Who won the “War on Terror”? Not the families who buried their children in New York, Kabul, Baghdad, Peshawar or Hangu. Not the soldiers and police officers sent repeatedly to hold ground that politics, justice and development failed to secure. Not the refugees who carried the ruins of policy across borders. A war announced without a measurable end produced many beneficiaries, several tactical victors and no defensible winner.¹

The question must nevertheless be answered. Power escapes accountability when every failure is renamed sacrifice and every new threat becomes proof that the previous campaign must continue. Twenty-five years after 9/11, the proper balance sheet is not territory temporarily captured or commanders killed. It is whether terrorism declined, constitutional government strengthened, illicit finance contracted and ordinary people became safer. By those measures, the proclaimed war failed.

Osama bin Laden did not achieve his declared political programme. Al-Qaeda’s central leadership was hunted, fragmented and deprived of much of its capacity to direct spectacular attacks. Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad. His organisation did not unite Muslim societies behind its ideology; its violence repelled millions. It would, therefore, be wrong to declare him the victor.

Nelly Lahoud’s phrase “catastrophic success” is more exact. Bin Laden succeeded in provoking an overreaction vastly larger than al-Qaeda’s own strength. The United States invaded Afghanistan, diverted itself into Iraq, normalised indefinite detention and surveillance, spent fortunes on distant wars and helped turn local conflicts into recruiting grounds. His success was catastrophic because it multiplied suffering, including among the very Muslims he claimed to defend.²

The scale of that overreaction is no longer rhetorical. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimated US commitments of about US$8 trillion for post-9/11 wars through fiscal year 2022, including future veterans’ care. It counted roughly 900,000 direct war deaths in its 2021 assessment and more than 38 million people displaced across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and the Philippines. Later research estimated millions more indirect deaths from the destruction of health systems, livelihoods and infrastructure.³

If expenditure disclosed purpose, the clearest winners sat far from the battlefield. Pentagon spending exceeded US$14 trillion between 2001 and 2020, with between one-third and one-half going to military contractors. From 2020 to 2024 alone, private firms received US$2.4 trillion—54 per cent of discretionary Pentagon spending. Five corporations obtained US$771 billion in contracts. War was failure for strategy and a dependable business model for those paid to supply it.⁴

This does not prove that 9/11 was engineered to enrich contractors, nor is such a conspiracy needed. Institutions reveal their real priorities through the interests they continue to reward after stated objectives recede. Threat inflation protected budgets. Secrecy obstructed scrutiny.

The revolving door joined public command to private gain. “Uncle Sam” could declare democracy, women’s rights and counter-narcotics as goals while allocating the overwhelming weight of resources to coercion and outsourced war.

The final American audit is devastating. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction recorded US$148.2 billion appropriated for reconstruction and related activities, including US$88.8 billion for security. It concluded that the United States and Afghan governments failed to create independent and sustainable security forces despite twenty years and about US$90 billion in support. A force advertised as 300,000 strong dissolved as its external logistics, finance and political guarantees disappeared.⁵

Did the Taliban win? They won the contest for Kabul and outlasted a superpower. That is a military and political victory. It is not a victory for Afghanistan.

The United Nations Development Programme reported that around three in four Afghans—about 28 million people—could not meet basic needs in 2025. Women and girls remain systematically excluded from education, work and public life. A movement may capture the State while the people lose their future.⁶

Pakistan did not win. It received money, diplomatic relevance and temporary strategic rent, but paid with blowback. The National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) records 83,000 lives and more than Rs. 35 trillion lost between 2001 and 2022. The Global Terrorism Index 2026 places Pakistan first among countries affected by terrorism, with 1,139 deaths and 1,045 incidents in 2025. A State cannot call itself a winner when the battlefield returns to its police posts a quarter-century later.⁷

Pakistan’s ruling networks nevertheless gained episodically. External assistance strengthened discretionary power. Security secrecy reduced parliamentary inquiry. Selected groups were treated as assets until they became liabilities.

Political governments outsourced strategy and then blamed institutions they had declined to control. The reward was short-lived influence; the cost was a governing order trained to bargain with armed power and manage emergencies rather than establish equal law.

