Twenty years ago, a new history professor was just getting their bearings on campus at the University of Vermont and teaching one of their first courses on Middle East history. In the Hudson Valley, a future international relations and counter-terrorism expert was beginning their second day of college at Vassar. In Minnesota, sleepy students began trickling into a new teaching assistant’s discussion class. The world changed immediately on September 11, 2001—but it also changed slowly, in ways that only time can reveal.
Two decades after that day, UVM Today gathered that same history professor, Boğaç Ergene; that same (now-graduated) college student, Professor of Political Science Peter Henne; and that same eager teaching assistant, Professor of U.S. History Nicole Phelps, for a roundtable discussion about 9/11’s place in history and what lessons we've learned 20 years later. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
The War in Afghanistan
This year marks not only a milestone commemoration of the attacks on September 11, 2001, but also the end of the longest war in U.S. History, The War in Afghanistan. It’s over now...right?
Peter Henne: Our combat mission is over in that we went in to uproot Al Qaeda, we tried to stabilize the country instead of its government, we decided that it wasn’t working and we left. But we're going to still face terrorist threats like ISIS, we're going to still have to launch air strikes and return strikes, and for the people of Afghanistan, their war is not over yet. America’s combat mission is over, but the problems that drew us there are still going on, and we have to figure out how to deal with that.
Nicole Phelps: I think Peter’s point highlights one of the main differences you’ll see here between historians and political scientists in this conversation. Unlike historians, his professional responsibility is to be right there on the pulse of what's going on in an immediate sense. Historically in the long term, however, certainly it will be interesting to see what sort of lessons are learned or legal actions Congress opts to take, if any. After the conflict in Vietnam, for example, Congress moved to try and curtail the president, so it will be interesting to see any legal changes down the line as a result. But it's still a big mess, and so the war is definitely not tied up with a neat little bow saying, “This is completely, officially and totally over.’”
It now concludes with a resurgence of Taliban and the fall of the Afghan government. What’s going on there now, and why?
Peter Henne: Well, they never went away, right? We never succeeded in completely eliminating them as an insurgent force. Last year, the Trump administration signed the Doha Agreement, a peace treaty with the Taliban, committing the U.S. to start pulling out troops—and so we did. There are protests against the Taliban occurring now, there’s been some interesting videos on Twitter of women rising up. The Taliban are facing opposition, some of it armed.
This resurgence shouldn’t have been a surprise—there was still a very powerful Taliban fighting force that moved in as America withdrew from various regions, so the speed at which Kabul fell I think caught people off guard. The fact that the Afghan government fled was likely frustrating to some, but the fact that the Taliban effectively took over the country shouldn't have been a surprise.
Nicole Phelps: And I’d also like to mention that one of the things that happened during the Trump administration was a gutting of the State Department, either by not filling appointments or by people choosing to leave. One of the practical implications of that is a smaller, less-trained staff in the embassies. It takes a while to build up those capacities again, so there's an institutional challenge there as well.
Historical Context
Many college-age students today, including those at UVM, were born after that day in 2001 or have no memory of the events or immediate fallout. Over time, how have you seen the content and context of the topic change in classrooms and curricula?
Boğaç Ergene: I started teaching at UVM in the months before 9/11 and one of the first courses that I was giving was on Middle East history. There were 11 students in my class—this was before 9/11. The next semester after 9/11, I had 45 students in my class. There was this spike in interest and awareness from the community that they needed knowledge about why it happened, about terrorism, about security issues. Nicole and I have been teaching on these very issues, and one thing I’ve noticed is that the way we teach—not just about the Middle East or Muslims, but about history and science as well—has been changing. In the wake of 9/11, educating the public about “real Islam” and “real Muslims” came from a need, at the time, to separate Islam and Muslims from the terrorists in the attacks. A noble effort, but a misguided one nevertheless. Ultimately, it’s not the teacher's responsibility to make that call. Getting out of that defensive posture in classrooms is important, and I think that will continue as more and more students graduate with different interpretations and understandings.
Nicole Phelps: It’s still a date and historical fact that students know is important and know they need to know, in the same sense of 1776 and the Declaration of Independence, for example. This is much more anecdotal, but I would say that until something happens like this to a generation—and maybe the January 6 attack on the Capitol is such a moment—an experience like that makes you think about those kinds of dates for previous generations. To me, September 11 helped me understand the fall of the Berlin Wall and also the Kennedy assassination in a different way from how people taught it or talked about it. All of a sudden that made more sense to me. I think that students’ understanding and their personal attachments to 9/11 may shift or maybe already have—I don’t know.
It seems as though conflict and fallout post-9/11—or really, “The War on Terror”—is so different from previous wars and nation-building efforts the U.S. had been involved with in the past. Why is that?
Boğaç Ergene: If you remember, the initial arguments for the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 were obviously a sense of justice—to go after the bad guys and punish those people who are deserving of punishment. It resonated with a majority of the United States at the time, but that was not the only argument out there. There was also this civilizational mission, too. We tried to change the Afghan society structurally. Was that a realistic expectation? Many people have said that this was an impossible task. If the idea instead is to punish those who were responsible for the attacks, that may have been accomplished. But all other factors used to justify the invasion—the unreliable proof from the get-go, given the short-sightedness of U.S. foreign policy—those are very much evidence that it was an unrealistic, if not impossible task, with consequences not only for us, but for the Afghans.
