9/11 conspiracy theories debunked: 20 years later, engineering experts explain how the twin towers collapsed

Roberto Robanne/AP

David Oswald, RMIT University; Erica Kuligowski, RMIT University, and Kate Nguyen, RMIT UniversityThe collapse of the World Trade Center has been subject to intense public scrutiny over the 20 years since the centre’s twin towers were struck by aircraft hijacked by terrorists. Both collapsed within two hours of impact, prompting several investigations and spawning a variety of conspiracy theories.

Construction on the World Trade Center 1 (the North Tower) and World Trade Center 2 (the South Tower) began in the 1960s. They were constructed from steel and concrete, using a design that was groundbreaking at the time. Most high-rise buildings since have used a similar structure.

The investigatory reports into the events of September 11, 2001 were undertaken by the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

FEMA’s report was published in 2002. This was followed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s three-year investigation, funded by the US Federal Government and published in 2005.

Some conspiracy theorists seized on the fact the NIST investigation was funded by the federal government — believing the government itself had caused the twin towers’ collapse, or was aware it would happen and deliberately didn’t act.

While there have been critics of both reports (and the investigations behind them weren’t flawless) — their explanation for the buildings’ collapse is widely accepted. They conclude it was not caused by direct impact by the aircraft, or the use of explosives, but by fires that burned inside the buildings after impact.

Fire and rescue workers search through the rubble of the World Trade Center in New York on 13 September 2001. On 11 September 2001, two aircrafts were flown into the centre’s twin towers, causing both to collapse.
BETH A. KEISER/EPA

Why did the towers collapse as they did?

Some have questioned why the buildings did not “topple over” after being struck side-on by aircraft. But the answer becomes clear once you consider the details.

Aircraft are made from lightweight materials, such as aluminium. If you compare the mass of an aircraft with that of a skyscraper more than 400 metres tall and built from steel and concrete, it makes sense the building would not topple over.

The towers would have been more than 1,000 times the mass of the aircraft, and designed to resist steady wind loads more than 30 times the aircrafts’ weight.

That said, the aircraft did dislodge fireproofing material within the towers, which was coated on the steel columns and on the steel floor trusses (underneath the concrete slab). The lack of fireproofing left the steel unprotected.

As such, the impact also structurally damaged the supporting steel columns. When a few columns become damaged, the load they carry is transferred to other columns. This is why both towers withstood the initial impacts and didn’t collapse immediately.

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Progressive collapse

This fact also spawned one of the most common conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11: that a bomb or explosives must have been detonated somewhere within the buildings.

These theories have developed from video footage showing the towers rapidly collapsing downwards some time after impact, similar to a controlled demolition. But it is possible for them to have collapsed this way without explosives.

It was fire that caused this. And this fire is believed to have come from the burning of remaining aircraft fuel.

According to the FEMA report, fire within the buildings caused thermal expansion of the floors in a horizontal and outwards direction, pushing against the rigid steel columns, which then deflected to an extent but resisted further movement.

This figure shows the expansion of floor slabs and framing which likely happened as a result of the fires.
FEMA / https://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_ch2.pdf

With the columns resisting movement there was nowhere else for the concrete floors to expand. This led to an increased buildup of stress in the sagging floors, until the floor framing and connections gave in.

The floors’ failure pulled the columns back inwards, eventually leading to them buckling, and the floors collapsing. The collapsing floors then fell on more floors below, leading to a progressive collapse.

The buckling of columns initiated by floor failure.
FEMA / https://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_ch2.pdf

This explanation, documented in the official reports, is widely accepted by experts as the cause of the twin towers’ collapse. It is understood the South Tower collapsed sooner because it suffered more damage from the initial aircraft impact, which also dislodged more fireproofing material.

The debris from the collapse of the North Tower set at least ten floors alight in the nearby World Trade Center 7, or “Building 7”, which also collapsed about seven hours later.

While there are different theories regarding how the progressive collapse of Building 7 was initiated, there is consensus among investigators fire was the primary cause of failure.

Both official reports made a range of fire safety recommendations for other high-rise buildings, including to improve evacuation and emergency response. In 2007, the National Institute of Standards and Technology also published a best practice guide recommending risk-reducing solutions for progressive collapse.

What does this mean for high-rise buildings?

Before 9/11, progressive collapse was not well understood by engineers. The disaster highlighted the importance of having a “global view” of fire safety for a building, as opposed to focusing on individual elements.

There have since been changes to building codes and standards on improving the structural performance of buildings on fire, as well as opportunities to escape (such as added stairwell requirements).

At the same time, the collapse of the twin towers demonstrated the very real dangers of fire in high-rise buildings. In the decades since the World Trade Center was designed, buildings have become taller and more complex, as societies demand sustainable and cost-effective housing in large cities.

Some 86 of the current 100 tallest buildings in the world were built since 9/11. This has coincided with a significant increase in building façade fires globally, which have gone up sevenfold over the past three decades.

This increase can be partly attributed to the wide use of flammable cladding. It is marketed as an innovative, cost-effective and sustainable material, yet it has shown significant shortcomings in terms of fire safety, as witnessed in the 2017 Grenfell Disaster.

The Grenfell fire (and similar cladding fires) are proof fire safety in tall buildings is still a problem. And as structures get taller and more complex, with new and innovative designs and materials, questions around fire safety will only become more difficult to answer.

The events of 9/11 may have been challenging to foresee, but the fires that led to the towers’ collapse could have been better prepared for.

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David Oswald, Senior Lecturer in Construction, RMIT University; Erica Kuligowski, Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow, RMIT University, and Kate Nguyen, Senior Lecturer, ARC DECRA Fellow and Victoria Fellow, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Before 9/11, Australia had no counter-terrorism laws, now we have 92 — but are we safer?

David Mariuz/AAP

Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, The University of Queensland and Keiran Hardy, Griffith UniversityAustralia is a long way from New York and Washington DC, but the September 11 terror attacks had a profound impact on our country.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, we became embroiled in decades-long insurgencies. At home, the attacks had enduring impacts on our legal system. Before 9/11 Australia had zero national counter-terrorism laws. Now, we have 92 of them, amounting to more than 5,000 pages of rules, powers and offences.

