On September 11, 2001, the men of al-Qaeda wanted to break the West. Not through a prolonged war, but in a single battle. Not on the ground, but high above the earth. One spectacular assault, and the myth of the West and its towers would come to an end. It would suffer its losses in the richest cities on earth.
Everything was meticulously prepared. The latest tools of modernity were used in the process. The al-Qaeda operatives of September 11 were trained to fly planes, to use them to strike the towers, and to send passengers hurtling through the air.
The world froze before that horrifying scene: hell opening in the sky. The full force of American power was stunned by the mind that had planned it. What would happen tomorrow? What was the next step? Who, in truth, were the perpetrators of September 11 who were sending their plane into the heart of the Pentagon? Was the West finished? Was the world finished? Had the world war whose bells had long been said to be ringing finally begun?
Everyone, everywhere in the world, went home frightened for themselves and for their fellow human beings on the planet. No one knew what had begun, whether what had begun would end, or whether the assault would end in New York or spread to cities everywhere. Where had the failure been? Why had the West not been broken? Because the preparation for the assault had taken place in Tora Bora. Everything else came from New York and Silicon Valley, and from training to hurl civilian aircraft at the towers. But the foundation was the idea of a conflict between East and West, and of how to break the latter.
A quarter of a century later, the distance between Tora Bora and New York remains the same. Each side is searching for its own world, but in the wrong place. After the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden made a jubilant statement saying that the battle had cost America billions of dollars.
Here lies the heart of the conflict, and the culture of Tora Bora. The West measures the economy by Elon Musk's profits, not by the losses of the commercial tower.
