The world was a dangerous place on September 11, 2001, and is now even more so. Freedom is shaken by terrorism, and terrorism neither fears nor respects complacent joy.
Eleanor Hodgman Porter was born in Littleton, New Hampshire, in 1868. She wrote several novels with little notice, but at the start of World War One, she wrote a blockbuster, Pollyanna. It became a worldwide bestseller that commonly came to be known as the Glad Book. It sparked a cultural phenomenon. It was about a girl, Pollyanna, whose ebullient personality met every evil and setback with a sense of glee and giddy happiness.
In the dismal years after World War I, “Glad Clubs” were inspired by it to reprogram young people into a perpetually happy state of mind no matter what ill confronted them. By the start of World War II, according to one reviewer, readers tired of Pollyanna’s laughing ‘hysterically,’ breathing ‘rapturously,’ and smiling ‘eagerly’ in the face of grave concern.
Thanks to Fr Gordon J. MacRae for this contribution – Send yours to steve@granitegrok.com
I watched much of the recent Democratic National Convention and was intrigued by it. I thought of Pollyanna all the way through it. It struck me as a half-time show in a Super Bowl game which had no connection to the battle at hand except to entertain. A state of perpetual joy cannot possibly reflect the realities of the dangerous world in which we live. Pollyanna and the Glad Book have mercifully vanished from our culture.
At Christmas in 1985, a young parishioner gifted me with a copy of Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October. I was put off by its sheer volume and had no time to read it then. So I stuck it on a shelf in my parish office where it remained for months. Every time I saw the high school kid who gave it to me he asked me if I had read it yet. “You have to,” the young prophet insisted.
Then I read that President Ronald Reagan was reading that same book and described it as “unputdownable.” Many years and thousands of pages of Tom Clancy novels later, I wrote a tribute to the book and its author on the occasion of his untimely death in 2013. It was “Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October.”
Most of my reading is done — even now — at the end of a busy day while lying flat on my back in bed with a book light. At this writing, nearly four decades after that first Clancy novel, I have devoured some 17,000 pages of his techno-thriller in the widely acclaimed “Jack Ryan” series. As time went on they got ever longer and more detailed, but I found each to be fascinating.
Clancy did a lot of research to bring realism to his novels. At times he would introduce a high tech fighter jet, for example, and devote 20 pages analyzing its technology. That drove some readers away, but it was what I loved most about his books. I made the big mistake once of referring to Clancy’s novels as “guy books.” Whoa, did I ever receive a thrashing from his many “non-guy” readers!
In 1994, I devoured 900 pages of Debt of Honor, Clancy’s eighth novel in the series. More than once, the big hardcover nearly broke my nose as I would read in bed until I could stay awake no longer. Then I would drop the book on my face.
By then, Jack Ryan had progressed through a distinguished and exciting career in the Central Intelligence Agency as a brilliant analyst and eventually as National Security Advisor. The riveting Debt of Honor ended with a spellbinding scene in Washington, DC as a Korean Airlines passenger jet was hijacked by Middle Eastern terrorists and flown at high speed by suicide bombers into the United States Capitol Building during a joint session of Congress wiping out most of the sitting U.S. government just as a new president was being sworn in.
History Repeats
Seven years later, on September 11, 2001, I relived that same scene with an intense sensation of déjà vu. Right before my eyes on national television, I watched live as the terrorist assault that came to be referred to simply as “9/11” unfolded before a shocked and unprepared free world. My first thought was to wonder whether the Clancy novel might have sparked such a framework of real terror into the minds of al Qaeda, but there was no such connection. I wrote of that day, its aftermath, and its challenges for the free world in “The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising.”
Twenty-three years have now passed since that day, but everyone who was alive then and at or near the age of reason remembers it vividly. It became one of those iconic events of history in which everyone recalls not only the terror but also a clear snapshot of where we were and what we were doing as that event unfolded. Tom Clancy instilled in me a high regard for history as a lens to the present. I have since digested 23 of Tom Clancy’s novels about foreign policy, its impact on history, or history’s impact on it.
It was a sequel to The Hunt for Red October that first drew me to the necessity of seeing the present with eyes that have gazed upon the past. September 11, 2001, did not happen in a vacuum. Clancy’s sequel, Cardinal of the Kremlin (Putnam, 1988) opened my eyes about Afghanistan. It was set toward the end of the Soviet Union’s decade-long occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 and the struggle of the Afghan people to be rid of that occupying force. The Taliban were never mentioned there, nor were al Qaeda, Islamic State, or ISIS-K. None of them existed yet, but the seeds of all of them were firmly planted and flourishing in Afghanistan as a result of that decade and all that followed. It is important to know this.
On Christmas Day, 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. They quickly won control of the capital, Kabul, and other important cities. The Soviets executed the Afghan political leader and installed in his place a puppet government led by a faction more amenable to Soviet control. Wide rejection of that government by the Afghan people led to civil war. A Saudi Arabian multimillionaire named Osama bin Laden established a training camp in the mountains of Afghanistan for rebels fighting the Soviet forces.
The 1980s also saw increased friction between the United States and the Soviet Union resulting from the 1979 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, greatly increased American military capabilities. The Soviets viewed him as a formidable foe committed to subverting the Soviet system. In his 1985 State of the Union address, President Reagan called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire” and vowed to root out and destroy any political movements that supported it.
In the mid-l980s, resistance to the Communist government and the Soviet invaders grew throughout Afghanistan. Some ninety regions in the country were commanded by guerrilla leaders who called themselves “mujahideen,” meaning “Muslim holy warriors.” The mujahideen resented the Soviet presence and its puppet government. By the mid-1980s, the U.S. was spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to aid these Afghan rebels based in Pakistan in a war to expel the Soviet occupation, which took the lives of some 1.3 million Afghanis in their struggle.