These laws have reshaped ideas about criminal responsibility, set us apart from our closest allies, and strengthened a troubling culture of secrecy.

But have they made us safer?

Unprecedented powers

No other nation can match the volume of Australia’s counter-terrorism laws. Their sheer scope is staggering. They include:

• control orders, which allow courts to impose a wide range of restrictions and obligations on people to prevent future wrongdoing. They can mandate curfews, limits on phone or internet usage and electronic monitoring
• preventative detention orders, which allow police to detain people secretly for up to two weeks, either to prevent an attack or protect evidence relating to a recent one
• mandatory retention of all Australians’ metadata for two years and access by enforcement agencies without a warrant
• a power for the home affairs minister to strip dual citizens involved in terrorism of their Australian citizenship.

Many of these schemes are unprecedented in Australian law, outstripping even our historical wartime powers.

‘Hyper-legislation’

Toronto University law professor Kent Roach, one of the world’s leading experts on counter-terrorism laws, has labelled Australia’s approach “hyper-legislation”. This refers not only to the vast scope and number of laws, but also the speed with which they were passed.

The data retention bill, forcing telecommunications providers to keep records of phone and internet use for two years, passed parliament in 2015.
Mick Tsikas/AAP

On average, it took around two and half days in the House of Representatives and two days in the Senate for each law to be approved. Those are very generous figures — they count the days bills were introduced into parliament, even if they weren’t debated. The speed was fastest under the Howard government, when a new counter-terrorism law was passed on average every 6.7 weeks. But the trend has continued.

At the end of last month, two laws containing extensive and highly controversial surveillance powers sailed through federal parliament with minimal scrutiny.

A ‘pre-crime’ approach

Counter-terrorism laws in Australia and elsewhere have reoriented the criminal justice system. Under wide-ranging offences, people can be imprisoned for harms they may cause in the future, rather than harms they have caused in the past.

This has been called a “pre-crime” approach to criminal justice. As Justice Anthony Whealy said when sentencing five terrorist offenders in 2010:

The legislation is designed to bite early, long before the preparatory acts mature into circumstances of deadly or dangerous consequence for the community.

The offence of preparing or planning a terrorist act is the clearest example. An equivalent of this offence will now be introduced in New Zealand following the recent terror attack in Auckland.

This offence and many others trigger criminal responsibility much earlier than the ordinary criminal law (for example, it has never been a crime to prepare a murder or robbery).

A person convicted of a terrorism offence can even be kept in prison beyond their original sentence, possibly indefinitely, based on the risk they still pose to the community.

Even tougher than our allies

Australia looked closely to the United Kingdom when designing our first counter-terrorism laws. On top of our close legal and political ties, this was because the UK had already enacted counter-terrorism laws—based on previous emergency powers for Northern Ireland — before 9/11.

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In the years since, our laws have become more extreme, setting us apart from the UK and the rest of our “Five Eyes” partners, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Not only have “tough on terror” policies played well with voters here, Australia does not have a bill of rights. This means the government has been able to enact counter-terrorism laws that would not be possible elsewhere.

One example of this is the mandatory retention of all Australians’ telecommunications metadata for two years. The European Court of Human Rights held that blanket retention for that time period infringed the basic right to privacy.

Other powers, such as preventative detention orders, would simply not be possible in countries with constitutional protection for human rights. The Council of Australian Governments’ (COAG) 2013 review of counter-terrorism legislation reported preventative detention orders were more likely to be seen in “discredited totalitarian regimes”.

‘The world’s most secretive democracy’

Following the 2019 federal police raid on ABC headquarters, The New York Times suggested: “Australia may well be the world’s most secretive democracy”.

Australia’s counter-terrorism laws enable and entrench these high levels of secrecy. It is a crime to mention basic details about the use of many counter-terrorism powers — or even the mere fact they were used.

Human rights advocates have raised concerns about law enforcement’s surveillance powers in Australia, including the ability to takeover accounts.
http://www.shutterstock.com

Sweeping espionage laws, overhauled in 2018, make it a crime to possess or receive national security information where the information would be made available to a foreign government or company (including through publication in the media). The definition of “national security” is exceptionally broad, extending to anything about Australia’s political and economic relations with other countries.

These offences pose a serious risk to journalists and whistleblowers who act in the public interest. Criminal trials for these offences can be also held in secret, undermining open justice and the right to a fair trial.

Are we any safer?

Undoubtedly, some counter-terrorism laws have enhanced Australia’s national security. But others have little, or no, proven effectiveness, despite their impact on fundamental rights.

For example, in 2012, former Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, Bret Walker SC, found control orders were

not effective, not appropriate and not necessary.

This finding was based on classified submissions by police and security agencies. Despite this, in response to Islamic State, the federal government expanded the grounds for issuing control orders, and allowed them to be imposed on children as young as 14.

Both the independent monitor and the 2013 COAG review recommended the repeal of preventative detention orders. Police had not used them and said normal arrest powers would be more useful.

Undermining cohesion

These controversial powers might even harm our security over the long-term.

Australia’s Muslim communities have felt targeted by “aggressive” counter-terrorism powers. This leads to lower levels of trust and makes communities less likely to cooperate with police. It also undermines the community cohesion that countering violent extremism programs are trying to build.

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Undermining human rights to prevent terrorism can also fuel the grievances that lead to radicalisation and recruitment. Back in 2004, a United Nations panel reported terrorist recruitment thrives when human rights and democracy are lacking.

Ultimately, to reduce terrorism over the long-term, governments need to support greater investments and research into countering violent extremism and deradicalisation programs. This is equally true for Islamist and right-wing terrorism.

Security, but at what cost?

Over the past two decades, evolving terror threats have exposed gaps in our laws that needed to be filled. But many of the laws we ended up with go beyond what is needed to prevent terrorism effectively. They also undermine core values and principles such as the rights to liberty, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

These values must not be lost in the pursuit of national security. Indeed, upholding them is an essential part of any counter-terrorism strategy.

