The 2001 bombing of Afghanistan was the military response examined in this book to the September 11 attacks, but Noam Chomsky treats it as more than a campaign against a suspected terrorist network: it risked worsening a humanitarian emergency and, in his analysis, helped expand U.S. military reach and demonstrate American power. His account sets the stated counterterrorism purpose against warnings about civilian consequences, disrupted relief, and the political effects of retaliation.

Background and Warnings

Chomsky places the bombing in a longer history of changing labels for the use of force. The 1991 Gulf War was openly called a war, while NATO’s bombing of Serbia was framed as a humanitarian intervention. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the U.S. initially used the word “crusade,” then changed its terminology after warnings that the word would alienate potential allies in the Muslim world. The shift, in his account, did not settle what the military response was for or what its consequences would be.

From the first days after the attacks, NATO leaders, regional specialists, and, Chomsky says, probably U.S. intelligence agencies warned the Bush administration that a massive attack causing many civilian deaths would serve Osama bin Laden’s aims. The concern was not limited to whether the suspected leader might be killed. Without credible evidence of his involvement being provided first, his death could make him a martyr; even if his voice were silenced by death or imprisonment, existing recordings and interviews could continue to circulate. Chomsky therefore portrays the threat of retaliation as a possible recruiting mechanism for Al-Qaeda and other extremist forces.

A related warning came from European leaders who recognized that an assault on Muslim populations could play into the plans of bin Laden and his associates. Chomsky cites the French foreign minister’s description of the danger as a “diabolical trap”: a response intended to punish the perpetrators might instead draw the United States and its allies into a cycle of escalating violence. He argues that the alternative was to investigate the underlying fears and frustrations while using legal procedures to punish those responsible, rather than responding with extreme violence and preparing for further escalation.

Airstrikes and Humanitarian Consequences

The airstrikes began on October 7, 2001, while food relief was already badly constrained. In early October, the United Nations World Food Programme had sent hundreds of tonnes of food into Afghanistan, but estimated that this would meet no more than 15 percent of the country’s needs. The attacks had already led international teams to withdraw and food deliveries to stop for three weeks; once the airstrikes began, the Programme suspended its convoys and food distributions by local teams.

The scale of need made that interruption especially consequential. A spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that 7.5 million Afghans lacked food and were on the brink of famine. Humanitarian representatives warned that the airstrikes made a mass departure of 1.5 million refugees increasingly likely. The account thus emphasizes not only immediate effects of military action but also its impact on the systems meant to keep people supplied and to enable them to remain in the country.

U.S. food airdrops did not, in the view of aid organizations quoted by Chomsky, compensate for the disruption of truck deliveries. Organizations including Oxfam, Médecins sans frontières, Christian Aid, and Save the Children Fund criticized the publicity around the drops, arguing that they were ineffective compared with the large quantities of food that could be carried by World Food Programme trucks. One volunteer dismissed the propaganda leaflets printed on the packages as little more than leaflets themselves. World Food Programme officials said that if airdrops were used, they should take place in daylight, with advance warning and people on the ground to collect and distribute the food. The contrast between aid presented from the air and the interruption of established supply routes is central to Chomsky’s challenge to the campaign’s humanitarian presentation.

Strategic Interpretation and Wider Effects

Chomsky interprets the bombing as an opportunity to strengthen U.S. military power as well as an operation against terrorism. He links the post-September 11 campaign to the earlier “war on terror” under the Reagan administration and to a broader effort to preserve U.S. global dominance. In his account, governments including Russia, China, and Turkey used the new counterterrorism climate to advance or legitimize repressive policies; he also says Israel recognized that it could intensify its suppression of Palestinians with stronger U.S. support. The bombing therefore appears within a wider pattern in which the attacks of September 11 accelerated political trends already under way.

The campaign also changed the geography of U.S. military presence. Chomsky states that the United States established major military bases in Central Asia for the first time. He connects those bases to access to the region’s resources and to the surrounding of major energy resources in the Persian Gulf. Before the war in Afghanistan, he says, Diego Garcia had been the safest major base in the system directed toward the Gulf; the new position in Central Asia made forceful intervention easier if U.S. leaders judged it appropriate. These are Chomsky’s strategic interpretations of the bases’ significance, rather than evidence in the account of a single declared operational objective.

He similarly reads the campaign as a demonstration intended to warn other states about the consequences of challenging U.S. rules. Chomsky suggests that such effects may have been calculated and may have formed a principal purpose of the bombing, while making clear that he has no access to classified documents. He compares this interpretation with NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had explained in terms of maintaining NATO’s credibility. In this analysis, credibility means the authority of the United States and its principal arms client, not an abstract measure of the alliance’s standing.

Significance and Unresolved Consequences

The account holds together two opposing possibilities: the bombing could be presented as a response to terrorism, yet a response that killed Afghan civilians could aid the cause it sought to defeat. Chomsky warns that even killing Osama bin Laden might intensify anger, despair, and frustration in the region and encourage new volunteers. The risk, as he frames it, is a feedback loop in which civilian suffering strengthens recruitment and makes further violence more likely.

He does not claim certainty about what the U.S. government would decide or what the consequences would be. Instead, he argues that the outlook depended partly on public opinion and on whether policymakers followed reason, law, and treaty obligations. His final assessment is that the underlying international problems largely remained, while September 11 and the response to it introduced changes with potentially significant and damaging consequences. The bombing’s decisive significance in his account lies in this double legacy: the immediate interruption of already fragile relief and a lasting expansion of military access and political leverage.