To mark the 25th Anniversary of 9/11 terrorist attacks—an event that profoundly reshaped global politics, international security, and the lives of millions around the world, the Afghanistan Policy Lab at Princeton School of Public and International Affairs shares a variety of reflections that highlight personal experiences, perspectives, professional paths, lessons learned and advice to future generations.
Habiba Sarabi , Former Affiliate at the Afghanistan Policy Lab, first woman Governor of the Bamyan Province; former Minister of Women’s Affairs and member of the Afghanistan Negotiating Team.
“September 11 remains a reminder of how global events can reshape individual lives and how fragile progress can be. Its tragedy belongs to those who lost their lives and loved ones, while its aftermath continues to shape Afghanistan.”
September 11, 2001, was a horrific terrorist attack that claimed thousands of lives in the United States and left families grieving. Its consequences extended far beyond America. For Afghanistan, September 11 marked a new chapter. It also changed my life.
I was living in Peshawar, Pakistan, as a refugee, having fled Afghanistan because of the Taliban’s violence and repression. CNN broadcast images of the attacks.
As reports connected the attacks to al-Qaeda, sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan, my thoughts turned to my homeland. I wondered whether the world would finally pay attention to Afghan women who had endured years of repression. This did not lessen the horror of what had happened in the United States; it reflected my experience of oppression and displacement.
What followed brought changes to Afghanistan. The Taliban were removed from power, an interim administration was formed through the Bonn process, and a new political order took shape. The 2004 Constitution enshrined equal rights and political participation for women and marginalized communities, including Hazaras.
For me, these changes created opportunities that once seemed impossible. Millions of Afghan girls returned to school, women entered public institutions, and a new generation gained access to education. I served for eight years as governor of Bamyan, becoming Afghanistan’s first female provincial governor. My daughter earned two master’s degrees and served in government. In 2014, I ran as a vice-presidential candidate.
Much of that progress was not sustained. The Doha Agreement and withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces culminated in the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021. The consequences for Afghan women and girls have been devastating, with severe restrictions on education, work, and public life.
Looking back, I recognize both progress and its limitations. Institutions remained fragile, while corruption and political divisions persisted. Yet meaningful transformation occurred, particularly for women and girls.
Reflecting on this period, I see my life intertwined with Afghanistan’s turbulent history—from a refugee witnessing September 11 in Peshawar, to a public servant contributing to national rebuilding, to a witness to the reversal of hard-won gains. Afghanistan also remains vulnerable to extremism, showing that the security concerns that shaped the post–September 11 world have not disappeared.
September 11 remains a reminder of how global events can reshape individual lives and how fragile progress can be. Its tragedy belongs to those who lost their lives and loved ones, while its aftermath continues to shape Afghanistan.
Matthew C. Weiner, Ph.D. is an Associate Dean in the Office of Religious Life. He oversees many programs including Hidden Chaplains, The Religious Life Council, and Faith Based Internships. He is the Principal Investigator (with Stanley N. Katz) for the Religion and Forced Migration Initiative, funded in part by the Henry Luce Foundation. He leads Live Music Meditation and co-curates the Stairwell Gallery.
“For two days we tried calling religious leaders, found some of them at ground zero, and held a service 48 hours after the planes hit. Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the UN said that while the acts were called inhuman, they were indeed human acts, and that humans could act differently as well- such as in the service we were responding with. Never in my decades of interfaith work have I experienced a prayer service with such gravitas and lack of ego.”
The morning of September 11th 2001, I was with Kofi Anan’s security detail, and we were doing a run through for a prayer service that was to take place on Thursday. It was Tuesday morning, my friend Timur Yuskaev and I were explaining to Annan’s people how the procession would work, which religious leaders would go when, and so on. There were some twenty religious leaders from every tradition in New York, each given a minute for their prayer. The service was to bless the United Nations for it’s work. We had done this a few years in a row. Annans’ security got the news in their ear buds that a plane had hit, and then another, and then they were gone- to the UN we can assume. And we walked up to the third floor of St. Barts church to the balcony where we watched the smoke rise and flow to over the river to Brooklyn. By then, the streets below, park avenue in our case, was already flooded with people walking home.
That night we walked in the upper east side, and the lamp posts had had made signs with the names of their loved ones, and the floors that they had been in, in the twin towers- all high level floors. A giant pile of flowers in front of the fire station. I got a call from my boss, James Parks Morton, an episcopal priest overseeing the UN Prayer Service. I thought he was calling to cancel the program- but Annan was turning the prayer service into one in response to what had just happened.
