0:07 Madi Minges: From the School of International Service at American University in Washington, this is Big World, where we talk about something in the world that truly matters.

0:16 Greg Aftandilian: Well, one thing I try to stress to my students is how much the 9/11 attacks impacted the American psyche. Not only was 9/11 a shock, but a lot of people believe that that was only the first foray by Al-Qaeda, that there was going to be subsequent big attacks against the United States, and a great amount of fear and anxiety gripped the American people. And so, I try to tell my students that sometimes a big event like this that gave people a lot of fear can transform how American society views things.

0:53 Madi Minges: I'm Madi Minges, and that was Greg Aftandilian. Greg is a professor in the Department of Foreign Policy and Global Security at SIS, whose expertise centers on US foreign policy and Middle East politics. He worked in the government for more than 20 years as a Middle East analyst in the Department of Defense and the State Department, and as a foreign policy advisor for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Greg joins us today to discuss the legacy of 9/11 25 years later, and consider what America has learned from the war on terror. Gregory Aftandilian, thank you so much for joining Big World and welcome to the show.

1:31 Greg Aftandilian: My pleasure, happy to be here.

1:34 Madi Minges: So, Greg, we're going to spend some time today talking about the legacy of 9/11, acknowledging that this September marks 25 years since that day. But I think the first question that comes to mind when discussing 9/11 is where you were on that day. So, I'd like us to start off there and maybe dig a little deeper by asking what that day was like for you.

1:59 Greg Aftandilian: I was a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and I was foreign policy advisor to Senator Paul Sarbanes of Maryland. That morning I was driving into work, and I put on the radio, and I heard that a plane went into one of the World Trade Center buildings. And like most people, I felt, well, this is probably a terrible accident. And then, first order of business that day was to have a meeting between my boss and the American Foreign Service Association. And my boss was late coming into the meeting, so I started the meeting myself, and speaking to the officials of this organization in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee room. And then somebody in the room said that the second tower was hit, and then we heard that this might be a terrorist incident. And then, a Capitol policeman comes in and says, "Everybody has to evacuate." There was no real explanation, so everybody's in a very confused state.

3:11 Madi Minges: Sure.

3:12 Greg Aftandilian: So, all of the people in the Senate office buildings ran outside, and a lot of people got into their cars to leave, but it was total gridlock. So, we walked to a coffee shop on Capitol Hill, and they had CNN on. So, we spent hours just having coffee and watching CNN. By this point, we heard that the Pentagon had been hit. And then, about five or six hours later, I decided to try to get in my car and go home. But the other weird thing was all the cell phones were not working that day, so I couldn't contact my wife in the suburbs of Virginia. Neither could anybody contact their loved ones to say they're okay and all that. So, it was a very, very tense day because nobody really knew what was going on.

4:12 Greg Aftandilian: I heard later that some of my relatives called the house to find out if I was okay because maybe they thought I was still working at the Pentagon. But it was a very, very strange time. And I realized also that this was going to be a big event changing the trajectory of US security and foreign policy.

4:36 Madi Minges: Yeah, for sure. I think as we're thinking about this anniversary, obviously it's 25 years since 9/11, but there's also the subsequent beginning of the war on terror. This year also marks five years since the withdrawal from Afghanistan. So, there's a lot of anniversaries all at once here. As a Middle East expert with the perspective and some distance now, what would you say are some of the long-term successes and failures of the war on terror?

5:14 Greg Aftandilian: Well, the successes are not as many as the failures, I'll put it bluntly. The successes were that the US decimated the Al-Qaeda network as much as it could. And eventually, of course, under the Obama administration, Osama bin Laden was killed in that raid, and Al-Qaeda was never able to mount another attack against the US homeland. Now, we know later ISIS emerged from Al-Qaeda, and then you had these lone wolf attacks in the United States by ISIS sympathizers. But in terms of a big event, as a lot of people were predicting, that didn't come to pass. And that was largely due to, I think, more resources going into the intelligence community and DOD. But the failures were that the US overreacted, and on a number of levels, and one of them of course was the Iraq War of 2003.

6:17 Greg Aftandilian: Without 9/11, I don't think the Iraq war would've happened, even though there was no connection between 9/11 and Iraq. But in the Bush administration's narrative that they pushed on the American people, that there was some type of connection. And I was there on Capitol Hill when the Iraq War resolution was put forward and passed in October 2002. And a lot of senators who should have known better voted for that war resolution, and I thought it was not only a failure of the Bush administration sort of concocting a war that was not necessary, but a failure of the legislative branch of our government not putting a check on the executive branch of our government.

