Left in Afghanistan: Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS-K, Credibility

In a frenzied flight from Afghanistan the U.S. left behind Americans, allies, $80 billion in weapons of war, some hard won credibility, and a leadership vacuum.

October 6, 2021

The late author, Tom Clancy was widely considered to be a master of the Cold War techno-thriller. I once wrote about his first novel, The Hunt for Red October (Putnam, 1984), which kept me awake for a few nights as a young priest in 1985. President Ronald Reagan sent it to the top of the bestseller lists when he famously described it as "Unputdownable." I wrote about Tom Clancy and that book shortly after his untimely death in October 2013. My post, which found a wide audience among his millions of readers, was “Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October.”

Tom Clancy instilled in me a high regard for history as a lens to the present. I have since digested 23 of Tom Clancy’s historical novels — some 15,000 pages — about foreign policy, its impact on history, or history’s impact on it. But it was a sequel to The Hunt for Red October that first drew me into the necessity of seeing the present with eyes that have gazed upon the past.

And it was that same sequel that opened my eyes about Afghanistan. The Cardinal of the Kremlin (Putnam, 1988) was set toward the end of the Soviet Union’s decade-long occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, and the struggle of the Afghan people to be rid of that invasion force. Everything that is happening in Afghanistan today has its roots in that decade. The Taliban were never mentioned in the book, nor were al Qaeda, Islamic State, or ISIS-K. None of them existed yet, but the seeds of all of them were firmly planted and flourishing as a result of that decade and all that followed.

On Christmas Day, 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. They quickly won control of the capital, Kabul, and other important regions. The Soviets executed the Afghan political leader and installed in his place a puppet government led by a faction more amenable to Soviet control. Wide rejection of that government by the Afghan people led to civil war. A man named Osama bin Laden, a Saudi multimillionaire, established a training camp in the mountains of Afghanistan for rebels fighting the Soviet forces.

The 1980s also saw increased friction between the United States and the Soviet Union resulting mainly from the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, greatly increased American military capabilities. The Soviets viewed him as a formidable foe committed to subverting the Soviet system. In his 1985 State of the Union address, President Reagan called the USSR an “Evil Empire,” and vowed to root out and destroy any political movements that supported the Soviet Union. He was much aided in this effort by Pope John Paul II who single handedly saved Poland from Soviet domination.

The Rise of the Taliban

In the mid-1980s, resistance to the Communist government and the Soviet invaders grew throughout Afghanistan. Some ninety regions in the country were commanded by guerrilla leaders who called themselves “mujahideen,” meaning “Muslim holy warriors.” The mujahideen resented the Soviet presence and its puppet government. By the mid-1980s the U.S. was spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to aid these Afghan rebels based in Pakistan in their war to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Up to 1.3 million people died in their struggle against the occupation.

Then in 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan leaving in their wake a leadership vacuum in a country wracked by civil war. From a distance, over the decade to follow, the United States continued to provide funds and weapons to the mujahideen rebels. Afghanistan was now without solidifying leadership, and nature abhors a vacuum. From the rubble of war, chaos, and a rudderless nation, the Taliban were born.

The Taliban movement was created in 1994 in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar by Mohammed Omar, a senior Muslim cleric (called a mullah). The name, “Taliban” simply means “student.” It refers to the movement’s roots in the fundamentalist Islamic religious schools. For many youth in war-torn Afghanistan, religious indoctrination was the only education they received.

Even that limited education was available only to young men. As the Taliban rose to power in 1994, the movement imposed a strict Islamic fundamentalism on the nation. Secondary schools for girls were closed and girls were barred from receiving education beyond a rudimentary level. Music and dancing were banned outright. Public works of art were destroyed. I wrote recently in these pages of an infamous example. In 2001, as al Qaeda was plotting against the United States, the Taliban blew up a 180 foot stone statue of Buddha that had been carved into an Afghan mountainside where it stood for 1500 years.

