Former US Diplomat Khalilzad Reflects on Post-9/11 Decisions and Regrets Over Afghanistan, Iraq Policies

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 on Friday 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.

The events of September 11 are considered the deadliest foreign attack in US history. Nearly 3,000 people died 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 attacking the group responsible, al-Qaeda. It was the start of a nearly 20-year-long war.

“You have to put yourself in the context of the time. We were very angry. We were concerned that other attacks may be planned. There may be sleeper cells,” Khalilzad said. “We wanted to get to as many people – al-Qaeda members – to arrest them.”

Khalilzad was a senior director on the National Security Council at the time of the attacks, serving under then-President George W Bush.

He later served in several ambassadorships, representing the US as the top diplomat in Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations at various points in his career.

In Friday’s interview, he described having misgivings about US policy toward Afghanistan, including the decision not to negotiate with the Taliban, which ruled the country at the time of the invasion.

Reports have since emerged that the Taliban was willing to strike a deal with the US in 2001, in the early months of the war. But the US reportedly rejected the possibility of a deal.

The Taliban fought US-backed forces for the next two decades, until the US withdrawal in 2021. Since then, it has retaken power.

“One thought that has emerged is that we should have negotiated with the Taliban or included the Taliban in the political process in Afghanistan,” Khalilzad said. “It would have been good if that had happened.”

He credits the decision not to enter into negotiations to several factors, including post-September 11 anger and the US’s status as a global superpower.

“We were angry, and we wanted to get information from them,” Khalilzad said of the Taliban. “But if we could have included them … realistically, that could have been helpful.”

In 2003, two years after the Afghanistan invasion, the US launched a separate operation against Iraq as part of its growing so-called “war on terror”.

The Bush administration justified that war by citing now-infamous intelligence assessments that Iraq was on the verge of obtaining “weapons of mass destruction”, including nuclear capabilities. Those reports would later turn out to be false.

Still, the war in Iraq would last more than eight years and would result in the overthrow and execution of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“With regard to Iraq, well, there the information was the problem,” Khalilzad said, adding: “I think, in retrospect, the circumstances, the analysis, the information was problematic.”

At the time, Khalilzad said, the US did not believe Hussein had been truthful about whether his country possessed weapons of mass destruction. The US also feared another “surprise attack”, similar to what al-Qaeda had launched.

“Without 9/11, I don’t think we will attack Iraq,” Khalilzad said.

He explained that the US government believed that, if “this problem of Saddam Hussein is also allowed to percolate”, the country could “face a huge surprise and attack”.

“Containment evolved into massive attack and overthrowing of the regime,” Khalilzad said.

In August, the US marked five years since its chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The process began in 2020, when President Donald Trump, during his first term, signed a deal with the Taliban to pull out all US troops by the following year. It was completed during the presidency of Joe Biden in 2021.

The withdrawal was widely criticised for putting troops at risk and leaving behind Afghans who had worked with US-allied forces and who were therefore at risk of violence and punishment.

For his part, Khalilzad said he agreed with the move to pull US troops from the country.

“We had been there for 20 years. Afghanistan was changed. The war could have gone on indefinitely. The world had changed. Priorities had changed. We decimated the terrorist threat. That’s what had driven us,” he said.

Shortly after US forces left the country, the US-backed Afghan government fell, and the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan.

But Khalilzad argued the new relationship has been positive for the US: “I think the Taliban, surprisingly, have been good in terms of terrorism for the United States interests.”