I was asleep when the twin towers were hit. I was woken up when the second plane hit the towers. As soon as I heard about it, even though I was half asleep, there was no doubt in my mind it was Osama Bin Laden. I was surprised I even remembered the name since I hadn’t thought of him in so long, but I knew that he in particular had made it his life’s ambition to bring down the twin symbols of American financial dominance with a truck bomb set in the World Trade Center’s garage. Back in 1993, I considered Bin Laden’s success in detonating the device and the failure for it to bring the tower’s down a testament to a lack of education in physics. But by a stroke of luck, Bin Laden and the American-educated merchanical engineer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were escaping their respective countries to Afghanistan at about the same time in mid-1996. The two had fought together in Afghanistan in ’89 but had never had a very close relationship. When Mohammed laid out his plan to Bin Laden, he was asked to join al-Qaida, but Mohammed delayed joining until ’99, when he became sure that bin Laden was committed to the plan.

Although I immediately knew who had attacked the U.S. on 9/11, I had no idea that the country was going to react the way it did. I had to leave for class shortly after the second tower fell, and I drove to class expecting it to be just another day, where I realized it was a much bigger deal than I thought. I didn’t remember the WTC bombing or the attack on the U.S.S. Cole being especially important. I don’t think I even discussed those particular terrorist attacks with my high school friends on the days that they happened. Or maybe I did and I just forgot. I didn’t know about the other two planes or realize how many people had died and how much devastation it had caused. Before I even got to my first class I saw everyone on campus huddled together talking about it. Many students were huddled in a classroom that had a television set and were watching the news.

The news didn’t seem all that informative, so I got on the internet instead and started looking up the history of Osama Bin Laden. I found out that he had carried out an assassination on Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance opposing the Taliban, only two days before the attacks. He had granted an interview with three reporters who detonated a bomb that was hidden in the camera, fatally wounding him. There was no doubt in my mind — this was Bin Laden’s payment to the Taliban for bringing his war to their country.

Massoud was called “the man who won the Cold War in Afghanistan” by the Wall Street Journal and was given the title “Lion of Panjshir.” While at the Europen Parliament in Brussells, he had addressed the United States specifically in Spring of 2001, warning us that should the U.S. not work for peace in Afghanistan and put pressure on Pakistan to cease their support to the Taliban, the problems of Afghanistan would soon become the problems of the U.S. and the world. Declassified Defense Intelligence Agency documents from November 2001 show that Massoud had gained “limited knowledge… regarding the intentions of [al-Qaeda] to perform a terrorist act against the US on a scale larger than the 1998 bombing of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Human Rights Watch cites no human rights crimes or abuses for Massoud’s troops in the period from October 1996 to 2001. Massoud created democratic institutions which were structured into political, health, education and economic committees. Women and girls did not have to wear the Afghan burqa and were allowed to work and to go to school. In at least two known instances Massoud personally intervened against cases of forced marriage. While it was Massoud’s stated conviction that men and women are equal and should enjoy the same rights, he also had to deal with Afghan traditions which he said would need a generation or more to overcome. In his opinion that could only be achieved through education. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the Taliban to the areas of Massoud. There was a huge humanitarian problem because there was not enough to eat for both the existing population and the refugees. In 2001 Massoud and a French journalist described the bitter situation of the refugees and asked for humanitarian help. He was 48 when he was killed and had survived countless assassination attempts since he was 22. Each September, thousands of people flock to his tomb like pilgrims to a holy shrine to commemorate the most celebrated hero of the Afghan resistance.

I was sure that subsequent news investigations into the history of the incident would bring these facts to light. I also thought the study of Islam would become an important tool to understanding our new enemy, just as learning German or Japanese was so essential to defeating our enemies in World War II. Of course what we got instead was another minority just got moved up a couple of notches on the general public’s shit list and politics (along with the word “defense”) essentially became redefined by the adage that “everything changed after 9/11.”

