How 9/11 Triggered Two Decades of Global War

9/11 was an attack on the United States, but the response – and its costs– were global.

By Seth Cline

Sept. 10, 2021

U.S. News & World Report

405020 39: Members of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry and U.S. Army personnel arrive by chinook helicopter May 4, 2002 in the Towr Ghar mountain in the Tora Bora valley region of Afghanistan. The Canadian Operation Torii is being conducted to destroy underground facilities in the mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan in order to deny al-Qaida access to the area. Canadian troops and U.S. forensic experts returned from the former al-Qaida stronghold with DNA samples they hope will identify some of those killed there by U.S. bombs late last year. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Canadian infantry and U.S. Army personnel arrive by helicopter in the Tora Bora valley region of Afghanistan, on May 4, 2002.(JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES)

"Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there … every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists."

Those words, spoken by President George W. Bush in a televised address just nine days after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were directed toward Congress and the American people, but they came to define a sprawling series of conflicts that have touched more than 120 countries across five continents in the years since.

The vision President Bush outlined that day – "Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any we have ever seen" – has come true: The conflicts he coined the "war on terror" would go on to become some of the longest and costliest wars in U.S. history. And though 9/11 was an attack on the United States, the costs – human and otherwise – have been global.

Deaths of Innocents

Civilians have suffered the most. In the five majority-Muslim countries that have been the primary battlefields of the post-911 conflicts, more than 377,000 civilians, journalists and nongovernmental organization workers have died as a direct result of the fighting – tens of thousands more than war fighters on either side, research shows.

Estimated Deaths From the War on Terror

All told, nearly 1 million people have died in the U.S.-led conflicts that followed Sept. 11 known as Operation Enduring Freedom.

PAKISTAN

IRAQ

AFGHANISTAN

YEMEN

SYRIA

Total Deaths:300,000 To 66000

Even those statistics reflect only a fraction of the harm and disruption the so-called "war on terror" have caused, says Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project.

"There have been 38 million people displaced by the post-9/11 wars. All of those people are now struggling for livelihood torn from their homes and communities." Those people, as well, are predominantly not Americans, she says.

"Bush talked about extending American force to 'all the dark corners of the world' and if you look at the map where the U.S. is engaged in counterterror, it's very heavily skewed toward countries with Black and brown populations," Savell says.

Allied Involvement

Those contributions began with the initial efforts to track down Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 2001, and escalated further with the deployment of NATO's International Security Assistance Force that year. By February 2011 – almost a decade after the first boots hit the ground – 47 countries had troops deployed in Afghanistan, and they constituted nearly a third of the total bootprint at the time.

In Iraq, support from U.S. allies was initially more limited. Only the United Kingdom, Poland and Australia contributed troops to the invasion at the war's outset in 2003. But by the coalition's peak in December 2005, allies had deployed more than 20,000 troops to the effort.

The global financial costs of the wars were also substantial. The five most financially generous U.S. allies in Afghanistan and Iraq spent an estimated $145 billion in military and non-military aid on those countries, according to one calculation. In both military and financial support, the United Kingdom was the biggest contributor to both war efforts.