Former US Diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad Reflects on Post-9/11 Missteps and Policy Failures

Twenty-five years after the attacks on September 11, 2001, a former top United States diplomat has outlined what he feels were missteps made in the aftermath. In an interview with journalist Alex Marquardt for the Al Jazeera programme This is America, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad described how the country’s heightened sense of fear led to a series of spiralling decisions that would transform the world for years to come.

“Anger was a factor of urgency because the people wanted to see action: What are we going to do about this?” Khalilzad said of the attacks, which are considered the deadliest foreign attack in US history, resulting in nearly 3,000 deaths when 19 hijackers crashed passenger jets into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

Less than a month after the attacks, the US launched an invasion of Afghanistan with the stated aim of targeting al-Qaeda, marking the start of a nearly 20-year-long war. Khalilzad, who served as a senior director on the National Security Council under then-President George W Bush and later as an ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations, noted that the country was driven by fear of sleeper cells and a desire to arrest as many al-Qaeda members as possible.

Reflecting on US policy toward Afghanistan, Khalilzad expressed misgivings about the decision not to negotiate with the Taliban, noting that reports later emerged indicating the group was willing to strike a deal in the early months of 2001. Instead, the US rejected the possibility, leading to two decades of conflict and the Taliban's eventual return to power following the 2021 US withdrawal.

Addressing the 2003 invasion of Iraq under the justification of weapons of mass destruction, Khalilzad admitted that the underlying intelligence assessments turned out to be false. He explained that without the trauma of 9/11 and the fear of another surprise attack from Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the invasion would likely not have occurred.

Discussing the military withdrawal from Afghanistan—which began under President Donald Trump and was completed under President Joe Biden—Khalilzad defended the decision to pull troops after 20 years, arguing that priorities had shifted and the terrorist threat had been decimated. He also claimed that the Taliban had surprisingly served US interests well regarding terrorism following the withdrawal.