These lessons have been known for a long time. As then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan said in 2005, when remembering victims of terrorism since 9/11:

compromising human rights cannot serve the struggle against terrorism. On the contrary, it facilitates achievement of the terrorist’s objective.

Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, Senior Lecturer, TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland and Keiran Hardy, Senior Lecturer, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

20 years on, 9/11 responders are still sick and dying

Shawn Baldwin/AP/AAP Image

Erin Smith, Edith Cowan University; Brigid Larkin, Edith Cowan University, and Lisa Holmes, Edith Cowan UniversityEmergency workers and clean-up crew are among 9/11 responders still suffering significant health issues 20 years after the terrorist attacks.

More than 91,000 workers and volunteers were exposed to a range of hazards during the rescue, recovery and clean-up operations.

By March 2021, some 80,785 of these responders had enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, which was set up after the attacks to monitor their health and treat them.

Now our published research, which is based on examining these health records, shows the range of physical and mental health issues responders still face.

Breathing problems, cancer, mental illness

We found 45% of responders in the health program have aerodigestive illness (conditions that affect the airways and upper digestive tract). A total of 16% have cancer and another 16% have mental health illness. Just under 40% of responders with health issues are aged 45-64; 83% are male.

Our analysis shows 3,439 of responders in the health program are now dead — far more than the 412 first responders who died on the day of the attacks.

Respiratory and upper digestive tract disorders are the number one cause of death (34%), ahead of cancer (30%) and mental health issues (15%).

Deaths attributed to these three factors, as well as musculoskeletal and acute traumatic injuries, have increased six-fold since the start of 2016.

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An ongoing battle

The number of responders enrolling in the health program with emerging health issues rises each year. More than 16,000 responders have enrolled in the past five years.

Cancer is up 185% over the past five years, with leukaemia emerging as particularly common, overtaking colon and bladder cancer in the rankings.

This equates to an increase of 175% in leukaemia cases over a five-year period, which is not surprising. There is a proven link between benzene exposure and acute myeloid leukaemia. Benzene is found in jet fuel, one of the toxic exposures at the World Trade Center. And acute myeloid leukaemia is one of the main types of leukaemia reported not only by responders, but by residents of lower Manhattan, who also have higher-than-normal rates.

Prostate cancer is also common, increasing 181% since 2016. Although this fits with the age profile of many of the health program’s participants, some responders are developing an aggressive, fast-growing form of prostate cancer.

Inhaling the toxic dust at the World Trade Center site may trigger a cascading series of cellular events, increasing the number of inflammatory T-cells (a type of immune cell) in some of the responders. This increased inflammation may eventually lead to prostate cancer.

There may also be a significant link between greater exposure at the World Trade Center and a higher risk of long-term cardiovascular disease (disease affecting the heart and blood vessels). Firefighters who responded to the World Trade Center on the morning of the attacks were 44% more likely to develop cardiovascular disease than those who arrived the next day.

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The mental health effects

About 15-20% of responders are estimated to be living with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms — roughly four times the rate of the general population.

Despite 20 years having passed, PTSD is a growing problem for responders. Almost half of all responders report they need ongoing mental health care for a range of mental health issues including PTSD, anxiety, depression and survivor guilt.

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Researchers have also found brain scans of some responders indicate the onset of early-stage dementia. This is consistent with previous work noting cognitive impairment among responders occurs at about twice the rate of people 10-20 years older.

COVID-19 and other emerging threats

Responders’ underlying health conditions, such as cancer and respiratory ailments, have also left them vulnerable to COVID-19. By the end of August 2020, some 1,172 responders had confirmed COVID-19.

Even among responders who have not been infected, the pandemic has exacerbated one of the key conditions caused by search and rescue, and recovery after terrorist attacks — PTSD.

More than 100 responders have died due to complications from the virus, which has also exacerbated other responders’ PTSD symptoms.

The number of responders with cancers associated with asbestos exposure at the World Trade Center is expected to rise in coming years. This is because mesothelioma (a type of cancer caused by asbestos) usually takes 20-50 years to develop.

As of 2016, at least 352 responders had been diagnosed with the lung condition asbestosis, and at least 444 had been diagnosed with another lung condition, pulmonary fibrosis. Exposure to asbestos and other fibres in the toxic dust may have contributed.

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Lessons learned

Our research involved analysing data from existing databases. So we cannot make direct links between exposure at the World Trade Center site, length of time there, and the risk of illness.

Differences in age, sex, ethnicity, smoking status and other factors between responders and non-responders should also be considered.

Increased rates of some cancers in some responders may also be associated with heightened surveillance rather than an increase in disease.

Nevertheless, we are now beginning to understand the long-term effects of responding to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Exposure is still having both a physical and mental health impact and it’s likely responders are still developing illnesses related to their exposures.

Ongoing monitoring of responders’ health remains a priority, especially considering the looming threat of new asbestos-related cancers.

Erin Smith, Associate Professor in Disaster and Emergency Response, School of Medical and Health Sciences, Edith Cowan University; Brigid Larkin, PhD candidate, Edith Cowan University, and Lisa Holmes, Lecturer, Paramedical Science, School of Medical and Health Sciences, Edith Cowan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Owning up: Australia must admit its involvement in Afghanistan has been an abject failure

Kevin Foster, Monash UniversityTwenty years ago, Australian forces followed the US into Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11 attacks with a simple mission: to hunt down Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership and remove the Taliban government that had sheltered them. That mission has ended in abject failure.

Its costs have been significant: 41 combat-related deaths, 260 wounded, more than 500 veteran suicides, thousands afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and around A$10 billion expended with precious little to show for it.

Uruzgan Province, the centre of Australian operations from July 2006 until the main Australian Defence Force troops withdrew in December 2013, fell to the Taliban in early August with scarcely a shot fired. All those years spent equipping, training and mentoring the Afghan National Army to stand up and fight for the gains made since 2001 had clearly achieved nothing.

But the failures don’t end there.