Many of the Taliban laws alarmed human rights groups and provoked worldwide condemnation. The Taliban strictly enforced ancient customs of purdah, the forced separation of men and women in public. Men were required to grow full beards. Those who did not comply, or could not comply, were subjected to public beatings.

Women were required to be covered entirely from head to toe in burkas while in public view. Those who violated this were often beaten or executed on the spot by the Taliban religious police. Women were also forbidden from working outside the home. Having lost hundreds of thousands of men to war, this left many widows and orphans in dire poverty.

As the Taliban movement grew in size and strength, it recruited heavily from the mujahideen, the anti-Soviet freedom fighters who were funded and armed in part by the United States. The Taliban gave a new national identity to the thousands of war orphans who were educated in only two fields of study: strict fundamentalist Islamic interpretation of the Quran and ancient tribal beliefs and practices — and war.

The Rise of Al Qaeda

By the late 1990s, in the absence of a government, the Taliban had taken control of all of Afghanistan with the exception of a small opposition force known as the Northern Alliance. Most other countries did not recognize the Taliban regime as a legitimate government, thus further isolating Afghanistan and its people from oversight and connection with the world community.

From that pinnacle of power, the Taliban also provided safe harbor to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, formed in 1980s Afghanistan to help repel the Soviet invasion. Osama bin Laden had a single goal: to incite a global holy war called, in Arabic, a jihad. The term, al Qaeda is Arabic for “base” or “base camp.” For its founder and adherents, it would become the base from which worldwide Islamic revolution and domination would be launched.

Over the course of the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda trained, equipped, and financed 50,000 mujahideen warriors from 50 countries. Saudi Arabian nationals comprised more than fifty percent of the recruits. Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam motivated many young men to come to the defense of Afghanistan and the Muslim world against Western “infidel” influences.

When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Osama bin Laden returned to his original goal for al Qaeda: to overthrow Muslim or Arab regimes that he considered to be too tolerant of Western influence. Bin Laden envisioned replacing these regimes with a single Muslim empire organized around Islamic “Sharia” law. He targeted the United States and other Western nations because he saw them as obstacles to his cause by becoming political allies with the Muslim nations he considered to be corrupt.

From 1991 to 1996, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, bin Laden quietly built al Qaeda into a formidable international terrorist network with cells and operations in 45 countries. Training camps were established in Sudan, and by 1992 most of al Qaeda’s operations were relocated there. From that base, attacks on U.S. troops and U.S. interests were launched in Yemen and Somalia and at a joint U.S.-Saudi military training base in Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was especially angered by the presence of U.S. military in Saudi Arabia.

Bowing to pressure from the Saudi and U.S. governments, al Qaeda and bin Laden were expelled from Sudan in 1996 and returned to Afghanistan. He formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Taliban while plans for a direct assault on the United States took shape. The September 11, 2001 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 Americans on U.S. soil, were described recently in these pages in “The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising.”

In response, the United States declared war on terrorism, the first declaration of war against a concept instead of a country. While Taliban leaders rejected U.S. demands to surrender bin Laden, the U.S. began aerial bombings of terrorist training camps and Taliban military positions in October, 2001. Ground troops of the Northern Alliance, meanwhile, continued their front-line offensive against Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan with help in the form of funds and weapons from the United States.

The U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan

The Taliban lost its hold on Afghanistan in November, 2001 when the Northern Alliance, aided by U.S. bombardments, captured the capital, Kabul. The Taliban surrendered its traditional stronghold of Kandahar in December 2001. A decade after the Soviets left, the United States now occupied Afghanistan and drove out the Taliban.

Around the world, a global anti-terrorism effort was underway resulting in the arrests or deaths of over 1,000 al Qaeda operatives and another 3,000 members of peripheral terrorist networks. One third of al Qaeda’s leadership was either dead or in custody. In May, 2011, U.S. Special Forces operatives killed Osama bin Laden at a house in Islamabad, Pakistan where he had been hiding in plain sight. Al Qaeda lost a general but gained a martyr.

