By Shyam Bhatia
Twenty-five years ago today, almost 3,000 people were killed in an act of terrorism that changed not only America but much of the world.
The numbers are familiar. Nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers seized four passenger aircraft. Two were flown into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to overpower the hijackers.
The dead came from more than 90 countries. They included office workers, firefighters, policemen, airline crews, passengers and people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But the significance of September 11 cannot be measured simply by the number who died that morning.
Its consequences are still unfolding.
A world united in shock
Kofi Annan, then secretary-general of the United Nations, understood this almost immediately. Ten days after the attacks he wrote that the terrorists had “aimed at one nation but wounded an entire world.” He also noted the extraordinary international character of the World Trade Center.
That world was briefly united by sympathy for America.
Russia expressed solidarity. Iran held candlelight vigils. NATO invoked its collective-defence provision for the first and only time in its history. Around the world, people who had never visited New York stood outside American embassies with flowers and candles.
India recognised the warning
India was watching with a particular sense of recognition. President K.R. Narayanan told George W. Bush on September 12 that the attacks were “a crime not just against the United States, but against all humanity.” He described terrorism as “the greatest threat of our times.”
Two days later, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee addressed the Indian nation. “For years we in India have been alerting others to the fact that terrorism is a scourge for all of humanity,” he said. “What happens in Mumbai one day is bound to happen elsewhere tomorrow.”
From grief to war
The United States itself experienced an extraordinary moment of unity.
On the evening of September 11, President George W. Bush addressed a shocked nation.
“The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger,” he said.
The anger would shape the next quarter-century.
The first response was directed at Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda had established their headquarters under the protection of the Taliban.
The American-led invasion rapidly overthrew the Taliban government. But what began as a campaign to destroy al-Qaeda became a twenty-year war.
For Americans, Afghanistan was a distant battlefield. For Afghans, it was home.
The consequences of the bombing campaign were felt almost immediately by civilians.
Masuda Sultan, an Afghan-American whose family lived near Kandahar, lost 19 members of her extended family in an American bombing in December 2001.
Her experience is a reminder that the consequences of September 11 quickly reached people who had played no part in the attacks.
The war continued for two decades. The Taliban eventually returned to power after the American withdrawal in 2021.
The United States had gone to Afghanistan because of September 11. Twenty years later, it left Afghanistan with the Taliban back in control.
Iraq and the unravelling of consensus
Then came Iraq.
Saddam Hussein’s government had not carried out the September 11 attacks. Yet in the atmosphere created by the attacks, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, arguing that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The weapons were not found.
The 9/11 Commission examined the alleged relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. It found contacts between the two, but concluded that there was “no evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”
The Iraq invasion produced years of violence and instability. It also helped destroy the international consensus that had existed immediately after September 11.
What had begun as an attack that united much of the world against terrorism became associated with two long wars whose costs were borne overwhelmingly by people far beyond New York and Washington.
Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that more than $8 trillion has been spent on post-9/11 wars and related operations. It estimates hundreds of thousands of direct deaths from war violence across Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen, and millions more indirect deaths resulting from the consequences of war.
These are estimates rather than precise counts.
But they convey something important: the human consequences of September 11 were vastly greater than the number of people killed on September 11 itself.
The health consequences never ended
There was also a human cost in America that is still being paid.
Firefighters, police officers, construction workers, office workers and others exposed to the toxic dust at Ground Zero developed respiratory diseases, cancers and other illnesses.
The New York Fire Department has lost more than 600 firefighters to illnesses linked to the attacks since 2001, according to figures reported on the 25th anniversary.
The World Trade Center Health Program now provides medical monitoring and treatment to more than 125,000 responders and survivors.
The fact that the programme is authorised until 2090 is perhaps the most striking statistic of all.
The American government expects the medical consequences of September 11 to require attention for almost a century.
The children of 9/11
There is now another chapter.
Around 25,000 children lived or attended school near the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Some were infants. Some were still in the womb.
Many were exposed to the enormous cloud of dust and debris that settled over Lower Manhattan.
Yet most early health studies concentrated on adults, particularly first responders.
Now, a quarter-century later, the US government is preparing a major study of people who were children or unborn at the time of the attacks. The CDC study is expected to begin by July 2027.
That is an extraordinary reminder of how slowly some consequences emerge.
The children of 9/11 are now adults.
Their children may eventually inherit the consequences of an event that happened before their parents were old enough to understand it.
Mariama James, who lived blocks from the World Trade Center, has herself developed skin cancer. Her children have experienced respiratory and gastrointestinal problems as well as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Speaking to The Washington Post this week, she put the generational consequences starkly:
“Imagine being raised in a family where everyone’s sick, and then you’re sick, too, due to an event that occurred before you were even born.”
It is difficult to imagine a more powerful description of the long tail of September 11.
A different America
September 11 also changed everyday life.
Airport security was transformed. Intelligence agencies were reorganised. The Department of Homeland Security was created. Surveillance powers were expanded.
For many people these became routine features of modern life.
For Muslims and people of Arab or South Asian appearance, however, the consequences could be much more personal.
This was something Bush himself recognised in the first days after the attacks.
The 9/11 Commission records his message that “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends.” He identified the enemy instead as a “radical network of terrorists.”
It was an important distinction.
But it did not prevent Muslim communities and immigrants from Muslim-majority countries from experiencing increased suspicion, discrimination and hate crimes.
The political arguments that followed September 11 — about immigration, borders, surveillance, religious identity and national security — remain with us today.
A generation that inherited 9/11
There is another reason this 25th anniversary feels different.
A child born on September 11, 2001 is now 25.
Millions of people are younger still.
For them, the attacks are history rather than memory.
They know the images from television and photographs, but they do not remember the disbelief of watching the second aircraft hit the South Tower. They do not remember the fear that another attack might be imminent.
Their parents do.
That creates an unusual historical divide.
September 11 has become something that one generation experienced and another inherited.
And yet the younger generation lives with consequences it did not choose.
It inherited the wars, the security systems, the changed airports, the political arguments about terrorism and immigration, and the suspicion that another catastrophe could happen without warning.
Twenty-five years in one family
There is a temptation, after 25 years, to measure September 11 by what followed politically and militarily.
But perhaps the simplest way to remember it is still the most powerful.
Nearly 3,000 people went to work, boarded aircraft, travelled through an airport, reported for duty or happened to be in the wrong place.
They expected to come home.
They did not.
Caroline Ogonowski’s father, John, was the captain of Flight 11.
She is now 39. This year she had her first child and named him after her father.
“My father will never know his grandson. And my son will never know his grandfather,” she told Reuters.
That is the passage of 25 years in a single family.
A father is gone.
A daughter has become a mother.
A grandson has been given a name belonging to a man he will never meet.
And beyond that family, the consequences of September 11 continue to be felt in New York, Afghanistan, Iraq, Washington, London, Madrid, Delhi and countless other places.
The attacks lasted only a few hours.
Their consequences have lasted a quarter of a century.
Perhaps that is the most important thing to remember today: September 11 was not only a day in 2001. It became a world that millions of people have lived in ever since.