Over the past weeks, there has been a great deal of hand-wringing about the potential loss of the gains made in Afghanistan in the 20 years between the Taliban rule. Those gains were many: a generation has profited from improved access to educational opportunities, key health indicators have markedly improved, a massive influx of foreign aid has stimulated the economy, the private sector has flourished, and a free media has reported on and critiqued the emerging society’s advances and shortcomings. Women especially benefited from new freedoms and took up prominent roles in politics, the public sector and the media.

All these gains are now in peril as the newly re-installed Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan looks set to return women to obscurity and chatteldom.

With the Taliban retaking control, the gains made by Afghan women will be lost and they will be returned to the status of chattels.
AAP/AP/Vincent Thian

While this is true of life in Afghanistan’s capital and larger cities, improvements in Uruzgan were less marked and never so far-reaching. Despite the Australian government’s “perennial airbrushed optimism” about the benefits brought by the ADF and its security and reconstruction efforts, the lot of Uruzganis beyond the provincial capital, Tarin Kot, changed little.

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In late 2012, little more than a year before the ADF’s withdrawal, Australian journalist Jeremy Kelly was struck by the disparity between the ADF’s “mission accomplished” rhetoric and what he saw when he travelled through the province. He wrote:

Australian military officials are quick to list achievements by its development arm: three times as many healthcare facilities since 2006 and a rise in the number of schools from 34 in 2006 to 205 now. They are impressive numbers, but they don’t tell the whole story. In Chora, only one of the 32 schools open actually has students attending […] The rest are “just for teachers taking a salary” […]

Meanwhile, in the western district of Deh Rawood, government and foreign officials were shocked last year when they found land surrounding three vacant schools, all built with foreign money, was being used to grow opium and cannabis.

In November 2020, an independent Afghan NGO, The Liaison Office, assessed the state of Uruzgan province ten years after the withdrawal of the ADF’s erstwhile security partners, the Dutch. Despite the doubling of health facilities and workers ensuring greater availability of antenatal and postpartum care for Afghan women, access to these facilities remains fraught.

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Taliban control of all major roads in the province and ongoing clashes with security forces restricted access to healthcare and education and stunted economic activity. Insecurity and internal displacement compounded by drought and disease severely affected agriculture with a marked increase in fallow land. Fewer schools were open in 2020 than a decade earlier. Though the Taliban had permitted the re-opening of some, they enforced a strict prohibition on girls’ education.

If Uruzganis profited little from the Australian presence, the ADF has emerged from the campaign damaged and diminished. Australian forces were bit players in the Afghan venture. Faithful followers of their US masters, they brought limited resources, exercised no control over strategy and so cannot be held responsible for the failure of the larger mission.

As the Taliban once again takes control in Afghanistan, the gains of the past 20 years have been lost.
AAP/EPA/Stringer

In this regard, the nation’s political leaders and the ADF itself have persistently measured the military’s performance by its adherence to the mythical yardstick of ANZAC virtue. From this perspective, the success or failure of the ADF mission rested less on what they did than who they showed themselves to be.

There is no doubt many thousands of servicemen and women served honourably and did what they could to improve the lives of the Afghans they encountered. Sadly, their efforts have left few permanent marks and will be largely forgotten. Instead, Afghanistan will be remembered for the alleged atrocities detailed in the Brereton Report.

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Afghanistan’s reputation as the graveyard of empires rests less on the prowess of its forces than the country’s capacity to expose the failings inherent in the armies that come to campaign there. This includes the dysfunctional leadership and supply of the Soviet military, and the hubris of the US’s faith in the force of arms.

Lazy platitudes about Australian moral and military exceptionalism were put to the test in Afghanistan, and found wanting. To retrieve something positive from this 20-year debacle it is vital the ADF owns up to its failures in Afghanistan. Only then can it hope to recover its ethical balance and rebuild its moral authority.

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Kevin Foster’s book, Anti-Social Media: Conventional Militaries in the Digital Battlespace, will be released by Melbourne University Press on August 31.

Kevin Foster, Associate Professor, Media Studies, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Taliban wants the world’s trust. To achieve this, it will need to make some difficult choices

Niamatullah Ibrahimi, La Trobe University and Safiullah Taye, Deakin University“We want the world to trust us.”

In the Taliban’s first press conference since seizing control of Afghanistan, this message was intended to allay fears of what a return to power could mean for the country.

In the wake of the Taliban’s stunning sweep across Afghanistan, attention is now focused on whether it can translate its rapid military gains to a political victory. This would require negotiating a governing system that can achieve both domestic and international legitimacy.

The movement’s media-savvy leadership has attempted to downplay fears of the return of its former repressive regime. However, the Taliban has not yet spelled out an alternative political system, aside from offering vague promises of pardons for government and military personnel and that women could continue to participate in society in accordance with sharia law.

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In Kabul, which remains under the watchful eyes of the world, the group has largely shown restraint while pursuing an active media campaign. However, there are reports of summary executions, revenge killings of government officials and soldiers, forced marriages of young girls with Taliban fighters, and communications disruptions coming from other provinces.

For many Afghans who remember the previous Taliban regime in the late 1990s, trust will need to be earned.

Who are the Taliban?

The Taliban first emerged in 1994 during the anarchy and civil war that followed the collapse of the pro-Soviet government of President Najibullah in April 1992.

After it took control of Kabul, the movement tortured and killed the president, hanging his body from a pole, and declared a new government, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

The group attracted international headlines for its violent suppression of women and minorities like the Shi’a Hazaras, as well as the restriction of all civil and political rights. It banned women and girls from attending school and joining the workforce, and prohibited music and photography.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was led by Mullah Muhammad Omar, a local religious figure with no notable reputation in Islamic law or Afghan politics.

The rarely photographed Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar.
AP

While the Taliban primarily sought to establish its rule over Afghanistan, it also attracted many foreign jihadist groups — most prominently Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, these groups had shifted their focus to the west, particularly the United States, as their main enemy.

