Ten years is a long time, long enough for memories of loved ones to fade in the minds of those who were young children when tragedy struck — even for a tragedy with the magnitude of the 9/11 attacks.
The pain of loss persists, of course, for anyone much older than that, waxing and waning over time but surely intensifying at every anniversary commemoration.
Those are the personal stories, about the impact of the terrorist missions on the people directly linked to Ground Zero at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and to the Pennsylvania crash site of the fourth jet commandeered by al-Qaida suicide pilots.
The larger truth, of course, is that 9/11 changed reality for every American, even those of us in the middle of the Pacific. And 10 years has not been long enough for America to properly regain its footing.
The attacks put an end to a kind of national naivete about a terrorist’s reach, an insularity that the U.S. should have discarded long ago. Reverberations from political and military conflicts around the globe can be felt anywhere.
The search for the right course correction has been costly in lives and national treasure, and we still don’t have the right balance. The principal error of the past decade was the conviction that countering terrorism demanded a largely military response.
That was the mistake of the Bush administration, which first ineffectually pursued al-Qaida in Afghanistan and then invaded Iraq to compel a regime change that is still struggling to take root. It amounts to adventurism in a region where political and cultural complexities are impossible to untangle.
The Obama administration has placed its bets instead on partnering with Afghan’s central government and escalating the war against the Taliban there. History will prove whether that surge can ultimately result in greater regional stability, or whether insurgents in neighboring Pakistan will undo all of those efforts.
What we do know is that thousands of people, Afghan and American, have given their lives to this murky mission.
On the home front, everyone’s lives have been touched by the quest for security. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has over time learned that surveillance against terrorism works better if the separate silos of government intelligence can share data: It really does matter that the right hand knows what the left is doing.
The reliance of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration on technological solutions was perhaps understandable: Scanners are expensive and are found by many to be intrusive, but most would prefer having that tool in place than to have nothing while more sophisticated investigative practices are being honed as complements.
That said, most would acknowledge that the TSA has still not found the right balance, and that travel is still excessively intrusive. How much added security we gain through that sacrifice is unclear at best.
The hope for the future is that we can adopt protocols that rely more on intelligence than on the fear that the heavy hand imposes on citizens. And we hope that military strategies, although always part of the foreignpolicy mix, will increasingly take a back seat to diplomacy. If it’s the tool of first resort, as the post-9/11 era has shown, the unanticipated consequences are disastrous.
In the days and weeks leading up today’s somber memorial, many Americans have wondered what life might have been like had 9/11 never happened.
That can be a fascinating discussion, but it’s academic.
What matters is where we all go from here, because clearly this is a journey that stretches ahead far longer than a single decade.