Nicole Phelps: It’s basically been a 20-plus year challenge to figure out how to engage non-state actors with tools that were designed for conflict between states. You need different rules and different strategies, and I think it's a question of whether or not the United States ever effectively came to terms with that. If we think in a longer historical perspective like the way we think about Vietnam and the first Gulf War in 1991, then the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, were similar to Vietnam in the sense that they were trying to change a political system and essentially change a culture. But one of the things that was fundamentally different is the draft for people to fight in Vietnam. There were lessons learned from that conflict, which were applied in the first Gulf War, but not really so much in Afghanistan.
There was also a technological shift in the military away from putting actual people on the ground as much as possible and using more precise, professionalized Army and special forces that created a distance between the actual situation in Afghanistan and what the American public felt and knew about the conflict. It has been so much easier over the past 20 years for many Americans to essentially forget that the war was happening. I think that's something that's quite different.
Legacy
Some of the major by-products that resulted from those events were, of course, the “War on Terror” and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. From your perspective, what other major shifts or developments have we seen since then?
Boğaç Ergene: I was in the United States at that point for about seven years, and there was this benevolent ignorance that I really did appreciate that comes from, to some extent, open-heartedness, open-mindedness about your culture, your religion, about your background essentially. That changed after 9/11. It was replaced with a sense of assumed knowledge and it became a prejudice. That cultural shift—that people think that they know about Islam, that they know about the Middle East—I became very much aware of.
Nicole Phelps: The Cold War brought a lot of structure and ideological certainty to U.S. foreign policy and the way the federal government was crafted from the 1940s, and then that went away in the 1990s. September 11 provided an opportunity to go back to a Cold War-like structure, where you knew what and who the enemy was, what was necessary to be an American and all of that. The September 11 attacks presented the opportunity to enlarge certain powers of the federal government with Homeland Security, the USA PATRIOT Act and in ways that would not have been acceptable on September 10.
And I'll just point out one last thing—immigration services, which is now split between U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), was reorganized to be put in the Department of Homeland Security. Prior to that, immigration was in the Justice Department; prior to that, it was in the Labor Department; prior to that, it was in the Treasury. I think that reflects how the American government has viewed immigrants as a whole over time, and Homeland Security definitely characterizes immigrants as a threat to the United States, both from abroad and within—that's a significant change.
Peter Henne: Like Nicole was saying, in international relations, we call it “securitization;” everything became a security threat. Immigration, terrorism, national disasters—it all became lumped together. As a former contractor at Homeland Security in the mid 2000s, it was interesting to see how the sausage was made in assessing threat. It sort of felt like throwing darts at a board, just a very messy incoherent place. For me, there was a decision I needed to make about which direction to go here: did I want to be part of this machine or not? I decided not, but it's just become normalized since then with systems in place, like taking your shoes off at the airport in a whack-a-mole attempt to stop terrorist attacks. That’s never going away, and we keep seeing more and more layers added on top.
Boğaç Ergene: One thing that has not been discussed in this conversation is about the human consequences of that involvement. The first thing that comes to mind is the U.S. military casualties, right? As far as I know from the last time I checked, there were about 3,000 military personnel casualties—which may have changed—but imagine what's happened in Afghanistan during those 20 years. According to some estimates—and there are no certain numbers out there—but 300,000 people, including civilians died. Very few people talk about that and if we’re making a list of what's happened, of what took place in Afghanistan, that damage should be in the forefront. What does that mean from the Afghan perspective? What does that mean in terms of psychology? These long-term consequences, in addition to institutional changes that may or may not have taken place in the last 20 years, are still to come.
Let’s end with some optimism—what are you hopeful about when you look at the next 20 years?
Peter Henne: Since realization that terrorism does not necessarily equal Al-Qaeda or Muslims, that terrorism is a tactic used by any ideological group, and that—for the foreseeable future—we might be dealing primarily with domestic right-wing extremists, I’m hopeful that we might continue and deal with it from that approach.
Boğaç Ergene: I hope that things will develop slower than what I anticipate, for immigrants and people of color to not lose their existing protections in the system or have them used against them. And for the political environment not to be as bad as I would imagine that might be in the future. Those are the kinds of hopes that I have.
Nicole Phelps: Arguably, the longest standing problem in the United States is the disconnect between the promise of equality that’s in the Declaration of Independence and the realities of inequality that are in the Constitution, which have been magnified by different decisions and new structures. The kind sof protections that Boğaç was just talking about are fairly recent and quite fragile. I'm not sure that they're really baked into American society enough yet, so my hope would be to get to a greater acceptance of others and closer to that promised equality. With that, I’m concerned about the oversimplification of a lot of political rhetoric that makes this kind of acceptance much more difficult. Even people who are advocates of such equality are often saying things in ways that are actually not particularly accepting or helpful to achieving their goals.
Looking to continue the conversation? Watch "Syriana" (2005), a film recommended by Professor Henne:
"It's really tense and complicated. For me at the time, it resonated. It just captures these confusing waves of paranoia and mixed political incentives and misunderstanding of what's going on in the early stages of the War on Terror. We watch it sometimes in my class, but I can't tell if the students like it or not."