Twenty years later, seven months into his term in office, the administration of President Joe Biden announced an end to the 20 year U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. It will be one of the great ironies of history that the U.S. left Afghanistan just as it was found in 2001 — with the Taliban in complete control. Just days after President Biden assured both nations that it is highly unlikely the Taliban will ever again rise to power in Afghanistan, they took complete control of the country in a matter of days — even before the U.S. departure was completed.

Wall Street Journal columnist and former presidential speech writer, Peggy Noonan — no fan of Mr. Biden’s predecessor — had written some flattering prose about the new tone in Washington led by an empathetic gentleman in the White House. In the aftermath of this catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, however, she wrote, “The Afghan Fiasco Will Stick to Biden” (WSJ, September 4, 2021):

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“August left a lingering, still head-shaking sense of ‘This isn’t how we do things.’ We don’t make up withdrawal dates that will have symbolism for photo-ops with the president looking determined on the anniversary of 9/11; we don’t time epic strategic decisions around showbiz exigencies. We wait for the summer fighting season to pass; we withdraw in the winter when Taliban warriors are shivering in their caves.

“We don’t leave our major air base in the middle of the night — in the middle of the night! — without even telling the Afghan military. We don’t leave our weapons behind so 20-year-old enemies can don them for military play-acting and drive up and down with guns and helmets. We don’t fail to tell our allies exactly what we are doing and how we are doing it — they followed us there and paid a price for it. We don’t see signs of an overwhelming enemy advance and treat is as a perception problem as opposed to a reality problem. We don’t get the U.S. military out before the U.S. citizens and our friends.”

— WSJ, Sep 4, 2021

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In regard to Ms. Noonan’ s sentence, “We don’t leave our weapons behind,” the London Times composed a basic inventory of what was left behind in Afghanistan in addition to a number of Americans and allies who are still there and still in jeopardy. Scattered across Afghanistan in several former U.S. military depots — and now in the hands of the Taliban — are the following:

“22,174 American armored military humvees [like the one featured atop this post], 42 trucks and SUVs, 64,363 machine guns, 358,000 military grade assault rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition; 162,043 military grade night vision goggles and military radios; 126,295 pistols, 176 heavy artillery weapons, 100 helicopters including 33 Blackhawks, four c-130 transport planes, 60 other fixed-wing aircraft, and lots of ammunition for a total cost of eighty billion dollars in advanced military assets.”

— London Times

There was a lot more left behind in Afghanistan. Peggy Noonan and other writers spoke of a humiliating transformation in this U.S. departure. The U.S. set a deadline for leaving, but somehow the “leaving” seemed more like an expulsion with the Taliban dictating the terms. In the end, America fled, taking only as many citizens and allies as conveniently possible while leaving many more behind. Senator Tom Cotton said that the U.S. left behind 1,000 Afghan allies who were fully veted to come to the United States, while taking 1,000 Afghan about whom the U.S. knows nothing.

The Rise of ISIS-K

Then a new terror group emerged on the scene. ISIS-K, also known as Islamic State Khorasan, managed to smuggle a suicide bomber into Hamid Kara airport in Kabul. The explosion killed ten U.S. marines, two U.S. army sergeants, and a U.S. Navy medic along with 95 Taliban soldiers. ISIS-K is a mortal enemy of the Taliban and has extreme hostility to the United States.

The “K” in its title refers to Khorasan, a once powerful Muslim territory that spanned Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Both the U.S. and the Taliban knew that ISIS-K was operating and planning attacks in Afghanistan. In May, 2021, ISIS-K bombed a Kabul school for girls. The group accuses the Taliban of growing “soft” on imposing Islamic “Sharia” law. Since then, the Taliban capitulated by banning all secondary education for Afghan girls.

