When America, along with its allies, launched ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, few could have guessed it would be stepping into its longest war.
Yet if the legacy of this two-decade conflict will be long disputed, bleeding as it did both literally and metaphorically into the invasion of Iraq two years later, and a broader War on Terror, it would be wrong to forget the unity of that pre-invasion month in 2001.
For 9/11 shocked the world and left no room for equivocation.
Rescue workers sift through the wreckage of the World Trade Center, two days after the terrorist attack