The Last War for Democracy
20th August 2021
Twenty years after 9/11, the War on Terror has come full circle. Everyone expected the Taliban to surge back to power as soon as American forces left Afghanistan. Instead, the surge began while America’s embassy in Kabul was still open, inviting unwelcome flashbacks to Saigon in 1975 and Tehran in 1979. There are piquant memories of 1989, too — not of the Berlin Wall’s fall or a young Francis Fukuyama’s publishing ‘The End of History?’ in the National Interest, but memories of an Afghan insurgency’s triumph over a superpower.
That triumph would inspire and ultimately contribute in the most concrete ways to a decade of terrorism, culminating in the 9/11 attacks. The very year that Western intellectuals celebrated the end of the Cold War, and with it the removal of the last great obstacle to worldwide liberal democracy, militant Islamists learned the lesson that not even the greatest of worldly powers was invincible before God’s holy warriors. If jihad against the Soviet Union could succeed, followed swiftly, as if by divine judgment, by the USSR’s dissolution, then who was to say a war against the United States could not be won?