In House and Senate hearnings, Generals Miley and McKenzie said that they recommended leaving between 2,500 and 3,500 troops in Kabul to maintain control over the evacuation and assure that Americans would not be left behind. They were overruled by the White House.

In response to the ISIS-K killing of 13 U.S. soldiers, President Joe Biden warned that “we will hunt you down and you will pay.” But without boots, eyes, and ears on the ground in Afghanistan now, that was easier said than done. Days later, the Pentagon and the President told the nation that a U.S. drone strike successfully killed ISIS-K terrorists. They said the reprisal was well vetted and “a righteous strike.”

It took several days for the truth to come out. The U.S. drone missile instead struck a white Toyota Corolla killing three innocent adults and seven children ranging in age from two to 15, all trying to flee Kabul and the Taliban.

Then our national attention was turned quickly once again to the other human disaster, the one at the Southern Border. While all eyes had been on Afghanistan, some 16,000 people amassed under and around a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. There was some gruesome footage of men on horseback chasing down and coralling desperately fleeing Haitians. The footage was not what it first seemed, but it was nonetheless a disturbing indictment of current policy.

An embarrased President Biden reacted with a declaration that the buck stops somewhere else. He vowed that the massively overwhelmed Border Patrol “will be held responsible and will pay.” It was the same thing he said when ISIS-K killed 13 U.S. soldiers in Kabul.

Rules for leadership are universal, and America is no exception. Nature abhors a vacuum, and fills it with chaos.

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Editor’s Note: Please share this post, and if you haven’t already, please Subscribe to Beyond These Stone Walls. You may also like these related posts from Father Gordon MacRae:

Christians and The Crusades of Islamic State

The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising

Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October

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The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising

The smoke of Satan billows still 20 years after September 11, 2001, but the courage of the men and women aboard Flight 93 is also an enduring legacy of that day.

September 15, 2021

“Are you guys ready? OK. Let's roll!” You may know these words but you may not know the name of the man who spoke them. Todd Beamer said these words to his fellow passengers, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham, and Tom Burnett aboard United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. All four were athletes who found themselves aboard this fateful flight. There is no indication that they had ever met before that day. They knew their plane had been taken over by hijackers, and like most they became resolved to let it all play out as was the case with most hijack flights during the 1970s.

But as they and other passengers around them made cellphone calls to family and others that morning, they quickly learned of the devastation unfolding in Manhattan and Washington at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The lights went on in their minds. This flight was now under the control of terrorists and was destined to crash into some as yet unknown building in Washington to kill everyone aboard and to maximize the loss of life in the nation’s capital. Its ultimate goal was to humiliate and crush the spirit of America.

The clock was ticking as most passengers were subdued by the terror. Knowing the inevitable fate of Flight 93, the four men, led by Todd Beamer made a decision to thwart the terrorist plan and retake control of their plane. None of them were pilots, but it seems in their noble defiance that they set that detail aside. Todd organized the others into a rudimentary plan to wage war against the terrorists who were armed with knives and what turned out to be a fake bomb while these heroic men were not armed at all. Todd prayed Psalm 23 aloud, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for Thou art with me with Thy rod and Thy staff that give me courage.” “OK. Let’s roll,” he said. Over the next seven minutes, the flight recorder caught the sound of intense struggle as the four men fought the terrorists and crashed their way through the cockpit door. Flight 93, intended to be used as a weapon to kill everyone aboard and hundreds more in Washington was crashed into the ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

It took a few days for that day to be accurately pieced together. So this is posted on the twentieth anniversary of their heroism. Todd Beamer and his comrades set their survival aside to save the lives of unknown hundreds.

The following is an account of that day that I first wrote on its tenth anniversary. It is told from a most unusual perspective, and I have rewritten it on this twentieth anniversary of 9/11. Please share it in honor of Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett and the passengers of Flight 93, the only flight to be denied its intended target that day.