The drug and arms economy proved more durable than governments. Poppy could fall while stockpiles moved. Heroin routes carried methamphetamine. Kalashnikov chains acquired drones. Cash, hawala, property and virtual assets became interchangeable layers.

Traffickers did not need to win a war. They needed every side to preserve demand for transport, protection, weapons, secrecy and money laundering. In that limited but brutal sense, illicit networks were among the most consistent winners.⁸

The deepest losers were constitutional citizenship and truth. Categories created for the battlefield migrated into ordinary politics: suspect populations, exceptional detention, information control and collective guilt. Once governments learn that fear can suspend scrutiny, terrorism becomes not only an enemy but a method of rule. The citizen is promised safety in exchange for rights and frequently receives neither.

Our 1991 thesis of “heroinisation and militarisation”  requires one final enlargement. The drug and the gun were not parallel contraband. They were instruments within a political economy of covert war.  By 2003, the drug-trap had become a debt-trap. After 9/11, both entered a permanent emergency in which foreign patrons financed coercion, local elites monetised access, armed groups taxed disorder and citizens absorbed the liabilities.

Completing this trilogy is not an exercise in anti-Americanism or absolution for local actors. Washington chose invasion, occupation and a contractor-led security model. Pakistan’s rulers chose dependency, selective militancy and institutional evasion. The Taliban chose repression. Traffickers and financiers chose profit from misery. Responsibility must remain specific, because collective blame is the refuge of every failed policy.

The alternative is neither pacifist fantasy nor another slogan. Terrorism must be fought through lawful intelligence, capable police, independent courts, financial investigation, control of weapons and precursors, treatment for addiction, representative local government and regional diplomacy. Military force may sometimes be necessary; it cannot manufacture legitimacy or perform the work of the State.

So, who won? The contractors were paid. Armed movements survived. Drug and weapons networks adapted. Security bureaucracies accumulated power. None delivered a just or durable peace. The peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the victims of 9/11, honest public servants, soldiers, taxpayers and constitutional democracy bore the losses.

The final lesson is as severe as it is simple: wars without accountable ends do not defeat terror. They redistribute its profits and socialise its pain.⁹

Endnotes

1. Ikramul Haq, Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin (Lahore: Annoor Printers and Publishers, 1991), chapters 2, 4 and 12; Ikramul Haq, Pakistan: From Drug-trap to Debt-trap, edited by Huzaima Bukhari (Lahore: Lahore Law Publications, 2003), Preface, pp. xiii–xiv, and Epilogue, pp. 262–264.
2. Nelly Lahoud, “Bin Laden’s Catastrophic Success: Al Qaeda Changed the World—but Not in the Way It Expected”, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2021.
3. Brown University, Costs of War, “Costs of the 20-year war on terror: US$8 trillion and 900,000 deaths”, September 1, 2021; Costs of War, “Civilians killed and displaced”; Stephanie Savell, How Death Outlives War, 2023.
4. William D. Hartung, “Profits of War: Corporate Beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 Pentagon Spending Surge”, Costs of War, 2021; William D. Hartung and Stephen Semler, “Profits of War: Top Beneficiaries of Pentagon Spending, 2020–2024”, July 8, 2025.
5. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Final Report: Seventeen Years of Reconstruction Oversight, December 2025, pp. 12–14 and 81–101; SIGAR, Why the Afghan Security Forces Collapsed, February 2023.
6. United Nations Development Programme, Afghanistan Socio-Economic Review 2024–2025; UN Women, “Five years of resistance, solidarity and the search for accountability”, September 21, 2026.
7. NACTA, “Pakistan’s National Narrative against Terrorism and Extremism”; Institute for Economics and Peace, Global Terrorism Index 2026, Pakistan profile.
8. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan Opium Survey 2025; UNODC, World Drug Report 2026, sections on synthetic drugs, Internet markets and trafficking routes.
9. Government of Pakistan, National Security Division, National Security Policy of Pakistan 2022–2026; NACTA, “Revised National Action Plan 2021”.

[Concluded]

Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds an LLD in tax laws. He was full-time journalist from 1979 to 1984 with Viewpoint and Dawn. He also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 1996.