7:11 Greg Aftandilian: Now, I understand that it was justifiable to go into Afghanistan to try to hunt down Al-Qaeda and try to overthrow the Taliban regime, which gave them protection. And there was very little controversy about that. But of course, as you know, we stayed in Afghanistan over 20 years, and we tried to remake the country, and that was unfortunately an abysmal failure.

7:40 Madi Minges: I wanted to also ask you, Greg, specifically about the impact on American foreign policy. Obviously, the war on terror was a massive effect of 9/11, but you've talked about the shift in attitude toward countries with ties to terrorism post 9/11. Could you talk about just the overall impact? How did 9/11 impact the US' approach to foreign policy?

8:10 Greg Aftandilian: Well, there was a, I mean, there was a focus on terrorism before, but then after 9/11, that was the big deal. In other words, all US government resources dealing with national security focused on terrorism, and a lot of money was sent to the intelligence community and DOD got a lot of money. So, there was a lot of resources spent on the whole terrorism issue. But one of the problems was that the mood of the United States was so fraught with anxiety that a lot of abuses took place. One, of course, was at Guantanamo Bay, where Al-Qaeda suspects were kind of thrown in the dungeon, if you will. And then you had the Abu Ghraib incident in Iraq. So, eventually, I think Americans realized that we better get our act together or we're no better than these terrorists. But in the initial period after 9/11, the mood was we have to go after and kill these people, they're almost like subhuman for attacking the United States and killing Americans.

9:23 Greg Aftandilian: So, that was one of, I think, the consequences of that. And that's not surprising when, if you look back at history after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt, with the support of a vast majority of Americans, rounded up Japanese Americans on the West Coast and put them in internment camps, in the mountainous states of the United States, and most Americans were fine with that, but many years later, people realized that was a huge infringement on people's rights. So, oftentimes in a war situation, we tend to, how should I put it? Lose sight of how we should operate as well as possible and not overreact.

10:16 Madi Minges: I think this is a good time for us to turn to some of those impacts on the domestic front from 9/11. It's well known that Islamophobia and xenophobia saw major upticks after 9/11. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of those domestic impacts, and maybe how have those impacts evolved, and what is the legacy of that today?

10:45 Greg Aftandilian: Well, I've been a big critic of George W. Bush, but to his credit, after 9/11, he actually said that Islam is a religion of peace, and Americans should not take their anger out on ordinary Muslim Americans, and things like that. But there were many incidents, of course, of Islamophobia in attacks on innocent people. And ironically, even though they weren't Muslim, but some Sikh Americans, a couple of them were killed because they wore a turban and people associated that with Osama bin Laden. But there were a number of incidents where Muslim Americans felt under siege by the larger society, and that was a very unfortunate development, because of course, the vast majority of Muslim Americans had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda, and believe that Al-Qaeda warped the Islamic religion.

11:40 Greg Aftandilian: Now, unfortunately, we still see Islamophobia today. If you look at the Michigan Senate race, you have a Muslim American running against this Republican Mike Rogers, and even though Mike Rogers has not played into Islamophobia, certainly a lot of supporters of his have pronouncing Abdulrahman, the full name of the Democratic opponent as a kind of dog whistle to try to drum up anti-Muslim sentiment. And I think President Trump did not do any favors when he started to run for the first time, he said he wanted a ban on immigrants from majority Muslim countries. And that kind of stoked, I think, this kind of very bad nativism, if you will, that has always been around in American society. So, unfortunately, we're still faced with that type of prejudice in our society.

12:49 Madi Minges: Yeah, absolutely. Greg, a little bit earlier in this episode, we talked about the long-term successes and failures of the war on terror. In the Iraq War specifically, there was this element to "win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people." Do you think that goal was successful?

13:07 Greg Aftandilian: For the vast majority of Iraqis, no. Obviously, a lot of the Iraqis were victims of Saddam Hussein's repressive regime, and many thousands of people were killed by Saddam and his henchmen. But it's one thing to get rid of a dictator, and it's another thing than to occupy a country. And I have made this point many times, but we sometimes think that because we're Americans and we don't have a colonial history in the Middle East, that people will look upon us somewhat differently from the old colonialists. But when you occupy an Arab and Muslim country, you're going to drum up all of these analogies to history, and for the people being occupied, they don't make that distinction. And of course, then that breeds a deep resentment, and that led in part to the insurgency that US occupation forces faced shortly after toppling Saddam Hussein's regime.