In memory of Todd Beamer

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I was ten years old on November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas. Fifty-eight years later, every detail of what I was doing as the news unfolded on that infamous day remains vividly engraved in my mind’s eye. That day and the days of infamy to follow play in my mind like videos I’ve seen a thousand times.

Every generation seems to have these “imprinted” events, some more catastrophic than others. The generation just behind mine remembers what they were doing when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Others a bit younger than me remember the great Northeast Blackout of 1965, and the 1968 assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King.

September 11, 2001 was like all of those days combined. Whenever I ask anyone about it, I get an account not only of the terror, but also of the normal activities of a day underway for those who witnessed it. It seems the closer to Ground Zero we were — emotionally or physically — the more vivid the imprinted memories of these events.

For me, the losses of that day were compounded by prison in ways difficult to explain. One of the most troubling events in the aftermath of what has become universally known simply as “9/11” came about six months later.

A weekly Catholic newspaper had published an article on prisons, and the folly of a system in which punishment alone prevails at the expense of rehabilitation. One letter to the editor in response was from the wife of a prison guard. She wanted to set the public straight that prisoners are a vile bunch and most defy rehabilitation. Her most vivid example was a claim that prisoners all over the country cheered for the terrorists on 9/11.

It was the sort of thing I hear often quoted by prison staff, especially at contract time. Prisons and prisoners are portrayed as inhuman and dangerous with most prison staff taking their lives in their hands every day they go to work. In twenty-seven years in prison, this has not been my experience with the vast majority of prisoners. And, the prison guard’s wife’s account notwithstanding, it certainly wasn’t my experience in prison on 9/11.

It is true that there are dangerous men in prison. Some are sociopaths; some are seriously mentally ill; some are just evil in their very core; but all combined they constitute a small minority of the one-size-fits-all prison environment. In my experience, twenty percent of prisoners should never leave prison if public safety is any consideration. Many of them don’t even want to leave. Their attitudes and behaviors are largely shaped by forces within them that allow no consideration for others.

Their sheer numbers and impact are dwarfed, however, by the eighty percent of prisoners who have but a singular goal: to atone for their mistakes, and to rejoin their families and communities as responsible and contributing members of society. Prisons are designed, built, and managed to contain the former group, however, and everyone else pays a price for that.

The biggest price prisoners had to pay in the wake of the terrorist attacks is having to live with the popular notion that most prisoners sided with the 9/11 terrorists, and would terrorize you themselves if given half a chance. Perhaps the best evidence against this notion was the true reaction of prisoners to the events of September 11, 2001.

Pearl Harbor in Manhattan

It was a Tuesday morning that began like any other. In this prison, every cell is at least “double bunked,” meaning that everyone has at least one roommate, and sometimes as many as seven. After nearly six years in an eight-man cell, I was moved just a year earlier to a prison unit with but two per cell. After years spent in the crucible of the prison’s “inner city,” it was like a move to the relative calm of the suburbs.

On September 11,2001, my roommate was Bob, a 37-year-old prisoner who is now long since a free man. With cups of instant coffee in hand that morning, Bob and I both stood for the day’s first prisoner count at 0730. After the count, Bob took his coffee to a table outside the cell while I prayed morning prayer from my breviary. Like most prison roomates forced to survive in a tiny space, Bob and I fell into a routine we could live with after a few months. Bob didn’t have a job in the prison — there are far more prisoners than available jobs — and I worked on the afternoon shift — back then in the prison programs office. So it became a sort of unspoken routine that Bob had some solitude every afternoon while I worked, and I had some space in the mornings to pray and write. Before either of us was moved to that cell, solitude was unheard of. Most people don’t really value solitude until they lose it.

After the count, I reached over to turn on the morning news on my small television. It was 8:48 AM. Both CNN and FOX had the same silent image on the screen: smoke pouring from a giant gash in the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Our TVs have no speakers so I reached for my headphones, then heard the fluttering voice of a commentator in a helicopter hovering nearby:

“We are just currently getting a look at the World Trade Center. Something has happened here . . . flames and an awful lot of smoke from one of the towers . . . This is easily three quarters of the way up . . . whatever has occurred has just occurred, within minutes . . . We’ll keep you posted.”

