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I Was a CSIS Analyst When 9/11 Happened. Here’s What I’ve Learned

We risk repeating the errors of the past twenty-five years on

In modern history, say from 1900 to the present, there are a number of deadly events which one could call “iconic” because of the huge impact they had on the world. While something happens every day somewhere, including major actions with important local or regional implications, it is rare for a given occurrence to have a disproportionate, global effect. These incidents are truly transnational and international in nature.

Take, for example, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina) in June 1914 by a Serbian terrorist. That one act led soon after to the outbreak of World War I, a war which saw the mechanization of warfare on a scale never seen before and a death toll of at least 20 million soldiers and civilians. While it is true that a war in Europe could have erupted in the absence of this royal killing, it was nevertheless the linchpin.

The history of that war is known to all, even more than a century later. We are undoubtedly familiar with the carnage of trench warfare and the human slaughter caused by artillery shells and poison gas. The shock of this maelstrom of killing convinced some to call this conflict “the war to end all wars.”

That epithet did not last a generation.

On December 7, 1941, a Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor in what was United States–controlled Hawaii (not yet a state) was the key factor in America’s decision to enter World War II, which had begun with German leader Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland more than two years previously. That war resulted in the deaths of between 40 and 50 million, twice the number of WWI, and the unleashing of atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, which alone killed as many as 250,000 people. Had Japan elected not to target the US, the war would most likely have had a very different outcome. WWII was not only catastrophically deadly but led to a whole new world order.

The aftermath of WWII was, of course, the Cold War, which, although not lethal on the scale of the two world wars, did place the planet on the knife’s edge of MAD—mutually assured destruction—for almost half a century. The West’s erstwhile ally in WWII, the Soviet Union, morphed into a mortal enemy, one that was the focus of the West’s military and security intelligence apparatuses for decades. Given the increase in nuclear arsenals on both sides and proxy wars aided by both the US and the USSR, civilization was put, perhaps for the first time, at risk of total annihilation. Several “near misses”—the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 is perhaps the best known—took us to the very edge of global conflict and collapse.

Terrorism did not start on that Tuesday morning in New York and Washington. The group responsible for the attacks, al-Qaeda, had been active for more than a decade before that day and had attacked the US, albeit mostly abroad, on several occasions in the 1990s. There were also many other forms of terrorism that had arisen over the previous decades, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century (generally seen as the time when terrorism as a tactic of violence began to spread). Nevertheless, the al-Qaeda airliner attack led many to see terrorism as something very serious as it immediately reached a height and prominence in the public’s eye that still dominates a quarter century later. Never before had a terrorist organization successfully carried out an act that took so many lives and led to a global response in the months and years to follow.

As a strategic Middle East analyst at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), it was my job to understand events in that part of the world and any implications for the security and safety of Canada and its allies. Terrorism was not my specialization in 2001—Iran was—but I was nevertheless well-positioned to learn more about this particular brand of violent extremism. To say that this one day had a lasting impact on my career would be a vast........

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