14:15 Madi Minges: On the topic of insurgency and the rise of various groups in the Middle East, you had mentioned ISIS earlier. We've been talking a lot about how the US has changed since 9/11 in its foreign policy approach, and just some of the domestic effects. But on the flip side is a question I have, how has terrorism and extremism changed post-9/11, and what does it look like today?

14:46 Greg Aftandilian: Well, it's kind of a complicated issue, but you had Al-Qaeda being largely defeated in Iraq. Al-Qaeda saw an opportunity after the US invaded Iraq to come in a big way, and for a while there, they were the leading insurgent group. But through a combination of factors, they were very much weakened. But the remnants of Al-Qaeda then went over to Syria because Syria was experiencing a civil war, and out of that emerged ISIS. And for a time, ISIS became the big terrorist group on the block, where it actually superseded Al-Qaeda, and it controlled large parts of Eastern Syria, Western Iraq, and Northern Iraq. And they had a very sophisticated social media outlet, and they attracted a lot of disaffected young Muslims who, some came from Europe, who, for a variety of reasons, never felt integrated into European societies, as well as a number of young Muslim radicals in the Middle East.

16:01 Greg Aftandilian: And so, that was the big deal for a number of years, trying to stop that recruitment and then trying to defeat the ISIS stronghold in Syria and Iraq. But then you had, of course, a lot of lone wolf attacks, not only in Europe, but also in the United States. They were never to the extent of what Al-Qaeda did on 9/11, but they did cause havoc in certain places, and a number of innocent Americans were killed as a result of these lone wolf attacks. Now, today, you still have remnants of Al-Qaeda in parts of Africa as well as ISIS, but it's not to the same extent that it once was. And I think the United States should get some credit in building an international coalition of countries that supported the anti-ISIS campaign. But a lot of the things that led to ISIS's formation, some of the factors are still around, so the countries that are opposed to ISIS should not let down their guard.

17:17 Madi Minges: Greg, I'd like to continue on this thread for a bit. I know that a lot of people were very concerned when the withdrawal from Afghanistan was announced, and what would happen in the absence of American troops, acknowledging that our military had had a presence in the Middle East for a long time at that point. Can you talk to us about what has come of Afghanistan and the Taliban in the five years since we pulled out?

17:46 Greg Aftandilian: Well, the Taliban have reverted to form, in other words, particularly on women's rights, young girls can only go to school up until primary school, they're not even allowed to go to what we would consider high school, let alone college. And so, women's rights have been completely degraded. The Taliban, of course, is not a democratic sort of movement, and it has a very Draconian version of Islam that it imposes on society. So, this has certainly set back any progress that was made over those 20 years when the US, with elements of the Afghan society, wanted to move the country forward. There's also, unfortunately, a real food scarcity problem now in Afghanistan. I was reading recently that a couple of million people now are facing famine in Afghanistan, and part of it is partly because of the climate not producing enough food, but also there's been very much confusion about international aid organizations trying to send food in.

19:06 Greg Aftandilian: So, a number of factors have contributed to this food scarcity problem. So, that's one of the tragedies of Afghanistan at this point, that not only politically and socially, but even in terms of people's basic needs, things are really pretty bad.

19:26 Madi Minges: Would you consider the way that the withdrawal went one of the failures of the war? Or I guess a broader question with that is how do you think the withdrawal impacted the legacy of this war?

19:45 Greg Aftandilian: Well, the withdrawal was a complete disaster. The way that it was done conjured up images of the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975. There's that iconic image of a helicopter on top of a building at the US Embassy and people trying to get on the helicopter. And of course, you had a similar scene at the Kabul Airport, where people were trying to hang on to an American cargo plane as it was exiting Afghanistan. And then, you had a terrorist incident where an ISIS affiliate kills a number of American soldiers in addition to Afghan civilians. So, the whole thing was a disaster. And unfortunately for Joe Biden, it I think permanently hurt him politically.