I tuned in just two minutes after some sort of plane struck the building. The camera cut to a more distant scene. “Wow, that’s a lot of smoke,” I thought. “Hey Bobby,” I called, “take a look at this.” Bob stepped back into the cell from reading his Stephen King book at a table just outside. “Look at this,” I said again, as I angled my small TV for Bob to see. Bob grew up in New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The scene on my screen — minus the smoke and flames — was one he had seen a thousand times.

Bob stared at the screen, and asked me what happened. The news commentators were just then saying that a plane flew into the North Tower. Commercial passenger jets would never be in the air space above Manhattan, so we both assumed this was a small, private plane that veered badly off course. Then I saw a close-up of the gash in the building. It seemed awfully big for a small plane to have caused it.

The news would only slowly unfold, and when it did, it was devastating. At 7:59 AM, American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Logan International Airport in Boston, bound for Los Angeles. It had a two-man flight crew, nine flight attendants, and 81 passengers — five of whom were al Qaeda terrorists armed with pepper spray and box cutters.

No one outside that plane knew what was happening when at 8:14 AM an air traffic controller’s instruction to climb to 35,000 feet went unanswered. No one knew that Mohamed Atta and four other terrorists had already stabbed two flight attendants and a passenger, and used pepper spray and the threat of a ficticious on-board bomb to subdue the rest.

The plane turned due south. Twelve minutes later, it began a rapid descent toward South Manhattan. At 8:46 AM, it flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center killing all 92 passengers and crew on board, and many others inside that building.

Oblivious to all of this from my vantage point, fourteen minutes passed as the CNN commentators pondered what sort of plane it might have been. Bob and I were riveted to the screen, feeling rather than seeing the lights slowly go on in our awareness. This wasn’t an accident.

Then at exactly 9:02, I spotted another plane. From CNN’s camera angle, it seemed to drift casually into view. The CNN commentator seemed not to notice it as she droned on about the North Tower. What was clearly a commercial airlines jet swept into the scene. I pointed to it on the screen, and said loudly “This shouldn’t be there.” I heard Bob whisper, “I know” when the plane disappeared behind the South Tower followed by an immense fireball exploding through the other side. “It’s an attack,” I said. “It’s a terrorist attack!”

It took some time for the story to unfold. Just one minute before American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Boston, United Airlines Flight 175 also departed Logan Airport bound for Los Angeles on another runway. It carried nine crew members and 56 passengers, five of them al Qaeda terrorists about to hijack that plane. Both planes were Boeing 767s.

At 8:51 AM, United 175 deviated from its flight path and New York air traffic controllers learned they could not contact its crew. At 8:58, it veered toward Manhattan. Four minutes later, I and thousands of other viewers spotted it on CNN’s live TV feed. I remember a split second of denial — perhaps the last moment of ignorant bliss this nation has seen — as that plane disappeared behind the South Tower and out of view. Then at 9:02 its enormous fireball emerged from half way up the building, and brought reality back home again.

Within moments, my cell was filled with people. Silent men in forest green prison uniforms, young, middle aged, and old, all staring at me. They knew that I had just seen what they saw, and none of them wanted to see any more of it alone. Then there were several guards, and it dawned on me for the first time that prisoners have televisions while prison guards do not — at least not while they are at work. “What’s happening?” they wanted to know. In they squeezed to stare at my screen.

Everyone standing in my doorway and crowded into my cell hoped against hope to hear the same thing. That this was some bizarre accident that could likely never happen again. Instead, I looked up and said, “This is a terrorist attack, and it isn’t over. Hundreds of people have just been killed, and those buildings are filled with people. This is going to be the worst disaster our country has ever seen. The world we knew just changed.”

