THIS is with reference to the editorial ‘After Sept 11’ (Sept 11) marking the passage of a quarter of a century since the infamous 9/11 attacks. It was a mass murder, deliberate and calculated, and nothing justifies it. Understanding the attacks, however, is not about excusing them; it is about preventing a repeat. The 9/11 Commission’s central finding was blunt: the biggest failure was one of imagination, a system built to deter the Soviet Union had not changed to counter a decentralised enemy. Some signals were missed in plain sight. The security agencies knew by early 2000 that hijackers were inside the country, but that was not shared.
The ‘wall’ separating foreign intelligence from domestic law-enforcement existed for a real reason, protecting civil liberties, even as it slowed the response. Airport security was built for a different era’s threats, not suicide attacks launched from within. This represented the growing pains of a superpower shifting from one kind of vigilance to another, learned at an unfortunate price.
Having said that, 9/11 is also what the United States did with its grief: investi-gating itself without flinching, rebuilding Lower Manhattan taller, creating the Department of Homeland Security and the Directorate of National Intelligence to close the exposed gaps. Remembering fully, learning honestly and never letting terror win. This is what the US did.
There is an uncomfortable symmetry in writing all this from where Pakistan now stands. In 2001, Pakistan was America’s frontline partner in the war against terrorism. Today, it is terrorism’s principal victim. Pakistan has already topped the Global Terrorism Index for the first time, recording 1,139 terrorism-related deaths in 2025, the highest since 2013.
Other trackers have shown combat-related deaths rising 73 per cent to 3,387, the deadliest year for security forces since 2011 and for civilians since 2015. It was the sixth consecutive year of rising terrorism deaths.
The Afghan Taliban’s 2021 return to power gave the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) the means and motivation to expand dramatically, alongside rising violence from the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA). Islamabad treated its neighbour’s takeover as a strategic gain. It was, in real terms, an intelligence failure of the same shape the US made before 2001: a known threat, and assumptions too slow to update.
Where 9/11 exposed separation between intelligence and law-enforcement, the crisis in Pakistan exposes the opposite: overreliance on kinetic solutions over political ones. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan accounted for over 74pc of attacks and 67pc of deaths last year. Hostage victims jumped from 101 in 2024 to 655 in 2025, driven largely by the Jaffar Express attack, where 442 people were seized. It is ample proof that the threat is actually evolving.
No doubt, America’s response to 9/11 was instructive: it investigated itself and built institutions to close real gaps. Pakistan’s honest accounting is overdue. It now sits among the handful of nations where nearly 70pc of all global terrorism deaths occur.
Every one of those 1,139 deaths in 2025 involved someone’s parent, spouse, child: a debt repaid only by naming the gaps precisely, and building the imagination to close them before the next attack; not after.
Lt-Col (retd) Syed Raziuddin
Rawalpindi
Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2026