20:40 Greg Aftandilian: His popularity rating never recuperated from the Afghanistan withdrawal. So, on a number of levels, the withdrawal was a real disaster, and a number of Afghans who had helped the US military and civilian infrastructure were left behind. So, that was also a tragedy.

21:03 Madi Minges: Absolutely. I think that brings up a question in my mind, or just I guess a thought, of President Trump was a longtime critic of forever wars, and US involvement in Afghanistan, and famously in 2024 campaign that if elected, there would be no more wars. Now, the US is embroiled in a new Middle East conflict directly with Iran this time. Has America learned anything from the past 25 years? What would you say is going differently now, five years after the end of the war on terror, or is this just more of the same?

21:43 Greg Aftandilian: I think Trump has gone back on his campaign pledge, and I think what happened here is that last June, June of 2025, he participated in the Israeli strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities at the end, and he scored a number of political points by that. But I think this time around, the Israelis told them that they were going into Iran with strikes, and maybe Netanyahu enticed him to come, but Trump probably believed this would be a quick and easy victory, and therefore he would participate again, not thinking through what would happen if the Iranian regime was not going to fall. Well, six months later, we're still in this mess. The regime has not fallen, the regime is probably more hard lined than it once was. The Strait of Hormuz was open prior to the war, and now it's essentially closed. So, we have a situation where things are worse than they were prior to late February of 2026.

22:56 Greg Aftandilian: And of course, the American people are upset over higher gas prices, higher grocery reprices, even farmers in the Midwest are upset over higher fertilizer prices because some of the ingredients for fertilizers come from the Persian Gulf region. So, the whole thing has been a disaster from the get-go, and I think this has really hurt Trump and the Republicans politically.

23:24 Madi Minges: Greg, I want to turn now and ask you a question as a professor. We've gotten to this point in history now where many of your students today were perhaps born after 9/11, or even if they were born, have no memory of it. I'm curious for you, how does that change the way you approach teaching that history? What tends to surprise them or you when you do teach about this period?

23:56 Greg Aftandilian: Well, the one thing I try to stress to my students is that how much the 9/11 attacks impacted the American psyche, in other words, American society as a whole. I told them that not only was 9/11 a shock, but a lot of people believe that that was only the first foray by Al-Qaeda, that a lot of people believed that there was going to be subsequent big attacks by Al-Qaeda against the United States, and a great amount of fear and anxiety gripped the American people. I should also mention that I was on Capitol Hill when there were anthrax attacks, and that also contributed to a lot of anxiety. And so, I try to tell my students that sometimes a big event like this, very much something that gave people a lot of fear, can transform how American society views things.

24:56 Greg Aftandilian: And I relate, of course, to what I said earlier of the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor, how that impacted American views, and it allowed, of course, the abuse of Japanese American civil rights in the aftermath of that attack. So, I try to tell students that when you have this type of big event, it changes a lot of people's thinking.

25:27 Madi Minges: Absolutely. Greg, we've covered so much in this episode, there's so many more things we could have gone into, but my last question for you is what would you say are some of the key lessons that Americans and the United States should take away from the war on terror?

25:47 Greg Aftandilian: Well, first of all, the war on terror was very strange because normally people have a war on a particular country or a group, but the war on terror was some amorphous thing, and it just went off into different tangents. And I think one of the lessons is that one, don't overreact, and then two, focus your attention on the real perpetrators and not try to broaden things to the point where the US then gets involved in these kind of never-ending wars. And when I talk about overreaction, we also have to understand that even American civil rights were infringed because you had the Patriot Act and you had the collection of phone data, and that was kept secret for a while, but then it leaked to the press.

26:45 Greg Aftandilian: And so, one of the tragedies, of course, of 9/11 was the US had this surveillance system that people felt went too far, because it's one thing to go after a specific terrorist that you believe is trying to do harm against the country, it's another thing to collect data against American citizens. So, those are the lessons I would suggest that people would take away from this.

27:14 Madi Minges: Greg Aftandilian, thank you so much for joining Big World to talk about the legacy of 9/11 and the war on terror. It's been great to speak with you.

27:24 Greg Aftandilian: My pleasure. Thank you.

27:28 Madi Minges: Big World is a production of the School of International Service at American University. This episode was produced by Morgan Desfosses. Our podcast is available on our website, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you listen. If you like this episode, please leave us a rating and review. Our theme music is, It Was Just Cold by Andrew Codeman. Until next time.