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# 9/11 Attack and America's War on Terror: The Cure has Out-killed the Disease
- URL: https://www.bontehmagazine.com/9-11-attack-and-americas-war-on-terror-the-cure-has-out-killed-the-disease/
- Published: 2026-09-15T11:32:38.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-15T11:32:38.000Z
- Description: To wave away the disproportion between the war and the wound that provoked it is to quietly concede that terror is subjective, that its meaning bends to who is holding the weapon and whose flag flies over the operation.
- Author: Ankiambom Nkesa Nkesa
- Tags: World

It is September 11, 2001\. Americans wake to an ordinary day and go about their business. Unbeknownst to them, a plot conceived years earlier by Osama bin Laden is about to crystallise on their soil. It unfolds like a horror film with the whole world as its unwilling audience. [Four planes, three targets, the Twin Towers plunged into, part of the Pentagon in ruins. Within hours, 2,977 people are dead](https://www.history.com/articles/9-11-attacks?ref=bontehmagazine.com), not counting the nineteen hijackers. 

May their souls rest. 

America was wounded and vowed retribution. That vow became the War on Terror, [a manhunt for bin Laden and everyone who shared his cause. It ended in May 2011, when American forces found and killed him in Abbottabad, Pakistan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing%5Fof%5FOsama%5Fbin%5FLaden?ref=bontehmagazine.com). 

Here is the plain statement the anniversary speeches tend to skip. [Brown University's Costs of War project estimates that 905,000 to 940,000 people were killed directly by the resulting wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen through 2023,](https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/paper/overview?ref=bontehmagazine.com) a figure spanning American troops, allied forces, civilians and militants. Fold in the indirect dead, those lost to collapsed hospitals, ruined water systems, and famine that follows war the way flies follow a wound, and the toll climbs to at least [4.5 to 4.7 million.](https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/papers/how-death-outlives-war?ref=bontehmagazine.com) That is somewhere near 1,500 human beings for every one killed on 9/11\. 

How does a war fought in the name of stopping terror end up producing more of it than the original crime? Someone is benefiting quietly while the larger world absorbs the cost. 

Defense contractors. A security apparatus that never found a reason to demobilize. Governments, American and allied, that discovered in the word "counterterrorism" a permission slip for interventions that would otherwise have drawn the world's scrutiny. The dead of Fallujah and Sana'a have no wall in Manhattan with their names on it. 

None of this makes the villains clean on either side. Al Qaeda and its successors killed civilians too, and a portion of the 940,000 direct dead were combatants killed in genuine battle. This is not a call to call America hypocritical. It is a harder claim. To wave away the disproportion between the war and the wound that provoked it is to quietly concede that terror is subjective, that its meaning bends to who is holding the weapon and whose flag flies over the operation. 

That concession should trouble anyone who thinks clearly about it. Kant's answer to this kind of question has stood for over two centuries: an act's moral character cannot depend on the identity of the actor, only on whether its principle could be willed as a law for everyone alike. Fear inflicted on a Yemeni family sheltering from a drone is not a lesser fear than fear inflicted on an office worker in Lower Manhattan. 

Terror does not become something else because a state, rather than a network, is the one inflicting it. Every person carries the same inalienable claim to life and to safety from deliberate fear, a claim that does not dissolve at a border or under a uniform.

The arithmetic that follows from this is not comfortable for anyone. Over 432,000 of the direct dead were civilians. Thirty eight million people were driven from their homes. [The wars will cost eight trillion dollars, with veterans' care alone reaching two to two and a half trillion by 2050](https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/sites/default/files/papers/Costs-of-War%5FUS-Budgetary-Costs-of-Post-9-11-Wars.pdf?ref=bontehmagazine.com). Nearly 3,000 dead in 2001 against close to a million dead directly, and millions more indirectly, since. 

A nation that answers an atrocity with a war whose body count it eventually stops counting is no longer fighting terror. It has become one of its largest manufacturers, and it did so with a flag on its shoulder instead of a mask over its face.