The Taliban relied on brutal and excessive force to dominate much of Afghanistan from 1996–2001. The movement did not develop governance institutions that could provide for political representation — such as establishing a parliament — or perform basic state functions such as delivering social services to the people.

As a result of its repressive policies, it turned Afghanistan into a pariah state. It was only recognised by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These countries saw the group as a proxy to limit the increasing influence of India, Iran and Russia, which were providing support to a coalition of anti-Taliban forces.

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The Taliban’s fundamental weaknesses led to its rapid disintegration following the US-led military intervention in 2001.

The movement’s key leaders then fled to Pakistan, where they launched an insurgency against the new Afghan government and US-led NATO forces. After the death of its founder, Muhammad Omar, in 2013, the Taliban selected his deputy, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad, to replace him. He was killed in a US drone attack in 2016.

Since then, Haibatullah Akhunzada has been leading the group, though it has been years since he’s been seen in public. (There were even rumours he died last year due to COVID, which the Taliban denied.)

Much of the international focus has instead been on the leaders in the Taliban’s political office in Doha. This was set up in 2013 to facilitate direct negotiations between the Taliban, the United States and the Afghan government.

The deputy head of the Taliban Political Office, Abdul Salam Hanafi (centre), during peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban in Doha last September.
Hussein Sayed/AP

Can the Taliban govern with legitimacy?

In its attempts to establish a new government, the Taliban is likely to face some difficult choices.

First, an attempt to restore the Islamic Emirate is likely to cost it international recognition, legitimacy and aid. This will, in turn, weaken its prospect of consolidating its hold internally and limit its capacity to govern.

The challenges facing the group are immense. Afghanistan is on the verge of a humanitarian crisis, exacerbated by COVID-19, a severe drought and a looming hunger emergency. The World Food Program says malnutrition levels are soaring and some 2 million children need nutrition treatment to survive.

The Taliban also needs revenue. The previous Afghan government was heavily reliant on foreign aid. But according to a recent UN report, the Taliban largely finances itself with criminal enterprises, including drug trafficking, opium production, extortion, and kidnapping for ransom. The UN estimates its annual income as anywhere from US$300 million (A$413 million) to US$1.6 billion (A$2.2 billion).

The Taliban spokesperson said in his press conference this week that Afghanistan will no longer be an opium-producing country. Without significant foreign aid, however, the question remains how the Taliban would sustain its emirate if it abandons its main source of income.

Second, if the Taliban embraces a more pluralistic and inclusive political system with fundamental human rights, especially with respect to women, it may face opposition from its more radical factions and rank-and-file members, who have spent years fighting to restore its emirate.

Another important constituency that the Taliban will risk alienating is its regional and global jihadist allies. These groups are now celebrating its victory, but they may turn against the Tablian if it is seen as compromising on its core ideological principles.

The movement has so far avoided dealing with these questions through vague rhetoric. But now it is in control, these issues are becoming urgent priorities.

Niamatullah Ibrahimi, Lecturer in International Relations, La Trobe University and Safiullah Taye, Phd. Candidate and Research Assistan, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

View from The Hill: There’s no getting away from it – we’ve all failed Afghanistan’s hopeful girls

Michelle Grattan, University of CanberraAs the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan finally captured Australians’ attention, Scott Morrison had some well rehearsed talking points during a Monday media blitz dominated by COVID and the lost war.

The questions were predictable. The answers were, to be blunt, mostly trite.

Had it all been a waste?

“It’s always Australia’s cause to fight for freedom, and whatever the result, whatever the outcomes of that, Australians have always stood up for that.”

But it hadn’t achieved anything?

“Everyone who has fallen in an Australian uniform, for our values and under flag, has died in the great cause of freedom, and they are great heroes.”

What had been the point?

“The point was to deny Osama bin Laden and to hunt him down, and to deny al-Qaeda a base of operations in Afghanistan. ”

Morrison said he was “absolutely devastated” about the future for the women and girls.

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The government is currently concentrated on getting out Australians (there are more than 130 in Afghanistan), and Afghans who have previously assisted our forces, as translators and the like.

Morrison insisted this is being undertaken efficiently, although things seem slow, and it surely could have helped if we’d kept our embassy open a few weeks longer while the processing was being done. The accountability will come later.

It’s obvious Morrison does not want to engage in any substantial debate about the whole Afghanistan debacle – another war in Asia in which the United States and its allies have been routed.

Morrison is on strong enough ground when he says the point had been to deny – after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks in the US – a base to al-Qaeda and to hunt bin Laden.

That indeed was a proper justification for the initial attack. Afghanistan was a terrorist haven and the west could not afford to leave it as such.

But what came after was another matter. To suggest it is always worth Australians dying for the cause of freedom, win or lose, does not really cut it as an argument.

Of course Australia is a bit player in this long-in-the-making disaster. The Afghan government had been a fragile house of cards, even if its collapse was surprisingly fast once the Americans (first Trump, then Biden) instituted the US exit.

America and its allies, including Australia, had failed to successfully train and motivate an Afghan military force to have the strength and will, when left on its own, to resist the Taliban. The US withdrawal also took out vital capability the Afghan military needed to function.

The Australian forces, and those of other countries, did good things for civilians over the past two decades including for women and their daughters. But after a glimpse of another, better life, all or much of that will now be reversed, and the outlook is bleak for a generation of girls.

During a private trip to Afghanistan in 2002 I met Benafsha, then 19, who told me she wanted to be a doctor, or an engineer.

She was in ninth grade at Ferdous High School in Kabul, run by Catholic Relief Services, where she was catching up on the time when she couldn’t study during the Taliban regime.

“I will be educated. My life will be better than my mother’s,” Benafsha said. It’s not a hope the average 19-year-old girl in Afghanistan will be able to feel today.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne did not exaggerate when she told Sky: “For women and girls I fear this is devastating”.

Morrison, Payne and Defence Minister Peter Dutton said in a statement late Monday, “The Taliban must cease all violence against civilians, and adhere to international humanitarian law and the human rights all Afghans are entitled to expect, in particular women and girls”.

Not much chance, on the Taliban’s previous record.

