Musings On September 11

 * I was supposed to be in a trial out of town today for one of my clients. She's been hospitalized since Sunday (it is not life threatening at this time, although it sucks to be in the hospital, of course). So, the trial had to be continued to a future date to be determined. As a result, I have some found time today.

* I was in court 24 years ago, on September 11, 2001, when the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon took place, and Flight 93 crashed after passengers rose up and disrupted the efforts of the men who hijacked the plane. 2,996 people were directly killed in the attacks including 19 terrorists were killed in the attacks, predominantly passengers on the four hijacked flights, people in the World Trade Center, and World Trade Center first responders. 

I still lived in the same house and was married to the same wife. Back then, I was a junior associate attorney with a two year old and an infant. Now, my children have finished college, have apartments of their own, have good jobs, and have significant others with good jobs. My daughter is engaged to be married in less than a year. I'm a few days away from starting a new job as a senior city attorney for the City and County of Denver, after almost twenty years of self-employment as an attorney in the interim.

* In the U.S., the 9-11 attacks, after briefly completely shutting down commercial air travel in the U.S., resulted in the formation of the Transportation Security Administration, the reorganization of the federal government bureaucracy to create a Department of Homeland Security, the establishment of much more strict security checks and protocols for commercial air travel, the creation of memorials and compensation schemes for the victims of the attacks (several thousand people were killed), the rebuilding of the Pentagon, and the erection of a new skyscraper where the World Trade Center once stood. Islamic terrorism in the U.S. after 9-11 proved to be extremely rare and small in scale. Some of the measures imposed in the wake of that attack, like a requirement to remove one's shoes in a security line that was triggered by a single failed shoe bombing attack on December 22, 2001, are finally being rolled back now. The 9-11 attacks also spurred the passage of the controversial PATRIOT Act which strengthened the authority of U.S. intelligence agencies, the substance of which largely remains on the books with several modifications adopted since then.

* A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Ashcroft v. Iqbal, dismissing a lawsuit alleging the arbitrary detention without probable cause and mistreatment of American Muslims in the wake of the 9-11 by the federal government adopted a new standard for bringing federal lawsuits, that replaced "notice pleading" that allowed lawsuits to be brought upon information and belief to be substantiated in the discovery process with "plausibility pleading" that requires allegations of facts that were actually known to state a plausible claim for relief to bring a federal lawsuit, and many but not all U.S. states subsequently also adopted this standard. The case was dismissed because the plaintiffs didn't have actual knowledge of the insider discussions of top U.S. officials in adopting the policy. The case and a related one called Twombly, which involved an anti-trust lawsuit in which the plaintiffs did not have the "smoking gun" of actual knowledge of the deal reached by allegedly conspiring insiders who had allegedly reached an anti-competitive agreement with each other, made it much harder to bring lawsuits that involve misconduct that only actual insiders have actual knowledge of without court ordered discovery.

* The 9-11 attack was planned and orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization operating in Afghanistan, an organization that the Taliban, which controlled almost all of Afghanistan at the time. al-Qaeda was backed financially and intellectually mostly by factions of the Saudi Arabian royal family and allied wealthy elites were were not part of the ruling faction. The terrorist was Saudi Arabian and Egyptian and Lebanese nationals.

In response to the attacks, Congress promptly and almost unanimously passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against this non-state actor. Starting on October 7, 2001, a small U.S. force using a combination of CIA operatives, U.S. Special Forces, and U.S. air power promptly crushed the Taliban (by December 7 of 2001), which had been on the verged of conquering the entire control over the opposition of a coalition of warlords, called the Northern Alliance, that was resisting them. 

A multinational coalition led by the U.S. then occupied Afghanistan in the resulting power vacuum, shepherded a constitutional assembly based upon local traditions which adopted a Western style government (but with Islamic law as the supreme law of the land) under which a democratically elected civilian government of Afghanistan was formed, with the multinational force supporting the newly formed Afghan government (whose take on Islamic law was far less extreme than that of the Taliban) in counterinsurgency actions against the Taliban. 

The Afghan government fell in 2021, just days after U.S. forces withdrew on August 30, 2021, under an executive agreement that previous U.S. President Trump had negotiated with the Taliban without Afghan government involvement. The Taliban government swiftly seized control of the entire country and has imposes a very strict Islamic law regime in the four years that have followed. 

The AUMF, however, continues to be in force to fight a larger "War on Terrorism" against Islamist terrorist groups and insurgencies related to al-Qaeda, especially the "Islamic State" group that briefly operated an ultra-extreme Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. U.S. military action under the AUMF, predominantly in the Middle East and Africa, has continued into 2025.

About 5.5 million members of the U.S. military served in the post-9-11 era and a large share of the soldiers in the Army and Marine Corps, as well as many members of the U.S. Air Force, and a modest number of U.S. Navy sailors, serve in Afghanistan and/or Iraq (where the Iraq War was conducted from March 10, 2003 to December 15, 2011 with some U.S. forces remaining on a residual basis afterwards). There was a steady, but small stream of casualties from that conflict: 2,420 U.S. soldiers were killed and 20,093 were wounded but not killed in the Afghan War over almost twenty years, usually from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and ambushes from Taliban-linked insurgents. The peak strength of the multi-national force in Afghanistan, in October of 2019, was 17,178 soldiers (about two-thirds of whom were U.S. troops, with British and Canadian troops making up a little more than half of the rest), which was about 5% of the peak number of U.S. troops deployed in Iraq. The U.S. spent $2.3 trillion on the war in Afghanistan (about 90% for the conduct of the war and 10% for related care of Afghan war veterans). At least 243,000 people died as a direct result of this war (mostly Afghani civilians, contractors, and Afghan combatants on both sides). These figures do not include deaths caused by disease, loss of access to food, water, infrastructure, and/or other indirect consequences of the war. 

* Afghanistan has been immersed in civil wars and insurgencies, with only brief interruptions, since 1979 (just six years after the 18th century monarchy that unified the country was removed in a 1973 coup, with the Western style republic's government removed in a 1978 coup). As a result, on essentially ever element of human development is it the worse in the world outside Sub-Saharan Africa, with only Yemen and the Palestinian territories within Israel (especially post-October 7, 2023 Gaza) coming anywhere close.