"Twenty-five years ago, the United States suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. The September 11, 2001, attacks killed nearly three thousand people and inflicted a collective trauma on an entire nation, fundamentally altering the US national security apparatus, ushering in the "war on terror," and leading to overhauls of US intelligence and homeland security. But the core problem of terrorism itself—which has existed for centuries—didn't go away.
As the world reflects on the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, we asked Atlantic Council experts to answer twenty-five pressing questions about how terrorism continues to shape the present era.
The answer resists a simple yes or no, and for good reason. Counterterrorism ought to be conducted with grand-strategic discipline, which requires one thing the United States has so far not produced: a stated theory of victory. Twenty-five years after 9/11, no administration has told the American public what the end of this effort looks like or what conditions would permit it to close. "Disrupt, dismantle, and defeat," which US President Barack Obama presented early in his first term, is a task list. The 2001 authorization for the use of military force was stretched across two decades and multiple continents without much congressional pushback. Over those same years, nonstate actors and their state sponsors pushed aggressively into high-tech domains, where cyber operations, artificial intelligence (AI), and cryptocurrency financing now grant asymmetric threats a global reach that the al-Qaeda of 2001 could scarcely have imagined…"
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The Assessment Gap in U.S. Counter-Terrorism Strikes
"For eight years I helped decide whether American counter-terrorism money was working.
As a programs advisor in the State Department's Bureau of Counterterrorism from 2018 to 2025, I oversaw about 20 projects in East Africa worth roughly $80 USD million a year. None of that money moved without a performance monitoring plan. We established baselines before work started and agreed on indicators in advance. When a project underperformed, or the reporting came late, we withheld funding. Reporting tracked activities against those metrics across the life of the program. Independent evaluations validated what implementers said they had done.
That machinery was not the bureau's idea. In 2014, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing titled "The State Department's Counterterrorism Bureau: Budget, Programs, and Evaluation," pressing the Coordinator for Counterterrorism on whether the bureau could show what its spending achieved. The following year, the Foreign Affairs Manual codified the Office of Programs and charged it with monitoring and evaluating what the bureau funded. That is the office I worked in.
Nor was it self-administered. In 2020, the State Department's Office of Inspector General inspected the bureau's foreign assistance and found that counter-terrorism was not complying with department standards for monitoring and evaluation. The inspection issued a numbered recommendation, published the bureau's response, and held it open until the bureau produced documentation. Inspectors found one employee serving as grant or agreement officer representative for 86 projects worth almost $147 USD million, a span of control they flagged as beyond what the bureau could properly oversee. The assistance side failed the standard, too. The difference is that somebody wrote it down…"
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Armand