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Read more:
How Joe Biden failed the people of Afghanistan — and tarnished US credibility around the world

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Promoting democracy and rebuilding a country proved to be much harder for the coalition that went into Afghanistan than inflicting an initial military defeat.

Determined insurgents, fanatically committed to their ideology, are the most difficult enemies to overcome. They regroup.

John Howard took Australia into Afghanistan, and then out of it at the end of 2002, to facilitate supporting George W Bush’s ill-judged mission in Iraq. He re-engaged Australia in Afghanistan in 2005.

Howard has told the Canberra Times, “I have absolutely no regrets about the decision my government took 20 years ago to involve this country. It was the right thing to do.” But reportedly he wouldn’t be drawn on whether it had been wise to stay.

The Howard government’s decision to return in 2005 is hard to justify in terms of Australia’s national interest.

Australia’s prolonged involvement in Afghanistan, and its role in Iraq were driven by its commitment to the US alliance, as had been its participation in that other failure, the Vietnam war.

Successive Australian governments have judged that the alliance, as the bedrock of Australia’s military security, demands quid pro quos when the US asks us to join in military operations.

The 70th anniversary of the ANZUS treaty is imminent. Howard invoked ANZUS for the first time in the wake of the September 11 attacks, which occurred while he happened to be in Washington.

The alliance is much broader than the formal ANZUS treaty, but the anniversary is a time to reflect on the extent to which the alliance has made some of our key international decisions virtually automatic, regardless of what might be our own distinctive interests.

Sadly but inevitably, Afghanistan’s pain will soon fade from the attention of both the Australian media and our politicians. For all the present talk, the fate of the Afghan women will disappear from our consciousness. When we in Australia talk about “women’s issues” we are usually distinctly near-sighted.

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Read more:
As the Taliban returns, 20 years of progress for women looks set to disappear overnight

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Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As the Taliban surges across Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is poised for a swift return

Afghan men bury a victim of deadly bombings near a girls’ school in May.
Mariam Zuhaib/AP

Greg Barton, Deakin UniversityThe imminent fall of Afghanistan is more than a national disaster. It is not just that the gains made in the past two decades, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, look certain to be reversed as the Taliban advances.

The Taliban’s victory is also al-Qaeda’s victory, and it has global implications.

Even before the US military completes the final steps of its troop withdrawal, the Taliban is surging. It is now reported to control 212 districts — more than half of Afghanistan’s 407 districts. This is triple the territory it controlled on May 1. The Taliban has seized 51 districts since the start of July alone.

The Taliban is currently contesting a further 119 districts, leaving the government with control over just 76, or little more than 20%.

And the government-held territory is surrounded. Almost the entire circular national highway is in the hands of the Taliban, meaning the cities under government control can only safely be reached by air.

Afghanistan has fallen

US President Joe Biden and political leaders in Kabul talk optimistically of a fightback to reverse the surge. But Afghan morale has collapsed along with the fabric of national security.

When the US military quietly snuck out of Bagram Airbase in the early hours of July 2, they did not just turn off the lights, they extinguished what hope that remained.

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For the Afghan peace talks to succeed, a ceasefire is the next — and perhaps toughest — step forward

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The Afghan military is stuck in a Catch-22 situation. Without air support, it cannot maintain logistic supply lines and medivac support for its troops across Afghanistan’s mountainous expanses.

The Afghan air force has just 136 airplanes and helicopters ready for combat missions from a fleet of 167, a drop of 24 aircraft in the previous quarter. It relies on international contractors to keep its aircraft flying. And almost all of the 18,000 US-funded contractors left with the last of the troop flights out of Bagram, leaving most of the Afghan helicopters and C130 transports soon to be grounded.

At the same time, Afghanistan’s scarce reserves of US-trained pilots are at risk of assassination from Taliban death squads, with at least seven gunned down while off base in recent months.

Whether the Taliban swiftly moves to take Kabul now, or remains content with encircling the capital and other cities, it is clear: Afghanistan has fallen.

‘War against the US will be continuing on all fronts’

Biden was dealt a very weak hand by his predecessor. The “peace agreement” between the Taliban and the Trump administration (but not the government of Afghanistan) committed the US to draw down all remaining 13,000 troops by May 2021, along with NATO troops.

It also involved a prisoner swap, with more than 5,000 captured Taliban fighters guaranteed release.

In return, the Taliban “pledged” to prevent its longtime ally, al-Qaeda, from operating out of Afghanistan, and to refrain from attacking international forces before their withdrawal.

The Taliban did refrain from targeting foreign troops, but at the same time stepped up its attacks on Afghan forces and leading civil society figures, with a particular focus on assassinating women and girls, and members of the largely Shia Hazara community.

A man cries over the body of a victim of deadly bombing at the entrance to a girls’ school in the Afghan capital in May.
Mariam Zuhaib/AP

Critics of the “peace process” with the Taliban, including former US generals and security officials, have argued that, with no real checks and balances on the Taliban breaking off its lifelong relationship with al-Qaeda, the deal represented mere window dressing to dignify a US exit.

On February 21 2020, The New York Times published an eloquent opinion piece attributed to Sirajuddin Haqqani as the “deputy leader of the Taliban”. What the Times did not disclose is he is the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the founder of the infamous al-Qaeda-allied Haqqani Network. And that the US has designated Sirajuddin a terrorist and offered US$10 million for information on his whereabouts.

In the piece, Sirajuddin opined:

I am confident that, liberated from foreign domination and interference, we together will find a way to build an Islamic system in which all Afghans have equal rights, where the rights of women that are granted by Islam — from the right to education to the right to work — are protected, and where merit is the basis for equal opportunity.

We are also aware of concerns about the potential of Afghanistan being used by disruptive groups to threaten regional and world security. But these concerns are inflated […]

But as attacks have continued unabated in Afghanistan, few believe the sincerity of Sirajuddin’s words. In fact, the piece was harshly criticised by numerous US officials, one of whom called it “blatant propaganda”.