For two days we tried calling religious leaders, found some of them at ground zero, and held a service 48 hours after the planes hit. Annan said that while the acts were called inhuman, they were indeed human acts, and that humans could act differently as well- such as in the service we were responding with. Never in my decades of interfaith work have I experienced a prayer service with such gravitas and lack of ego. Later that day we held a press conference with those same religious leaders, Muslims condemning the attacks, religious leaders of other faiths calling for tolerance towards Muslims in New York. The head of the Board of Rabbis being the most vocal about the need to stick together as a city. And then on Friday, bringing a delegation of religious leaders to the 92nd Street Mosque to show solidary, with all of us sitting on the floor as prayerful participants.
There are so many other things to say about those days. There was a Jesuit Brother named Joel who worked to find the names of those who were undocumented and disappeared in the towers- their relatives too scared to ask for compensation or to share the names of those lost. There were the Muslim leaders who came to synagogues and churches and created what seemed like the first really open interfaith Iftars as a way to welcome other communities into their mosques. We created programs, helped journalists, found ways to get clergy passes to religious leaders so that they could be at Ground Zero (something the orthodox Jewish community helped with tremendously). What I recall most was a sense of bewilderment, something that one could feel at the time but all the more in the months as they past, and a sense of shared citizenship, people helping each other across religious lines in a way that I wonder if we would see today.
Hanifa Girowal, Affiliate at Princeton University’s Afghanistan Policy Lab who also serves as an Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Afghanistan. She is the Vice President of Women’s Rights First (WRF), an Afghan women-led organization dedicated to documenting human rights violations and advancing women’s participation in peace building and accountability processes in Afghanistan.
“A lesson I have carried from childhood: Afghan women do not only need others to speak for them. They need institutions that invest in their knowledge, leadership and ability to shape policy. Supporting spaces such as APL at SPIA, and Afghan women led organizations help to preserve that expertise at a time when Afghanistan risks disappearing from international attention.”
I was in first grade, living as a refugee in Quetta, Pakistan, when I watched the towers fall on a small television in our home. My parents had fled Afghanistan during the civil war, and our first reaction was fear that another war was coming.
A few years later, our family returned to Kabul. I remember seeing thousands of girls walking to school, an opportunity my older sister and many of my female cousins had been denied under Taliban rule. Life was difficult. We had no clean water at home, and I would walk miles to bring water for my family. But we were going to school, learning English and imagining futures that had once seemed impossible.
Yet the Afghanistan I experienced in Kabul was not experienced equally. In Ghazni, I watched female cousins with little access to education being forced into marriage. I promised myself that one day I would return and open a school for girls.
I eventually studied law, worked in government and human rights, and received a Chevening Scholarship to pursue my master's degree in public international law. My human rights work also exposed me to torture, arbitrary detention, and abuses affecting communities caught between different sides of the conflict. It taught me that Afghanistan's post 2001 story cannot simply be described as either success or failure.
For many Afghan women, those years brought extraordinary opportunities. But war, corruption, political exclusion and abuses of power continued, particularly in rural and conflict affected communities. The international intervention that followed September 11 opened important opportunities, but it failed to produce an inclusive and sustainable peace.
When the government collapsed in 2021, with the arrival of Taliban, and women were again pushed out of education and public life, I felt an even greater responsibility to continue the work my generation had begun. That is why institutions such as the Afghanistan Policy Lab (APL) at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs matter. APL creates space for Afghan researchers and practitioners to transform lived experience into policy relevant research and ensure that discussions about Afghanistan include Afghan perspectives.
Through my research there, I have been able to examine questions of women's rights, exclusion, and accountability while remaining connected to the larger question of Afghanistan's future.
The same conviction led us to establish Women's Rights First, an Afghan women led organization supporting women to document violations, understand accountability mechanisms and participate in decisions affecting their lives.
Both efforts reflect a lesson I have carried from childhood: Afghan women do not only need others to speak for them. They need institutions that invest in their knowledge, leadership and ability to shape policy. Supporting spaces such as APL and Afghan women-led organizations helps to preserve that expertise at a time when Afghanistan risks disappearing from international attention.
Twenty-five years later, my lesson is simple: Peace is not merely the absence of war. It requires justice, dignity, and opportunity for everyone. Afghanistan's unfinished promise is to build that kind of peace.
Heather Mercer, President and Founder of Global Hope, a U.S.-based nonprofit, a graduate of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, author, and international speaker with nearly 30 years of experience working in conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
“September 11, 2001 is seared into my memory. I was in Afghanistan, held captive by the Taliban for 105 days. From that prison, I witnessed events that would reshape America, the world, and the course of my own life. It was a vantage point I never would have chosen, but one I now consider a tremendous gift.”
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the enduring refrain “Never Forget” still carries the weight of a nation’s grief.
As I reflect on the quarter century since that day, I know I never could. September 11, 2001 is seared into my memory. I was in Afghanistan, held captive by the Taliban for 105 days. From that prison, I witnessed events that would reshape America, the world, and the course of my own life. It was a vantage point I never would have chosen, but one I now consider a tremendous gift.
From that prison cell, I confronted the brutal reality Afghan women were living under: dignity stripped away by decree, freedom stolen, futures suffocated beneath walls both visible and invisible. I left Afghanistan carrying more than the memory of captivity. I carried the women I met there—their courage, their suffering, and a visceral understanding of how tyranny destroys lives. Their stories became part of the freedom work I carried forward in the years that followed.
For two decades, the United States pursued counterterrorism and nation-building in Afghanistan—efforts that proved far harder, more costly, and in some respects more misguided than ever imagined. Yet the failures and miscalculations of that era should not obscure the essence of the struggle itself: the fight for freedom and human dignity.
That struggle still endures. Millions of Afghan women are once again living under Taliban rule, fighting for the right to exist—to speak, to learn, to participate in public life, and to shape their own lives. Their quest for dignity is costly, existential, and unfinished.
And so, as “Never Forget” remains the banner over all that was lost that September morning, perhaps this anniversary can also widen the meaning of what those words call us to remember.
Never forget lives taken.
Never forget the families forever changed.
Never forget those who served, sacrificed, and gave their lives in the years that followed.
And never forget those for whom the fight for freedom still endures—long after the headlines have moved on.
We are given one life, and none of us knows how long it will be. September 11 taught my generation that with terrible clarity. The question is what we will do with the days we are given.
For me, the answer is a commitment renewed: Invest these days in creating a safer, freer, and more just world—and never forget those who still yearn to live in one.
Nazeela Elmi, Former Professional Specialist and Resident Fellow, Afghanistan Policy Lab and Advisor at the Afghanistan Accountability Collective
“For Afghans, 9/11 became deeply intertwined with the trajectory of the country, and with the opportunities and losses of an entire generation. My own professional path grew out of these contradictions. I was fortunate to have the window of opportunity that emerged after 2001 to receive an education and imagine a future that felt increasingly possible.”
The events of September 11, 2001, shaped the lives of millions of people, particularly Muslims in the United States and around the world. For Afghans, however, 9/11 became deeply intertwined with the trajectory of the country and with the opportunities and losses of an entire generation. My own professional path grew out of these contradictions. I was fortunate to have the window of opportunity that emerged after 2001 to receive an education and imagine a future that felt increasingly possible. As an elementary and high school student, I worked at a local radio station. The progress was real, and we believed Afghanistan could move toward a more democratic future.
After graduating from high school in 2016, I received a scholarship to study abroad and left Afghanistan, believing I would eventually return and contribute to my country. Upon graduating, I received a job offer in Afghanistan in August 2021. I was preparing to return home in August when the Afghan government collapsed, and the Taliban returned to Kabul. I watched from afar as the country I knew, and the future I had imagined for myself and for so many young Afghans, changed almost overnight. For Afghan women, it marked the beginning of the systematic dismantling of rights and freedoms. Afghan women had warned the international community. They knew the history and understood what a Taliban return would mean. Yet, for years, international actors and commentators were willing to entertain the narrative that the Taliban had changed. In many ways, the events following 9/11 became the starting point of a journey that led me to ask not only how states respond to terrorism, but whose security is prioritized, whose voices are heard, and what happens when counterterrorism becomes disconnected from human rights.
Afghanistan, however, is a country whose modern history has repeatedly been shaped by foreign intervention and competing geopolitical interests. It has been a pawn in the “Great Game,” a buffer zone during the expansion of the British Empire, and later the site of invasions and interventions by two of the world's greatest powers, the Soviet Union and the United States. The Taliban itself emerged in the context of foreign-backed proxy warfare. Twenty-five years after 9/11, I believe we are living through a period of historical amnesia and, at times, dangerous naïveté. Pragmatism understandably lies at the center of diplomacy with the de facto authorities, but pragmatism cannot absolve us of moral responsibility. Those who engage with terrorist organizations must consider not only immediate political objectives and strategic interests but also what such engagement communicates to communities that have been dehumanized and victimized by them and the implications for international security, regional stability, and legal obligations under international human rights law. The consequences are also profoundly gendered. Afghan women today are bravely warning what happens when the international community becomes desensitized to systematic violations and gender apartheid. For future generations, my greatest advice is simple: Do not forget history. Afghans deserve to live with dignity, rights, education, and hope. Twenty-five years after 9/11, the lives of Afghans and many Muslims around the world are shaped by it; the international community has a responsibility not to look away from an existential risk in the making."
Major Peter Loftus, an active-duty officer in the United States Air Force. He is currently Chief of Staff of the Air Force PhD Fellow at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA).
“Five years on from the fall of Kabul, what should we make of the American experience in Afghanistan? This question reminds me of a comment from former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. When asked about the impact of the French Revolution, he said, “It’s too soon to say.” The same applies for the American experience in Afghanistan. But of one thing I’m certain. We owe a debt to those who made the ultimate sacrifice during the Global War on Terror.”
On 9/11 everything locked down. I was nine years old and living on a U.S. Air Force base in England. I did not know it then, but this event would fundamentally alter the trajectory of my life. Despite being a single parent with two kids, my father deployed to Iraq during the height of the violence in 2006. When he came home, he told me of waking to the sound of sirens and incoming rockets. I would experience those same sleepless nights 12 years later in Afghanistan.
What struck me about my experience in Kandahar was that while war seemed eminently coherent in books, it was anything but in practice. I saw neither causal mechanisms nor conventionally acceptable p-values. What I saw was a chaotic dance. The war was a dance between myriad fragments of many societies meandering stochastically towards ill-defined goals. It wasn’t logical or predictable. It just… was.
After Afghanistan I had a choice. I could pursue the well-trodden, career-enhancing path of Weapons School, where the Air Force develops elite tactical practitioners. Or, I could take a career risk by pursuing the much less frequented Chief of Staff of the Air Force PhD Program. When reflecting on my experiences in Kandahar, I believe the U.S. military’s primary challenge is not our ability to fight, but rather our ability to achieve strategic objectives. That’s what led me to pursue a PhD at Princeton.
Five years on from the fall of Kabul, what should we make of the American experience in Afghanistan? This question reminds me of a comment from former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. When asked about the impact of the French Revolution, he said, “It’s too soon to say.” The same applies for the American experience in Afghanistan. But of one thing I’m certain. We owe a debt to those who made the ultimate sacrifice during the Global War on Terror. As John says in the Gospel, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
From the poppy fields of Belgium to the poppy fields of Kandahar, Americans have given their lives to advance the cause of liberty. We will continue to do so even in the face of defeat. Failure, after all, is a powerful instructor. Many of the lessons Clausewitz writes about in his magnum opus were learned not from victory but rather from defeat at the hands of Napoleon's army. We owe it to those who rest in Section 60 and elsewhere to reflect upon and learn from our experiences in Afghanistan.
[ The views expressed here are those of Major Loftus alone and do not constitute endorsement by the Department of War, the Department of the Air Force, or the U.S. Government.]
Muhammad Idrees Ghairat, Program Manager, Afghanistan Policy Lab at Princeton School of Public and International Affairs
“Twenty-five years after 9/11, I reflect on this period through my own journey. Considerable progress was made during the two decades after 2001, changing the lives of millions of people, including mine. I went from being a displaced teenager uncertain about his future to receiving an education, returning home, building a career with the United Nations and later with other multilateral institutions, and contributing to my country.”
For many young, educated Afghans, the post-9/11 era was a time of hope and opportunity. I was able to build my career through the opportunities available during that period, including working with the United Nations. Having seen Afghanistan in the 1990s, a country marked by poverty, civil war, and isolation, I saw how the U.S. and broader international engagement after 2001 opened a window of opportunity that my generation had rarely experienced before.
Following the establishment of a democratic government, women and girls returned to schools and universities. They became teachers, journalists, entrepreneurs, government officials, and professionals. Young Afghans studied abroad and returned home with new ideas. For many of us, there was a sense that our lives did not have to be defined only by war and displacement.
At the same time, the conflict continued, and corruption and weak institutions remained serious problems. While many young Afghans embraced education and professional opportunities, others were drawn into extremist groups and the continuing war.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, I reflect on this period through my own journey. Considerable progress was made during the two decades after 2001, changing the lives of millions of people, including mine. I went from being a displaced teenager uncertain about his future to receiving an education, returning home, building a career with the United Nations and later with other multilateral institutions, and contributing to my country.
After the Taliban’s return in 2021, unfortunately, young people, especially women and girls inside Afghanistan, no longer have those opportunities. There are many examples, but the ban on girls’ education beyond sixth grade alone demonstrates how much has been lost.
I still believe today: When young people are given education, opportunity and a reason to hope, their lives change, and sometimes so does the direction of a country.