Then, in 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, leaving in their wake a leadership vacuum in a country wracked by civil war. From a distance over the decade to follow, the United States continued to provide funds and weapons to the mujahideen rebels. Afghanistan was now without solidifying leadership, and nature abhors a vacuum.
The Taliban
From the rubble of war, chaos, and a rudderless nation, the Taliban were born. The Taliban movement was created in 1994 in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar by Mohammed Omar, a senior Muslim cleric (called a mullah). The name “Taliban” simply means “student.” It refers to the movement’s roots in the fundamentalist Islamic religious schools in Pakistan. For many youth in this war-torn nation, religious indoctrination was the only education they received.
Even that limited education was available only to young men. As the Taliban rose to power in 1994, imposing strict Islamic fundamentalism on the nation, secondary schools for girls were closed, and girls were barred from receiving any education beyond a grade school level. Music and dancing were banned outright. Public works of art were destroyed. I once wrote in these pages of an infamous example. In 2001, just as Osama bin Laden was deep into a plot against the United States, the Taliban drew attention away by blowing up a 180-foot stone statue of Buddha that had been carved into an Afghan mountainside 1500 years earlier.
Many of the Taliban laws alarmed human rights groups and provoked worldwide condemnation. The Taliban strictly enforced ancient customs of purdah, the forced separation of men and women in public. Men were required to grow full beards. Those who did not comply or could not were subjected to public beatings. Women were required to be covered entirely from head to toe in burkas while in public view. Those who violated this were often beaten or executed on the spot by Taliban religious police. Women were also forbidden from working outside the home. With thousands of men lost to war, many widows and orphans lived in dire poverty.
As the Taliban movement grew in size and strength, it recruited heavily from the mujahideen, the anti-Soviet freedom fighters who were funded and armed in part by the United States. The Taliban gave a new national identity to the thousands of war orphans who were educated in only two fields of study: strict fundamentalist Islamic interpretation of the Quran and war. The young men of Afghanistan became radicalized.
The Rise of Al Qaeda
Most other countries did not recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government, thus further isolating Afghanistan and its people from oversight and connection in the world community. From their pinnacle of power, the Taliban provided safe harbor to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, formed in 1980s Afghanistan to help repel the Soviet invasion and incite a global holy war called, in Arabic, a jihad. The term al Qaeda is Arabic for “base camp.” For its founder and adherents, it would become the base from which worldwide Islamic revolution and domination would be launched. We entered Afghanistan after 9/11 for that reason. It had become the host and incubator for terrorist actions against the United States. When we withdrew suddenly in 2021, we left behind that incubator, still festering with hatred from Islamic extremists.
Over the course of the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda trained, equipped, and financed 50,000 mujahideen warriors from 50 countries. Saudi Arabian nationals comprised more than fifty percent of the recruits. Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam motivated many young men to come to the defense of Afghanistan and the Muslim world against Western “infidel” influences.
When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Osama bin Laden returned to his original goal for al Qaeda: to overthrow Muslim or Arab regimes that he considered too weak and tolerant of Western influence. Bin Laden envisioned replacing these regimes with a single Muslim empire organized around Islamic “Sharia” law. He targeted the United States and other Western nations because he saw them as obstacles to his cause by becoming political allies with Muslim nations he considered to be corrupt.
From 1991 to 1996, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, bin Laden quietly built al Qaeda into a formidable international terrorist network with cells and operations in 45 countries. Training camps were established in Sudan, and by 1992, most of al Qaeda’s operations were relocated there. From that base, attacks on U.S. troops and U.S. interests were launched in Yemen and Somalia and at a joint U.S.-Saudi military training base in Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was especially angered by the mere existence of that base.
Bowing to pressure from the Saudi and U.S. governments, al Qaeda and bin Laden were expelled from Sudan in 1996 and returned to Afghanistan, where they were free to plot. He formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Taliban while plans for a direct assault on the United States took shape. The September 11, 2001 attacks, which killed over 3,000 Americans on U.S. soil, thus came together while the world was not watching.
In response, the United States declared war on terrorism, the first declaration of war against a concept instead of a country. While Taliban leaders rejected U.S. demands to surrender bin Laden, the U.S. began aerial bombings of terrorist training camps and Taliban military positions in October, 2001. Ground troops of the Northern Rebel Alliance in Afghanistan rebelled and maintained a front-line offensive against Taliban forces with help in the form of funds and weapons from the United States.
Al Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon began on September 11, but it was not September 11, 2001. This is where failures of national intelligence and readiness are crucial factors. The September 11 date for terrorist assaults on the United States was not random. For extremists in the Muslim world, the next day, September 12, was a day of infamy, a day of reckoning for a 17th-century Islamic assault on Europe.
The Muslim command captured and slaughtered 30,000 hostages. This caused Polish King Jan Sobieski to meet the assault with the largest volunteer infantry army ever assembled. The Muslim push for control of Eastern Europe was stopped in its tracks on September 12, 1683. What we call 9/11 was the result of an Islamic grudge held for over 300 years.
Jesus said (Luke 10:3), “Go your way; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves.” Lambs in the midst of wolves are ever vigilant, and they count on a shepherd who will not lead them into slaughter. The last four years have seen a disastrous policy that left the U.S. southern border open with little oversight. I would want my country to welcome refugees and care for them. That is clearly called for in the Gospel. But among the nearly 11 million who have crossed that border undetected are al Qaeda and ISIS-K operatives lying in wait to unleash their terror upon the United States. In a world at the cusp of war, the threats have never been more dire.
As much as we might like Pollyanna and revel in her smile, are we really prepared to make her Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces?
