The Warnings We Hear Too Late: Twenty-Five Years After 9/11
Twenty-five years after 9/11, we remember the dead—but also the warnings that came before. A reflection on terrorism, foresight, and the human cost of failing to imagine what seems impossible.
COMMENTARIES
Asanga Abeyagoonasekera
9/11/20265 min read
Photo credits (left to right): New York City, September 21, 2001 — New York firefighters and members of the Salt Lake City Urban Search and Rescue team gather at the World Trade Center site during recovery and cleanup operations. Photo: Michael Rieger/FEMA News Photo, via Wikimedia Commons. Sri Lanka, April 21, 2019, 8:45 a.m. — Nine minutes before the first explosion at 8:54 a.m. at the Shangri-La Hotel. My son is pictured drawing at a hotel table. Photo: Asanga Abeyagoonasekera.
There are mornings that divide a life into two parts: the morning before, and everything that comes after.
The boy in the photograph is my son. I took this photograph nine minutes before the Easter Sunday terrorist attack at the Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on April 21, 2019. He was drawing on a sheet of hotel paper, unaware of what was approaching. Minutes later, he would see his first dead bodies being carried down the hotel’s exit stairway. My family survived that morning. Hundreds of others did not.
Eighteen years earlier, on September 11, 2001, at 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, Flight 175 struck the South Tower. A total of 2,977 people were killed. An ordinary morning became a dividing line in history.
I know terrorism not only as a subject of study, but as a wound carried through a lifetime. When I was 16, my father was killed by a suicide bomber. Decades later, I survived another terrorist attack with my own family.
These experiences have shaped how I understand terrorism. Its geography changes. Its organizations change. Its ideology evolves. But its reach remains the same: ordinary people, in places where they believe they are safe.
The deeper tragedy is that terrorism is sometimes not entirely unforeseen. We often know enough to imagine catastrophe. What we fail to do is believe that it can happen.
Twelve years before September 11, terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins warned: “The nightmare of governments is that suicidal terrorists will hijack a commercial airliner and, by killing or replacing its crew, crash into a city or some vital facility.” The warning appeared in a paper presented at the International Seminar on Aviation Security and published by RAND.
The nightmare had been imagined. Yet imagination is not preparedness.
We prepare for what has happened. We are less prepared for what has not.
Sri Lanka experienced a similar failure. In 2017, during a high-level discussion at the Ministry of Defence, I warned that extremists could follow emerging international patterns and attack civilians and high-level targets, including five-star hotels. A recording of that discussion was later submitted to the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the Easter Sunday attacks as evidence.
The possibility had been imagined. What was missing was the willingness to connect the fragments.
Information alone is not foresight. A government can possess warnings, intelligence and evidence and still fail to see the picture. Intelligence may exist in different institutions and different minds while the threat quietly moves toward reality.
Sometimes the failure is not the absence of information. It is the absence of imagination.
The 9/11 Commission later identified a ‘failure of imagination’ among the central shortcomings that contributed to the attacks.
This lesson extends beyond terrorism. Governments today confront cyberattacks, artificial intelligence, geopolitical competition, economic crime, cryptocurrency financing, disinformation and other asymmetric threats that do not always announce themselves in familiar forms. The challenge is to recognize weak signals before they become strong shocks. Foresight is not predicting the future with certainty. It is preparing for futures that appear improbable until they arrive—a principle central to the work of The Millennium Project in Washington, D.C., where I contribute to futures research on emerging risks.
After September 11, America transformed its foreign and security policy and pursued those responsible across the world. At the 9/11 Memorial, words from the Roman poet Virgil remind us: “No Day Shall Erase You From the Memory of Time.” Memory was preserved, but so was resolve. The hunt for those responsible continued for years, at an immense human cost.
More than 15,000 U.S. military personnel lost their lives in combat, while some 1.8 million became disabled. America did not fight alone. Allies joined the effort, and families across many nations bore the consequences of a long war. Behind every statistic were human lives: families waiting at home, children growing up without parents, and soldiers returning from distant battlefields carrying wounds that would remain long after the fighting ended. Nearly ten years after September 11, Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But terrorism did not disappear. Al-Qaeda weakened, while the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) emerged with a different ambition, seeking not merely networks, but territory and a state.
Today, extremism continues to evolve. Its offshoots have fragmented into multiple actors across regions. In South Asia, groups such as ISIS-K and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), together with the wider environment created by instability and Taliban rule in Afghanistan, continue to present serious security challenges. The threat has also moved decisively into the digital domain. Terrorist propaganda, recruitment and influence operations can now cross borders instantly, reaching and potentially radicalizing vulnerable individuals anywhere with an internet connection. Geography is no longer the barrier it once was.
Organizations can be defeated. The conditions that produce extremism are harder to defeat. Terrorism’s greatest weapon is not only violence. It is surprise—the ability to make the unimaginable suddenly real. The state faces the opposite problem. Officials ask whether an attack is likely. Terrorists ask whether it is possible. Between those two questions lies the space in which catastrophe can occur.
On September 11, we remember the dead. But remembrance should also ask a more uncomfortable question:
What warnings are we hearing today but refusing to understand?
What dangers are visible in fragments but invisible as a whole? What future catastrophe is already being discussed in an intelligence briefing, a research paper, a government meeting or a warning from an expert—while we continue believing that tomorrow will resemble yesterday?
History repeatedly shows that warnings rarely arrive as a single, unmistakable alarm. They appear as scattered pieces: an unusual movement of money, a radical statement, a suspicious network, a change in behaviour, an overlooked intelligence report. The danger emerges when those pieces are connected too late.
The greatest failure of foresight is not that we cannot see the future. No one can. It is believing that because something has never happened before, it therefore cannot happen.
My father’s death taught me that terrorism can enter a family without permission. Easter Sunday taught me that it can come within minutes of those we love. September 11 reminds us that an ordinary morning can become a dividing line between life and death.
The answer cannot be permanent fear. It must be vigilance, intelligence, international cooperation and, above all, the courage to imagine what others would rather dismiss as impossible.
The distance between New York and Colombo is vast. The distance between human blindness and catastrophe can be only a few minutes.
We remember not only what happened. We remember those who warned us.
And we must ask whether, this time, we are listening.
Asanga Abeyagoonasekera is a Senior Fellow at The Millennium Project and Executive Director of the South Asia Foresight Network. He is the author of five books and conducts research on security and geopolitical risks. He developed the Economic Crime and Geopolitics Index (ECGI). He is a former Director General of Sri Lanka’s Institute of National Security Studies (INSS) and an alumnus of the U.S. National Defense University.
