[Choi Ji-woong's Energy War] 9/11 Terrorist Attacks, the Taliban, and Oil

Causes of 9/11 Terror: Ultimately 'Oil'
The US allied with oil-producing Saudi Arabia, leading to terrorism
The 1979 Islamic Revolution also traces back to oil

Asia Economy Newspaper publishes a monthly series every Thursday titled 'Choi Ji-woong's Energy War,' diagnosing the energy industry undergoing a great transformation and examining the related changes in the international order. The author is an expert in the energy field who joined Korea National Oil Corporation in 2008, worked in the Europe and Africa Business Division and the Stockpiling Business Division, and completed an oil and gas MBA program at Coventry University in London in 2015. He published the bestseller 'How Oil Rules the World,' which covers the modern history of oil. Last year, he gained readers' attention by serializing the column in this newspaper.

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If one were to name the most shocking terrorist attack in history, it would be the September 11 attacks in 2001. The horrific sight of two airplanes crashing into the New York World Trade Center and the collapse of the 110-story twin towers remains vividly etched in memory even 20 years later.

At the time, the Bush administration identified Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national, and his group al-Qaeda as the masterminds behind the terror attacks. They then attacked the Afghan armed group Taliban, which was protecting him. This war, which began on October 7, 2001, less than a month after the attacks, lasted nearly 20 years. However, the Taliban ultimately survived in Afghanistan. In February last year, the U.S. and the Taliban signed a peace agreement. Following the peace accord, U.S. troops began a gradual withdrawal. Subsequently, the Taliban rapidly expanded their influence in Afghanistan and eventually recaptured the capital, Kabul.

In fact, the Taliban was not initially a group intending to confront the U.S. The Taliban leader, Muhammad Omar, prioritized controlling war-torn Afghanistan, which was no easy task. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the country was embroiled in fierce civil war among the former government army, armed warlords, and religious factions. During this process, the Sunni fundamentalist armed group Taliban, which grew in the Kandahar region, rose as the most powerful faction with support from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In 1996, they even captured the capital, Kabul. However, in northern Afghanistan, the 'Northern Alliance' fiercely resisted the Taliban. At that time, the Taliban's main objective was to become the ruling power in Afghanistan.

However, an event changed the nature of the Taliban. In May 1996, Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national, entered Afghanistan. He had declared the Saudi royal family as agents of the U.S. and rebelled against them. Feeling threatened, he was expelled from Saudi Arabia and Sudan and ended up in Afghanistan. There, he met Taliban leader Muhammad Omar.

The U.S. was also wary of bin Laden and his al-Qaeda group. However, the possibility of an alliance between bin Laden and the Taliban was considered low. At that time, the Taliban's most important patron was the Saudi royal family, the Sunni hegemon. If the Taliban protected and allied with bin Laden, who opposed their patron Saudi royal family, they risked losing a crucial supporter. In fact, Taliban leader Omar even planned to hand bin Laden over to Saudi Arabia. However, both Saudi Arabia and the Taliban could not find the right timing due to bin Laden's position as al-Qaeda's leader and concerns about backlash factions.

At that time, the U.S. did not view the Taliban negatively. From the U.S. perspective, the Taliban, a Sunni and anti-socialist group like Saudi Arabia, becoming the ruling power in Afghanistan and governing the region was not a bad direction for regional stabilization.

However, after bin Laden joined the Taliban, an interesting scene unfolded. Bin Laden frequently contacted Western media. In this process, the perception arose that bin Laden, who was initially a lodger, became the symbolic figure of the Taliban and emerged as the center of the jihad against the U.S. Three months after arriving in Afghanistan, in August 1996, he declared a jihad against U.S. troops occupying the two holy sites through Western media. He claimed that attacks against U.S. forces were a moral duty and a legitimate right.

Jiwung Choi, Researcher at the Petroleum Information Center, Korea National Oil Corporation

The presence of infidel U.S. troops in Islam's holy city Mecca was enough to provoke Islamic outrage, and many individual Muslims found bin Laden's expression of their sentiments through Western media compelling. As a result, the Taliban abandoned plans to extradite him to Saudi Arabia.

Under Taliban protection, bin Laden meticulously carried out the long-planned terror attack: the 9/11 attacks in 2001. His ambition was to simultaneously strike the political, economic, and defense centers of the U.S. He planned to hijack four large passenger planes?two to crash into the World Trade Center, a symbol of American capitalism; one to attack the Pentagon, the U.S. Department of Defense building; and the last to target the White House.

The plane targeting the White House failed due to courageous resistance from passengers, but the other three planes executed bin Laden's plan. Subsequently, U.S. forces entered Afghanistan, drove the Taliban out of Kabul, and established a new Afghan government under U.S. protection in 2004. In May 2011, Osama bin Laden was finally killed by U.S. special forces. However, the Taliban were only pushed to the southern border and were not completely defeated.

It took the U.S. ten years to eliminate Osama bin Laden, and despite fighting for nearly another decade, they ultimately failed to eradicate the Taliban. Although the U.S. was able to kill leader Osama bin Laden by mobilizing its intelligence network in the harsh terrain of Afghanistan, where most of the land is a plateau over 1,000 meters high, it was extremely difficult to track down and eliminate the scattered armed groups one by one. (In fact, bin Laden was found not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan.)

After a long 20-year fight, the U.S. and the Taliban signed a peace agreement last year. This repeated the pattern of the Soviet army, which entered Afghanistan in 1979 but failed to control the country despite a decade-long war with tens of thousands of casualties. Now, the Taliban have recaptured Kabul once again.

Tracing the root of the 9/11 attacks reveals it was a backlash against the close U.S.-Saudi relationship, comparable to a marital relationship. In Iran, opposition to the pro-American Pahlavi dynasty culminated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and opposition to the pro-American Saudi royal family led to the 9/11 attacks 20 years ago. The reason the U.S. sought major oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran as key allies was ultimately 'oil,' which prompts reflection on the role of oil in today's history.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.