Twenty-five years in the shadow of 9/11, By Osmund Agbo

As thick fumes of smoke billowed over Manila’s skyline on that fateful day in January 1995, no one knew exactly what was cooking inside Room 604 of the Doña Josefa Apartments, or what the recipe was supposed to produce. But it didn’t take long to find out.

Firefighters and Philippine intelligence officers who entered the apartment discovered a bizarre collection of materials: hot plates, electrical wiring, timers, fuses, counterfeit passports, Bibles, and clerical clothing. It looked less like an apartment than a makeshift laboratory for terrorism. The occupants had already fled the scene, but they had left behind a treasure trove of documents and a computer that revealed the outline of an extraordinarily ambitious plot. It was called Bojinka.

The plan was simple: plant bombs aboard twelve U.S.-bound commercial airliners and detonate them over the Pacific or South China Sea after the conspirators had escaped the aircraft. They also discussed assassinating Pope John Paul II and attacking President Bill Clinton during his 1994 visit to Manila. The immediate disaster that exposed the plot was almost absurdly mundane.

Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad were experimenting with bomb-making chemicals when an accident produced thick, foul-smelling smoke. They fled in panic, and firefighters were summoned. Yousef later escaped to Pakistan, while Murad was eventually arrested. But there was another figure who loomed large in the background: a man known to investigators as Mukhtar, who was also Ramzi Yousef’s uncle. For years, American intelligence knew the name, but his true identity proved elusive.

Then came March 2002. Abu Zubaydah, another high-value al-Qaeda operative, was captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan. During his interrogation, FBI agent Ali Soufan asked about a man known as Mukhtar. According to Soufan, Abu Zubaydah laughed and wondered how the Americans could not know that Mukhtar was one of more than fifty noms de guerre used by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the man whom the 9/11 Commission would later identify as the principal architect of the September 11 attacks. The revelation was a major intelligence breakthrough.

A year later, on March 1, 2003, Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, working with U.S. personnel, captured KSM in Rawalpindi. He was transferred into the CIA’s secret detention facility and subjected to coercive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, rectal hydration, and rectal feeding. KSM’s capture provided important intelligence about al-Qaeda and its network worldwide.

The Bojinka plot had focused on destroying aircraft. KSM and his associates later took the concept further while designing the September 11 plot: instead of bombs destroying airplanes, the airplanes themselves would become the weapons. That evolution connects Manila in 1995 to New York and Washington in 2001.

KSM was not always a terrorist, though he embraced the ideology relatively early in his life.

Born to Pakistani parents who had emigrated to Kuwait, he grew up there and became involved with the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager. In 1983, he moved to the United States to attend Chowan College in North Carolina. He later transferred to North Carolina A&T State University, earning a degree in mechanical engineering in 1986. He subsequently left the United States and traveled to Afghanistan, where he received militant training during the war against the Soviet occupation.

By the early 1990s, KSM and his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, were part of the wider international network of Islamist militants emerging from the Afghan jihad. Today, KSM remains in U.S. custody at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, while Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a principal architect of the Bojinka plot, is serving a life sentence without parole at ADX Florence in Colorado.

It has now been 25 years since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when nineteen hijackers murdered 2,977 people. But the human cost of the wars that followed has been vastly larger. Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that more than 940,000 people died directly from violence in the major post-9/11 war zones.

Terrorism did not disappear. It mutated, and the world is arguably confronting a more diffuse and geographically dispersed terrorist threat than it was twenty-five years ago. Organizations splintered, rebranded, and spread across borders. Parts of Africa, particularly the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin, are now confronting jihadist insurgencies, kidnapping, and criminal violence.

If we are serious about defeating terrorism, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: terrorists are human beings. They do not emerge from a vacuum. They are shaped by ideology, grievance, money, opportunity, political manipulation, and social networks.

Understanding those forces helps explain how terrorism is nurtured and how its ideology is propagated. History also teaches another uncomfortable lesson: governments sometimes believe they can manipulate violent movements for short-term strategic advantage.