Then in April of this year, Saleem Mehsud, a CNN reporter in Pakistan, conducted an interview through intermediaries with two al-Qaeda figures. It underscores the close relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban — both the Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban (TTP):

The Americans are now defeated […] Now the organisation of Pakistani Taliban and their leadership not only moving forward in the light of Sharia but also making better decisions based on past experiences and recent successes have been made possible by the same unity and adherence to Sharia and Wisdom […]

Thanks to Afghans for the protection of comrades-in-arms, many such jihadi fronts have been successfully operating in different parts of the Islamic world for a long time […]

Ominously, the al-Qaeda spokesmen warned:

war against the US will be continuing on all other fronts unless they are expelled from the rest of the Islamic world.

A safe haven for terrorists again

Biden has justified withdrawing from Afghanistan by asserting the US military had accomplished its goal of ousting al-Qaeda from its safe haven in Afghanistan.

But Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defence from 2006–11, confessed in a recent New York Times op-ed:

There is little doubt the United States made strategic mistakes in Afghanistan. We vastly underestimated the challenge of changing an ancient culture and of nation building in a historically highly decentralised country. We never figured out what to do about the Taliban safe haven in Pakistan.

Despite ongoing negotiations, I do not believe the Taliban will settle for a partial victory or for participation in a coalition government. They want total control, and they still maintain ties to al Qaeda […]

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Read more:
As the US plans its Afghan troop withdrawal, what was it all for?

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Gates’s comments echo a UN monitoring team report released in June that claimed al-Qaeda is already present across Afghanistan, especially along the border with Pakistan, and is led by Osama Mahmood under al-Qaeda’s Jabhat-al-Nasr wing:

19 members of the group have been relocated to more remote areas by the Taliban to avoid potential exposure and targeting

al-Qaeda maintains contact with the Taliban but has minimised overt communications with Taliban leadership in an effort to ‘lay low’ and not jeopardise the Taliban’s diplomatic position vis-a-vis the Doha agreement [with the US].

Both al-Qaeda, which is estimated to have 400-600 fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the Taliban are playing the long game. Their patience will have tragic implications for the Afghan people. But that is just the beginning of the problem.

Afghanistan was the birthplace of al-Qaeda in 1988. The group gave rise to terrorist networks around the world, including Southeast Asia’s Jemaah Islamiyah, formed in Afghanistan in 1993, and Al Qaeda in Iraq, which morphed into the Islamic State in Iraq in 2006.

A Taliban-controlled Afghanistan — a return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan — will be much larger and prove much more durable than the IS caliphate in Syria and Iraq could ever have been. This will be a powerful inspiration for jihadi terrorists everywhere.

And there will be little to prevent it becoming a safe haven for training and equipping terrorists from around the world.

Greg Barton, Chair in Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In COVID’s shadow, global terrorism goes quiet. But we have seen this before, and should be wary

Alaa Al-Marjani/AAP

Greg Barton, Deakin University

Have we flattened the curve of global terrorism? In our COVID-19-obsessed news cycle stories about terrorism and terrorist attacks have largely disappeared. We now, though, understand a little more about how pandemics work.

And ironically, long before the current pandemic, the language of epidemiology proved helpful in understanding by analogy the way in which terrorism works as a phenomenon that depends on social contact and exchange, and expands rapidly in an opportunistic fashion when defences are lowered.

Terrorism goes quiet – but we’ve seen this before

In this pandemic year, it appears one piece of good news is that the curve of international terrorist attacks has indeed been flattened. Having lost its physical caliphate, Islamic State also appears to have lost its capacity, if not its willingness, to launch attacks around the world well beyond conflict zones.

We have seen this happen before. The September 11 attacks in 2001 were followed by a wave of attacks around the world. Bali in October 2002, Riyadh, Casablanca, Jakarta and Istanbul in 2003, Madrid in March 2004, followed by Khobar in May, then London in July 2005 and Bali in October, not to mention numerous other attacks in the Middle East and West Asia.

Since 2005, with the exception of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris in January 2015, al-Qaeda has been prevented from launching any major attacks in western capitals.

The 2015 attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris left 12 people dead.
Ian Langsdon/AAP

The September 11 attacks precipitated enormous investment in police counterterrorism capacity around the world, particularly in intelligence. The result has been that al-Qaeda has struggled to put together large-scale coordinated attacks in Western capitals without being detected and stopped.

Then in 2013, Islamic State emerged. This brought a new wave of attacks from 2014 in cities around the world, outside of conflict zones in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Nigeria.

This wave of IS international terror attacks now appears to have reached an end. The hopeful rhetoric of the collapse of the IS caliphate leading to an end of the global campaign of terror attacks appears to have been borne out. Although, as the sophisticated and coordinated suicide bombings in Colombo in Easter 2019 reminded us, further attacks by previously unknown cells cannot ever be ruled out.

While it’s tempting to conclude that the ending of the current wave of international terrorist attacks by IS is due largely to the ending of the physical caliphate in Syria and Iraq, and a concomitant collapse of capacity, the reality is more complex. Just as the wave of al-Qaeda attacks in the first half of the 2000s was curtailed primarily by massive investments in counterterrorism, so too it appears to be the case with IS international terror plots in the second half of this decade.

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The 2019 attacks in Sri Lanka illustrate dramatically what happens when there is a failure of intelligence, whether due to capacity or, as appears to be the case in Sri Lanka, a lack of political will. The rise of IS in 2013-14 should not have caught us by surprise, but it did, and in 2014 and 2015 we were scrambling to get up to speed with the intelligence challenge.

Epidemiology of terror

The parallels with the epidemiology of viruses are striking. Reasoning by analogy is imperfect, but it can be a powerful way of prompting reflection. The importance of this cannot be underestimated as intelligence failures in counterterrorism, like poor political responses to pandemics, are in large part failures of imagination.

We don’t see what we don’t want to see, and we set ourselves up to become victims of our own wishful thinking. So, with two waves of international terrorist attacks over the past two decades largely brought under control, what can we say about the underlying threat of global terrorism?

