Terrorists of 9/11 achieved far more than that one day of destruction

American foreign policy went seriously out of whack as a result of its need to yield to the near universal misunderstanding of the causes and consequences of the 9/11 attack. Of course, this was a terrible event and the shock and anger that resulted were totally understandable. But the long term, consequential changes in American foreign and domestic policy have frequently been misdirected and have caused problems potentially as serious as 9/11 itself.

The terrorists' goal was to design an attack not only of immediate shock and horrendous injury but to damage America far beyond the costs of the immediate calamity while exalting the leadership role of Osama bin Laden. Ironically, the American reaction has served the goals of the 9/11 perpetrators to the full. The horrendous, long-term, domestic monetary costs are a story for another day. The negative shift in American attitudes toward Muslims, the crowning of bin Laden as the leader of a radical Islamic world and America's consequent, botched foreign policies is a sufficient topic.

A panicked U.S. response came styled as a war against "terrorism." Terrorism is not an entity but a style of warfare that has been used for centuries. It will not disappear in any foreseeable future; thus, our war is the Endless War. This war's first foreign policy step was an unnecessary war against Afghanistan. It arose because Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of Afghanistan's majority Pashtun language group, had given camping rights in a remote section of Afghanistan to Osama bin Laden, the estranged son of a Saudi billionaire. Bin Laden was the leader and founder of a small subsect of Sufists, originally homed around him personally at his Afghanistan address. Sufists, dominant in Saudi Arabia, are in turn a subsect of Sunnis, in turn one of two conflicting divisions of Islam. Sunnis, dominant in Arab countries, are spread across south Asia, including Iran, Pakistan and India to Indonesia, and have many different customs and practices.

[We're still arguing about the national meaning of 9/11]

Bin Laden was not the leader of "Islamist" terrorism. He was no more a leader of the Islamic world than Rick Perry, whose "Dominionism" sect holds that Christians should dominate the Earth, is the true leader of all Christianity. Islam is divided and subdivided into many subsets. That there is no pope or ultimate human source of valid belief is a core principle. Anybody can make their own interpretation of the Quran.

Adopting al-Qaida as the name of his group, bin Laden, a psychiatric case, brought terror to the United States for daring to intrude on his native country, Saudi Arabia. The American relationship kept American military and oil people in the holy land, the vicinity of Mecca, in his view an unforgivable sacrilege.

Omar shared a contested control over the area we call Afghanistan with a variety of ethnic groups, some enveloping its northern border with Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Omar was not a terrorist but accommodated bin Laden, a fellow Muslim, whom he thought he had a religious duty to protect.  Understandably enraged, the United States not only went after the al-Qaida group but made "war" on Omar, the opening drive of our Endless War, for having given bin Laden room.

At the time, some in America urged that having smothered bin Laden's camp (a bit late) with bombs and recognizing his continuing threat to America, all that was further necessary was to give Omar a good whack to signal to everybody in the vicinity that giving harbor to the likes of bin Laden would bring down America's wrath. But no, we went full-out to war against Afghanistan, attempting a full occupancy, as Imperial England had once tried, believing that by doing so we would eliminate the site of threats to the U.S. (Good luck on that one.)

[9/11 at 15: Safer at home, but jihadist threat is greater abroad]

Bush II and the neocons reenter. Prior to 9/11, faking a nuclear threat, they had us invade Iraq to "finish the job" that his father had done in kicking Saddam Hussein's invading Iraqis out of Kuwait. All now agree that Bush II's war was a colossal mistake (starting with their real motives) compounded by a botched occupancy following the successful drive on Baghdad. Saddam Hussein, a secular Sunni Muslim, ran a country in which his Sunnis wielded iron control over a Shia Muslim majority.

We are big for democracy, right?  So, having conquered Iraq, we invited the Shia to take control of the government. Hussein's Iraq had recently finished a bloody war with Shia Iran in which we had covertly supported Hussein. So how happy are the discharged Sunni army veterans who now find their country ruled by the enemy? So the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi military vets, in tatters but with lots of combat experience, flee to the west, towards the Syrian border, and are easily persuaded in that region to start a new country.  A new country requires a religious justification so it is the "Caliphate" promised somewhere in the Quran like Christianity's "City on a Hill."

Meanwhile, bin Laden, our real enemy, has escaped to the east from Afghanistan. He finds home in the Afghan border country with Pakistan, our nuclear-powered ally, where he lays plans to expand his organization into the political chaos of North Africa. We kill him, but his organization goes on, supported, according to unrevealed but obvious intelligence, by rich sympathizers in Saudi Arabia who still want Americans to be gone from the whole Middle East.

Bin Laden's secondary goal remains a great success. This oil billionaire's fanatic son and the organization he invented, aided by the American press, is now considered in America to be the historic leader of "radical Islam," the front edge of the "Muslim civilization."

It is true that from Indonesia and India where most Muslims live, the United States is generally viewed, with some hostility, as an imperial power (wonder why?), but with rare exceptions they like Americans. Terrorism is hated everywhere among ordinary people.

Along the way, a retired Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, delivered a "Clash of Civilizations."

Know the title and you don't need to read the book for its thesis. In an ultimate war of civilizations, no holds are barred. Bin Laden and his kin and American neocons share a common perspective. It is the last viewpoint we want as a guide to American foreign policy.

John Havelock is a former Alaska attorney general and former White House fellow. He lives in Anchorage.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com or click here to submit via any web browser.