Afghanistan

Dick Cheney should no longer be allowed to appear on network TV talk shows. The issue here is not one of ideology or censorship, but rather of compassion and pity. The former vice president has long been a disgrace to his political office; now he is also an embarrassment to himself.

Just shy of 10 years ago, on Sept. 12, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the U.S. and its allies would "go after terrorism wherever we find it in the world" and "get it by its branch and root" so that it could "be brought to an end." Things haven't worked out that way.

Judged solely on outcomes, the decade-long war on terrorism has been a rousing success. Al Qaeda has been chased out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Its leader and most of his lieutenants are either captured or dead. The organization is on the brink of “strategic defeat,” according to both the U.S. Defense Secretary and the director of the CIA. Across the Middle East, support for jihadist violence has plummeted. Since Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda has not mounted one successful strike on American territory—and has failed even to pull off an attack against U.S.

The Pakistani city where Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALS on May 2, 2011, made for a discordant place for the principal villain of 9/11 to die. No longer cave-bound in the sawtooth mountains of Waziristan, he had bunkered down amid modern conveniences: a gas-station mini-mart selling Diet Coke, a travel agency booking flights to Rome, a Barclays bank doling rupees through its high-functioning cash machine. Along with four major hospitals, the Pakistan Military Academy, and several prestigious academic institutions, ­Abbott­abad (pronounced OPT-uh-bad by residents) is home to St.

For the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, we asked New Yorker contributors to look back on how their work, and their lives, were changed. Here are Steve Coll’s answers.

To understand 21st century geopolitics, think of the global capitalist system: it is a marketplace, not a monopoly. In this diffuse network of nodes and connections, stronger and weaker ties, interdependencies and feedback loops, bad decisions are punished almost as quickly as the stock market punishes bad business models. We have just lived through the inaugural cycle of this geopolitical marketplace. Two decades ago, president George H.W. Bush proclaimed a "New World Order" at the United Nations General Assembly, yet today's world is multipolar and leaderless.

Much has changed since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but few American institutions have changed as much as the military.

At the most basic level, it has shifted from a peacetime military to a continuously wartime military, and it has done so for the first time since the United States got rid of the draft.

Pakistan, and Pakistani-American relations, confront their worst crises in recent memory.

Pakistan's economy is in free fall, and its major cities are wracked by political violence, while Pakistani attitudes toward the United States have never been worse -- a legacy of the CIA contractor who shot and killed two Pakistanis in the city of Lahore this year, the campaign of drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal regions and the unilateral American raid to kill Osama bin Laden in northern Pakistan in May.

Shortly after eleven o'clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard.