September 11, 2001. Where we were then, and where we are today.

 I was getting ready for work.  My wife was getting ready to take our son to preschool.

She was watching the Today Show, and called me up because a jet had hit one of the Twin Towers.  I came up and watched the footage.

Then the second one hit.  I was watching from the stairs.  Right away, I told her it was terrorism.

We all seemingly know the story.  Another jet hit the Pentagon.  Heroic passengers stormed the cockpit of a fourth and in the resulting struggle it went down, taking all of them, and the Islamic jihadist who justified murder in the name of God, to their deaths.

President Bush promised revenge and retribution.

The nation united.

The Administration soon went off course, mistaking necessarily retribution against Al Queda, to whom the jihadist belonged, with the Baathist of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, with whom the same didn't get along.  The nation soon set ground in Afghanistan, but the commitment was small.  A larger one went to war in Iraq, leading to the end of the Baathist regime there, but a guerilla war against ISIL thereafter which was eventually won.  In Afghanistan, the larger commitment, and one to rebuilding the nation with a democratic model after the Taliban regime that gave safe harbor to Al Queda was removed.   The slow commitment lead to a messy and protracted war.

That war was more or less won, but a guerilla war against the armed Islamic students of the Taliban, a force that exists only because of Pakistan's support, continued on for 20 years.  President Obama tried to extract the US and then reversed course.  At the end of his administration President Trump negotiated with the very entity which had given safe harbor to those who attacked us on this day 20 years ago and then committed to withdrawal.  President Biden, whom never approved of the nation building mission in Afghanistan, completed what Trump had started with an inept and messy withdrawal that amounted to a surrender to the Taliban and an abandonment of our allies in Afghanistan.

The nation will look back on this day with sadness, as it should.  But what it should be considering as well is what its recent acts mean in terms of its immediate future.  We've left our enemies in power and rejuvenated in a region which gave rise to this attack 20 years ago and their dedication to an isolated and extreme interpretation to a religion that started as a Christian heresy and spread first by excusing primitive and male vices, and then spread by the sword remains unabated and will not abate.

Killing Osama Bin Laden and devastating Al Queda has made us safer, to be sure.  But the ineffective and misdirected nature of our following efforts, followed by the abandonment of that which we created, has not made the world safe.