‘Never Forget’ becomes ‘Never Remember’

On Sept. 11, 2001 , I returned from school on an emergency early dismissal to a motionless neighborhood. It was another of many shocks when I found that my father was home early from work. I joined him in front of the living room television. In silence, we watched out-of-sequence replays of the day’s events. The rings of the Pentagon were engulfed in flames. The Twin Towers crumbled. The shattered remains of another jetliner smoldered in a Shanksville field. Smoke-plastered New Yorkers ran pell-mell through the streets as hopeless workers leaped from office buildings.

“Your world will never be the same,” my father told me.

How right he was.

Seven years later, creating a peaceful future for Afghanistan was my life’s passion. My studies of the country’s long, complex history and of the military operations underway there launched me into my dream career as a civilian intelligence analyst during the 2010 military surge in Afghanistan.

About a year later, on May 2, 2011, I sat stunned on a hotel bed as I watched President Barack Obama announce that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had been killed. Obama rightly explained that there was work left to be done. Most of my countrymen appeared happy to overlook this fact, wanting to believe that bin Laden’s death signified the end of our 9/11 trauma.

I grew frustrated over the years that followed as Islamic terrorist cells grew and multiplied while American leaders looked for paths to exit Afghanistan that would almost certainly result in the Taliban’s return to power.

Not long after I left intelligence in 2013, the Taliban raised their flag of hate over their political office in Qatar. I was so deeply enraged that we had allowed the Taliban this opportunity for posturing that I stopped reading news about Afghanistan.

In the spring of 2021, I leaped back into the swirling vortex of Afghanistan’s chaos as the United States prepared to withdraw from the country. I spent the three years following the Taliban’s takeover covering the disasters unfolding under their rule.

The Taliban have turned Afghanistan back into a pariah state . The Taliban’s latest orders , which include forbidding women from solo travel and limiting the direction of a woman’s gaze and the volume of her speech, have fully stripped Afghan women of any basic human rights. The struggling Afghan economy has now been forced into stagnation . A working system of law and order has been replaced with a brutal interpretation of Sharia law in which women are once again being sentenced to death by stoning for alleged crimes of morality. Schools are being converted into madrassas where the Taliban can train the young populace in their hate-filled interpretation of Islam.

Once again, al Qaeda is finding haven within Afghanistan, along with numerous other Islamic terrorist groups. The August 2022 drone strike on al Qaeda senior leader Ayman al Zawahiri at a Haqqani guesthouse in Kabul was the tip of a growing iceberg. Al Qaeda is building relationships with other terrorist entities and runs training camps in 12 of 34 Afghan provinces, according to U.N. reports. Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, believes the number of compromised provinces is likely 15.

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I considered 9/11 a seminal moment from history when I bought around a dozen children’s books about the day in 2020. This week, as I reread those familiar books to my children for a fifth consecutive year, I struggled not to blurt out a postscript warning that the circumstances that enabled these attacks are present once more. The weight of that knowledge is too great to heap on a child, but it is a mantle that should weigh heavily on our leaders.

More than two decades ago, the nation promised never to forget the attacks of 9/11 and the 2,977 lives lost on a day that shattered American innocence. Given our acquiescence about the return of the conditions in Afghanistan that led to al Qaeda’s rise, at this moment, “never remember” seems a far more apt slogan.

Beth Bailey ( @BWBailey85 ) is a freelance contributor to Fox News and the co-host of The Afghanistan Project, which takes a deep dive into nearly two decades of war and the tragedy wrought in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.