intercept communications and disrupt planned terror attacks involving cells and networks.
In our region we have witnessed the remarkable results of close cooperation between the Indonesian police and the Australian Federal Police (AFP).
Thankfully, the ratio between attempted large-scale attacks that were detected and disrupted and those that have succeeded is large. Increasingly, the vast majority of terror plots are being thwarted at the planning stage.
The flip side of this is that lone actor attacks, with one or two gunmen acting alone without a cell or a network, remains a constant threat that is not easily countered. Australians were reminded of the horror of such attacks in the Bondi Beach shootings of December 2025.
Were it not for this welcome international cooperation and fast-evolving capacity, the past 25 years would have seen many thousands more lives lost.
However, this does not mean the threat posed by terrorist organisations seeking to inflict a mass casualty attack has been eliminated. Thankfully, it’s highly unlikely an attack of the scale and nature of the September 11 attacks could be repeated. But it is not impossible. The best intelligence systems in the world are only as good as the political frameworks in which they exist, and the leaders they serve.
A terrible recent reminder of this occurred on October 7 2023 when the al-Qaeda aligned Hamas terror group, based in the Gaza Strip and supported by Iran, succeeded in a mass attack on Israel.
Even more than was the case with the 2001 attacks, there were multiple intelligence reports and warnings given ahead of October 7. The attacks succeeded not so much because of an intelligence failure as a failure by Israeli leadership to listen to the intelligence.
Almost three years on, there has yet to be a proper reckoning of how Hamas managed to succeed beyond what anyone had dared think possible. Hubris and misplaced confidence in modern technology, a structural unwillingness to listen to junior intelligence officers, particularly women, and a complex web of political interests and cynical manipulation came together to defeat some of the world’s best counterterrorist intelligence.
The years since the October 7 attack by Hamas have shown the true potential of terrorism to provoke an angry, vengeful response that involves striking out without any plan, with catastrophic consequences.
The devastating impact of the response to the Hamas attacks, not just on the two million plus people living in the Gaza Strip but more broadly on Israel, the West Bank, Lebanon and the wider Middle East, is the topic for another discussion.
But it is that vengeful, angry response of understandable outrage that is causing the greatest lasting damage.
How the response to terrorism creates more terror
One clear way the September 11 attacks changed the world was as a catalyst for a decades-long global War on Terror. This war never had a clear strategic plan or an agreed endpoint. Instead, it saw first Afghanistan, then Iraq, drawn into destructive conflict that amplified threats and gave new opportunities to terrorist groups. Al-Qaeda had never been as effective as when the occupation of Iraq gave rise to Islamic State.
Incredibly, 20 years after a relentless military campaign by a global coalition fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, the al-Qaeda aligned terror group is now running a cruel authoritarian state repressing tens of millions, particularly women and children. It presents a growing threat not just to its immediate neighbours but also to the wider world.
The great mistake made was not the failure to stop the September 11 attacks in the first place, although that should have been achieved. It was the failure to understand how terrorism can amplify its impact through our response to outrage.
To properly understand the way in which September 11 functions as a hinge point in history, we need to look back 50 years before 2001 to see the coalescing of the forces that gave rise to al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda’s origin story stems from the imprisoning and persecution of Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt in the 1950s. The 1966 prison execution of visionary brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb saw his brother and remaining Brotherhood leaders flee to Saudi Arabia, where their revolutionary political vision was fused with state-sponsored Wahhabi fundamentalism and the support of Osama bin-Laden. It fuelled the global resistance movement in Afghanistan and gave rise to groups such as Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian terror network behind the Bali bombings.
Twenty-five years after September 11, the Salafi jihadi terrorist ideas first sketched out by Sayyid Qutb, then realised by al-Qaeda, remain an enduring threat.
Their impact in Afghanistan and central Asia continues to be underestimated. But it is in Africa where both al-Qaeda and Islamic State continue to expand and evolve, inflicting devastating violence across a dozen conflict zones.
Given the September 11 attacks were 50 years in the making, there’s every reason to believe the threat unleashed through the rise of al-Qaeda presents an enduring problem.
Sadly, the mistakes of the past 25 years seem set to produce more generations of angry young men drawn to the siren song of revolutionary jihad.
Greg Barton receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is engaged in a range of projects funded by the Australian government that aim to understand and counter violent extremism in Australia, Southeast Asia and Africa.