Like everyone else, I supported going to war against al-Qaida in Afghanistan. I also liked the idea of financially supporting the Northern Alliance in their fight against the Taliban since they were acting as allies to al-Qaida, but in my mind the ultimate goal was still defeating al-Qaida, not regime change. However, the Northern Alliance never even entered the American vocabulary. Instead, the U.S. put everything into democratic elections that brought about Hamid Karzai, who the U.S. maintains a frayed relationship with despite the fact that we are ostensibly “at war” with his brother, Afghanistan’s Poppy kingpin, with in our continued War on Drugs, and the fact that Karzai stole the last election. Today, even Northern Alliance members who profited mightily in the land grabs and cash giveaways that followed the American invasion have signaled resistance to Mr. Karzai’s efforts to negotiate a peace settlement with the Taliban.

Looking back 10 years now, I can only think that we reacted exactly the way Bin Laden wanted us to react. Senior al-Qaida member Said al-Adel summarized “Al Quaeda’s Strategy to the Year 2020” in 5 steps:

1) Provoke the United States into invading a Muslim country.

2) Incite local resistance to occupying forces.

3) Expand the conflict to neighboring countries, and engage the U.S. in a long war of attrition.

4) Convert Al-Qaeda into an ideology and set of operating principles that can be loosely franchised in other countries without requiring direct command and control, and via these franchises incite attacks against countries allied with the U.S. until they withdraw from the conflict, as happened with the 2004 Madrid train bombings, but which did not have the same effect with the 2005 London bombings.

5) The U.S. economy will finally collapse under the strain of too many engagements in too many places, similarly to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Arab regimes supported by the U.S. will collapse, and a Wahhabi Caliphate will be installed across the region.

This is exactly what al-Qaida did, very successfully thanks to our help. When the U.S. declared war on al-Qaida, they were a tiny backwater band of militants that had no influence on the rest of the Islamic world. Today they are massive world franchise whose derivative controls large portions of Iraq and Syria. That did not happen despite the most powerful military in the world ten times over declared war on them but because of it. Although they didn’t plan for us to attack Iraq, when we did, they were able to open up a franchise there (“So what?” responded Bush). By winning political support using “strong on terrorism” campaigns, Republicans ensured ever more expensive military expansions while at the same time enacting unprecidented wartime budget-busting tax cuts, all while cloaking themselves under the mantle of “not criticizing the president during a time of war,” a concept which immediately dismissed as soon as a Democrat was elected.

Where 9/11 unified the country, Iraq divided the country and the world in a way not seen since Vietnam. Strangely, the 2008 election was fought by two centrists, Obama and McCain, yet the backlash against Obama’s election has caused both of them to make a far-right shift. Despite the fact that Obama was essentially elected on anti-war, anti-Wall Street sentiments, the elected president has shown himself to be neither. Indefinite detention, targeted killings and military trials are still core elements of our national security strategy and the top lawyer and 34-year-veteran of the CIA, John Rizzo, explained to PBS’ Frontline that Obama has “changed virtually nothing” from Bush policies in these areas. America’s favorability rating with the Middle East skyrocketed when Obama was elected president, but after advancing not-so-secret wars in Pakistan and Yemen, views of America in the Arab world are now lower than they were during the Bush era.

We still view the world as if we need to change it rather than ourselves in order to be safe from terrorism. Ten years of nonstop fighting should have taught us that the best way to have dealt with 9/11 was to ensure that the people who booked flights actually compare the manifest to known terrorists (something that we should have been doing from the start) and to keep the pilot’s door locked regardless of what terrorists on the plane threaten to do. Despite the high numbers of deaths on 9/11, a lot more people died in car accidents and similarly boring situations that do not involve wars being declared. You are more likely to be killed by a lightning bolt than a terrorist attack, yet even in our new age of austerity, politics is still defined by this irrational fear. The attack on 9/11 is often compared to the attack on Pearl Harbor in that it “woke the sleeping giant” and brought the United States away from it’s isolationist leanings. My hope is that we not just put 9/11 behind us, but “go back to sleep” and forget it entirely, because everything we “learned” that day has done nothing but put us down the road of moral and financial destruction that we now find ourselves on.