In 1994, Mullah Mohammed Omar, a one-eyed veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad, gathered religious students in Kandahar who wanted to end Afghanistan’s civil war. They became known as the Taliban, which in Pashto means “students” or “seekers of knowledge.” Pakistan’s security establishment, led by the ISI, viewed the Taliban as a potential strategic asset, believing a friendly government in Kabul could provide Pakistan with strategic depth against India. But governments often discover too late that violent proxies have interests of their own.

Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan became a sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Pakistan eventually found itself fighting militants connected to networks it had once considered strategically useful. The irony became almost unbearable when bin Laden was found living in Abbottabad, not far from the Pakistan Military Academy. But Pakistan is not alone in this pattern of folly.

The United States, too, armed and funded the Afghan mujahideen during the Cold War to fight the Soviets, contributing to the broader militant environment from which the Taliban and al-Qaeda later emerged. In Iraq, Washington supported Saddam Hussein during parts of the Iran-Iraq War, only to later confront him after he invaded Kuwait. The logic was the same: short-term gain, long-term catastrophe. This is the curse of transactional leadership. It mortgages the future for a fleeting sense of control in the present.

Leaders often imagine they are manipulating extremists as pawns in a game of chess. But pawns have wills of their own. Ideologies, once unleashed, cannot easily be boxed back in. General Hamid Gul, as head of Pakistan’s ISI, believed the Taliban could serve as Pakistan’s strategic tool, while American officials viewed Saddam Hussein as a potential counterweight to Iran. Both calculations proved disastrously misguided.

The cost of these miscalculations is always borne by the powerless. The families of Bajaur trudging through the mountains, the children massacred in Peshawar, the millions of out-of-school children in Borno’s IDP camps, and the passengers fleeing collapsing towers in New York: these are the true victims of short-term bargains struck in secret rooms by ambitious men. The architects of such strategies rarely pay with their lives. Ordinary people do.

Then there’s Saudi Arabia, a Wahhabi state where Salafi extremism has historically had significant institutional and religious influence. Saudi clerics and wealthy private patrons have, over the decades, been accused of helping spread extremist interpretations and financing religious institutions abroad, including some madrassas associated with the broader ideological environment from which militant movements emerged.

For decades, the United States has maintained a close strategic relationship with the Saudi monarchy, even as fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens. Yet the question of Saudi Arabia’s relationship to the broader ecosystem of jihadist extremism remains far more complicated than the nationality of the hijackers alone. Nigeria offers its own grim parallel.

Boko Haram was once courted and tolerated by politicians in Borno for electoral leverage. But it soon broke free, splintering into factions, with some pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.

Similarly, transnational fighters from the Sahel have been accused of being brought into Nigeria to influence political contests. In some cases, armed groups have subsequently remained behind, turning instead to kidnapping, banditry, and trafficking and unleashing a wave of insecurity that now threatens the very elites who once saw them as convenient allies.

For decades, successive Nigerian administrations have treated terror financing with the casual indifference of political expediency. While the U.S. State Department has sanctioned individuals accused of financing Boko Haram, questions remain about the networks and collaborators operating within Nigeria. Even more troubling, some individuals accused of enabling violent groups have continued to operate with political influence while the nation pays the price of impunity.

The lesson is universal: the monsters created for expedience rarely stay loyal.

They mutate, grow stronger, and eventually turn on their masters. Mullah Omar’s ragtag students reshaped global politics. Boko Haram’s transformation from a local Islamist movement into a transnational jihadist organization became another cautionary tale. The transactional bargains that helped create or empower such movements are now etched in blood.

If the United States, Pakistan, Nigeria, or any nation wishes to escape this cycle, leaders must abandon the illusion of clever deals with extremists. Real security lies not in proxy wars or militant allies but in building just societies, resilient institutions, and inclusive political systems that deny extremists the grievances they exploit. Anything less is sowing the seeds of future catastrophe.

Twenty-five years after September 11, the smoke has cleared from lower Manhattan, but its consequences continue to reverberate across continents. The story of Bojinka, 9/11, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the spread of terrorism into Africa carries a warning governments repeatedly forget:

Violence may be rented for a season, but it is rarely possible to control the price of the lease. And when the bill finally comes due, it is usually ordinary people who pay it.

Osmund Agbo is a medical doctor, author, and the 2026 recipient of the Thabo Mbeki Prize for Scholarship and Public Service.