When it comes to terrorism, we don’t see what we don’t want to see.
Rahmat Gul/AAP

There are four key lessons we need to learn.

First, we are ultimately seeking to counter the viral spread of ideas and narratives embodied in social networks and spread person-to-person through relationships, whether in person or online. Effective policing and intelligence built on strong community relations can dramatically limit the likelihood of terrorist networks successfully executing large-scale attacks. Effective intelligence can also go a long way to diminishing the frequency and intensity of lone-actor attacks. But this sort of intelligence is even more dependent on strong community relations, built on trust that emboldens people to speak out.

Second, terrorist movements, being opportunistic and parasitic, achieve potency in inverse relation to the level of good governance. In other words, as good governance breaks down, terrorist movements find opportunity to embed themselves. In failing states, the capacity of the state to protect its citizens, and the trust between citizen and authorities, provides ample opportunities for terrorist groups to exploit grievances and needs. This is the reason around 75% of all deaths due to terrorist activity in recent years have occurred in just five nations: Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria (followed by Somalia, Libya, and Yemen).

The third lesson is directly linked to state failure, and is that military methods dramatically overpromise and under-deliver when it comes to countering terrorism. In fact, more than that, the use of military force tends to generate more problems than it solves. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than what has been so wrongly framed as the Global War on Terror.

Military methods under-deliver when it comes to tackling terrorism.
Watan Yar/AAP

Beginning in October 2001 in the immediate wake of the September 11 attacks, the war on terror began with a barrage of attacks on al-Qaeda positions in Afghanistan. It was spurred by understandable anger, but it led to two decades of tremendously expensive military campaigns they have completely failed to deliver the hoped-for end in terrorism to justify the massive toll of violence and loss of life.

The military campaign in Afghanistan began, and has continued for almost 19 years, without any strategic endpoints being defined and indeed with no real strategy vision at all. After almost two decades of continuous conflict, any American administration would understandably want to end the military campaign and withdraw.

Obama talked of doing this but was unable to do so. Trump campaigned on it as one of the few consistent features of his foreign policy thinking. Hence the current negotiations to dramatically reduce American troop numbers, and in the process trigger a reduction in allied coalition troops while releasing thousands of detained militants in response to poorly defined and completely un-guaranteed promises of a reduction in violence by the Taliban.

This is America’s way of ending decades of stalemate in which it is has proven impossible to defeat the Taliban, which even now controls almost one half of Afghanistan. But even as the peace negotiations have been going on the violence has continued unabated. The only reason for withdrawing and allowing the Taliban to formally take a part in governing Afghanistan is fatigue.

Not just Afghanistan

If the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan were the main story, the situation would already be far more dire then we would care to accept. But the problem is not limited to Afghanistan and West Asia. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the “coalition of the willing” was justified largely on the grounds it was necessary to stop al-Qaeda from establishing a presence in Iraq. It achieved, of course, the exact opposite.

Al-Qaeda had little, if any, presence in Iraq prior to the invasion. But the ensuring collapse of not just the regime of Saddam Hussein but the dismantling of the Baath party and the Iraqi military, led largely by a Sunni minority in a Shia majority country, created perfect storm conditions for multiple Sunni insurgencies.

These in turn came to be dominated by the group that styled itself first as Al Qaeda in Iraq, then as the Islamic State in Iraq, and then as the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria. This powerful insurgency was almost completely destroyed in the late 2000s when Sunni tribes were paid and equipped to fight the al-Qaeda insurgency.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was supposed to stop al-Qaeda.
Jerome Delay/AAP

The toxic sectarian politics of Iraq, followed by the withdrawal of US troops at the end of 2011, coinciding with the outbreak of civil war in Syria, saw the almost extinguished insurgency quickly rebuild. We only really began to pay attention when IS led a blitzkrieg across northern Iraq, seized Mosul, and declared a caliphate in June 2014.

Defeating this quasi-state took years of extraordinarily costly military engagement. But even as IS was deprived of the last of its safe havens on the ground, analysts were warning it continued to have tens of thousands of insurgent militants in Syria and northern Iraq and was successfully returning to its earlier mode of insurgency.

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Read more:
US retreat from Syria could see Islamic State roar back to life

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As the Iraqi security forces have been forced to pull back in the face of a steadily building COVID-19 pandemic, there are signs the IS insurgent forces have continued to seize the spaces left open to them. Even without the pandemic, the insurgency was always going to steadily build strength, but the events of 2020 have provided it with fresh opportunities.

The fourth and final lesson we need to come to terms with is that we are dealing with a viral movement of ideas embodied in social networks. We are not dealing with a singular unchanging enemy but rather an amorphous, agile, threat able to constantly evolve and adapt itself to circumstances.

Al-Qaeda and IS share a common set of ideas built around Salafi-jihadi violent extremism. But this is not the only violent extremism we have to worry about.

In America today, as has been the case for more than a decade, the prime terrorist threat comes from far-right violent extremism rather than from Salafi-jihadi extremism. The same is not true in Australia, although ASIO and our police forces have been warning us far-right extremism represents an emerging secondary threat.

But the potent violence of an Australian far-right terrorist in the attack in Christchurch in March 2019 serves to remind us this form of violent extremism, feeding on toxic identity politics and hate, represents a growing threat in our southern hemisphere.

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ASIO chief’s assessment shows the need to do more, and better, to prevent terrorism

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Fighting the terrorist pandemic

In this year in which we have been, understandably, so preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic, another pandemic has been continuing unabated. It is true we have successfully dealt with two waves of global terrorist attacks over the past two decades, but we have not dealt successfully the underlying source of infections.

In fact, we have contributed, through military campaigns, to weakening the body politic of host countries in which groups like al-Qaeda, IS and other violent extremist groups have a parasitic presence.

We now need to face the inconvenient truth that toxic identity politics and the tribal dynamics of hate have infected western democracies. Limiting the scope for terrorist attacks is difficult. Eliminating the viral spread of hateful extremism is much harder, but ultimately even more important.

Greg Barton, Chair in Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Mali: Terrorist Attack Update

Mali: Terrorist Attack Update