I felt a little as though I was in that long remembered scene from childhood as Walter Cronkite explained what just happened in Dallas that November 22nd when I was ten. On this September day, you could hear a pin drop as I recounted to others in my cell the events of that morning and repeated what was known up to that moment. It came as a shock to realize that less than thirty minutes had passed since I closed my breviary and reached for my TV’s ON button.

And it was true that there was more coming. It would be awhile before we learned that at 8:20 AM, American Airlines Flight 77 departed Washington’s Dulles Airport, also bound for Los Angeles. It was a Boeing 757 with six crew and 58 passengers. Five of them were al Qaeda terrorists. At 8:54 AM its transponder beacon was deactivated.

At 9:37 AM, exactly 35 minutes after the South Tower was struck in Lower Manhattan, American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the west side of the Pentagon between corridors four and five, piercing the E, D, and C Rings and entering the B Ring. All 64 people aboard the plane, and many inside the Pentagon itself, were killed instantly.

I suddenly became aware of a transformation among the people crowded into my small cell. There were no longer prisoners and prison guards. There were only men in the face of an alarming new enemy and a common resolve.

Just four minutes before that first Boeing 767 struck the North Tower in Manhattan, United Airlines Flight 93 bound for San Francisco departed Newark Airport. It carried seven flight crew and 37 passengers. Five of them were al Qaeda terrorists. Cell phone calls to family members of the passengers wove together a chilling account of how passengers became aware of the other attacks, and then confronted the terrorists aboard their own flight, now heading for a selected target in Washington, DC. In the ensuing, heroic struggle between the passengers and the terrorists, United Flight 93 slammed into the ground at 10:02 AM in a field in Shanksville, PA, 20 minutes out from Washington. We could only imagine ourselves aboard that plane, and, in fact, many prisoners wished they were.

Then in Manhattan, the Twin Towers collapsed. The knowledge that hundreds of police, fire fighters, EMTs and rescue workers, there to help only to be crushed to death, caused both prisoners and guards to turn from my television and place their faces in their hands. America was under siege, and we were men. We could see it only from a distance, and we were powerless to answer.

The mood in prison throughout that day and in the days to follow was eerily somber. It was one characterized first and foremost by shame — the shame of being in prison at a time when families needed the comfort of their fathers, their husbands, their brothers, their sons; the shame of being detained while their country was being attacked.

In the days, weeks, and months to follow, the prisoners I knew would have given anything to go to help sort through rubble at Ground Zero, to clear out debris from the Pentagon, or to kneel in prayer at Shanksville, PA. As the very notion of freedom and an open society were under attack, the least of the free longed for a chance, any chance, to serve, to protect, to make amends.

I, for one, took this very personally. I grew up in sight of Logan Airport in Boston from where some of these flights were hijacked. This began at home — my home, our home, while our backs were turned. As the news unfolded that this was the work not of a hostile government, or some organized crime cartel, but rather the actions of religious believers waging jihad — holy war — against us, we had no category for it; no terms of understanding with which to make sense of it.

And then within weeks of 9/11, for Catholics, at least, revelations of a jihad of another sort roared out of Boston and spread across the U.S. News of decades-old abuses — some of them unspeakable, but some of them also untrue — were repackaged by the news media for eyes already clouded with suspicion for the religious terrorists in our midst.

Two decades have passed, and we still struggle with trading civil liberties for security, due process rights for safety in a free society edging toward becoming less so. To our nation’s credit, we have declared our unwillingness to blame all of Islam for the crimes of its twisted and radical few. But while refusing to allow Islam to be reflected in the acts of its lunatic fringe, we’ve tolerated — even cultivated — a virulent anti-Catholicism that holds the Church in contempt for not acting in 1965 as it would in 2005.

If America truly believes that the answer to jihad is to abandon our own faith, and our fidelity as Catholics, then the war is over. The 9/11 terrorists have already won.

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