World Trade Center in New York. Although it was a cloudless day,
the cause was not immediately apparent: after all, in 1945 a plane
had crashed into the seventy-eighth floor of the Empire State
Building. At 9.05 a.m., however, it became all too clear. At that
instant, United Airlines Flight 175, which had left Boston for Los
Angeles at 7.58 a.m., smashed into the World Trade Center’s South
Tower. The United States was under terrorist attack. Two other
planes that day did not reach their destination. At 9.39 a.m.,
American Airlines Flight 77, which had left Washington Dulles for
Los Angeles at 8.10 a.m., struck the Pentagon Building, headquar-
ters of the US Department of Defense, and at 10.10 a.m., United
Airlines Flight 93, which had left Newark for San Francisco at
8.01 a.m., crashed near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, apparently after
passengers overpowered those who had hijacked their aircraft. The
structures of the World Trade Center suffered lethal damage: the
South Tower collapsed at 10 a.m., and the North Tower at 10.29
a.m. The total dead and missing from the plane crashes and attacks
on the Center was estimated in mid-January 2002 at 2893 (The
Times, 11 January 2002), with a further 233 dead from the
Pentagon attack and the plane crashes in Washington DC and
Pennsylvania. The 19 hijackers were led by an Al-Qaidaactivist,
Mohamed Atta. The spectacle was captured by television cameras
which flashed it to households throughout America and screens all
around the world. As a disaster it caused a psychological shock
comparable to the sinking of the ‘unsinkable’ ship Titanic on 15
April 1912, and the fiery destruction of the airship Hindenburg on
6 May 1937. But with one difference. They had been accidents,
whereas the attacks of 11 September were indubitably deliberate,
with Bin Laden the instigator (DeYoung and Pincus, 2001; Dobbs,
2001). The closest parallel was with the bombing of Pearl Harbor
on December 7 1941, which President Roosevelt described as ‘a
date that will live in infamy’. That was how the United States saw
September 11 2001, and it spelt the end for the Taliban.
This chapter details the events which followed, and concludes
this book by offering some reflections on the challenges which
Afghanistan will have to confront as a result of over two decades of
252 The Afghanistan Wars