There is something almost ritualistic about how the United Nations Security Council marks September 11 each year, and this 25th anniversary was no exception. Michael Waltz, representing the United States, stood before the chamber and invoked the memory of nearly 3,000 people killed in 2001, framing the hunt for Osama bin Laden as a collective global achievement — “together, we hunted him down,” as he put it. He went further, listing terror attacks that have scarred the home countries of all 15 Council members, an attempt to universalise the trauma of terrorism rather than let it remain an American story alone.
It was a rhetorically clever move, and not an accidental one. By naming attacks in Russia, China, France, the UK and others, Waltz was implicitly asking the Council to see terrorism as a shared civilisational threat rather than a selectively applied label depending on whose adversary is doing the killing. That is the perennial problem at the UN — the Security Council has never managed to agree on a comprehensive definition of terrorism, largely because member states routinely disagree on which armed non-state actors deserve the label and which deserve the euphemism of “freedom fighter” or “resistance.”
Why does this matter beyond diplomatic theatre? Because a quarter-century after 9/11, the global counterterrorism architecture built in its aftermath — sanctions lists, financial tracking regimes, the FATF, joint intelligence sharing — is fraying under the weight of great-power rivalry. Russia and China have periodically blocked terror designations at the UN that the US and its allies have pushed for, usually along geopolitical rather than evidentiary lines. The Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, the very country where bin Laden was sheltered, is itself a reminder that military victories against terrorism don’t always translate into durable political defeats of the ideology.
India’s stake in this conversation is direct and long-standing. New Delhi has for years pressed the Security Council to adopt the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism, frustrated by what it sees as a global order that mourns attacks in Paris or New York with unanimous solidarity but hedges when the target is Mumbai or Pahalgam. India’s own experience with cross-border terrorism has made it acutely sensitive to the double standards Waltz’s speech, perhaps unintentionally, exposed — that naming attacks across all 15 member states is a start, but naming the states and networks that sponsor such attacks is where the real diplomatic courage lies. India has consistently argued that Pakistan-based groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed deserve the same unambiguous condemnation that al-Qaeda received after 2001, a parity that has often proven elusive at the UN.
My take: symbolic gestures like this anniversary statement matter, but they are cheap unless followed by consistent, non-selective action. The real test of whether the world has learned anything from bin Laden’s decade-long hunt is not whether the Council can agree that terrorism is bad — everyone agrees on that — but whether it can agree on naming the specific perpetrators and patrons without geopolitical convenience getting in the way. On that score, 25 years later, the Security Council still has homework to do.
RP analysis · Based on reporting: Together, we hunted down bin Laden: U.S. tells UNSC on 25th anniversary of 9/11 attacks
