From 9/11 to 2026: Twenty-Five Years of Counterterrorism and the Evolution of the Terrorist Threat
Arguably, September 11, 2001 (9/11) fundamentally transformed the international security environment. The coordinated attacks demonstrated that a relatively small non-state organization could inflict catastrophic damage on the world’s most powerful state. More importantly, the attacks exposed a potent transformation in the nature of terrorism. A bunch of terrorists hiding in a relatively remote and impoverished environment could plan, finance, train, communicate, and execute a complex operation against targets thousands of miles away.
The twenty-fifth anniversary in 2026 therefore provides more than an occasion for remembrance. It represents an appropriate moment to assess whether the enormous counterterrorism enterprise constructed after 9/11 achieved its principal objectives, how profoundly it damaged the infrastructure of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, and whether terrorism itself evolved in response to sustained counterterrorism pressure.