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Twenty-five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the US is still working out what kind of danger it is meant to guard against. In 2001, the answer was clear enough: foreign terrorists, organised abroad, striking the homeland. A quarter century of wars, laws, agencies and public argument later, that answer no longer holds on its own.

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that US citizens today rank domestic extremism and mass shootings well above foreign terrorism as the biggest threat to their safety, a sharp turn from the fear that dominated the years right after 2001. The US Department of Justice describes an institutional machine built for counterterrorism that must now also handle cyberattacks, ransomware and foreign interference. Seth Jones of CSIS goes further, arguing that the United States has entered an “end of sanctuary,” where drones, missiles and cyber operations from China, Russia and North Korea matter more to homeland security than any single terrorist network. The state that emerged from 9/11 is large, expensive and still standing. Whether it learned the right lessons is a major question.

What followed from the 9/11 report

The 9/11 Commission’s final report was unusually blunt about own allies of the US. It said plainly that Pakistan’s army and intelligence services had long been unwilling to confront Islamist extremists, and that many officials sympathised with or supported them even while Islamabad also assisted Washington against al-Qaeda. It made a similar point about Saudi Arabia, noting that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers came from Saudi society and that money raised there, often through charities, ended up funding extremism abroad. These things meant that the very countries the United States relied on to fight the war on terror were also part of the problem.

What followed did not resolve that contradiction so much as live with it for two decades. Afghanistan is the clearest case. The Taliban were removed from power within weeks in 2001, but the mission drifted between destroying al-Qaeda and trying to build a modern state, without settling on which one it actually was, as Barack Obama later admitted in his memoir. He wrote that Marines would clear an area of the Taliban only to see the gains lost because local governance never followed, and that billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts often went to some of Kabul’s least trustworthy operators.

Robert Gates, who had watched the Soviet Union bleed in Afghanistan in the 1980s, warned Obama that vague goals would........

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