I stipulate that the U.S. government has put unreasonable and unjust burdens on travelers.
But whether the attacks were a success or a failure at advancing the attackers' political agenda has nothing to do with that.
The stated goal of the 9/11 attacks was not to put burdens on American travelers, but to change U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia — notably to end U.S. support for Israel and force the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Muslim-majority nations. Another motive some scholars have inferred was to provoke a global war between the West and the Islamic world, leading to a global caliphate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacks
Since the attacks, the U.S. has continued to increase foreign aid (including military aid) to Israel; has prosecuted two aggressive wars in Muslim nations; and maintains significant military presence in a number of Muslim-majority nations including Kuwait, Bahrain, and Afghanistan.
The U.S. also killed the leaders of the groups responsible for the attacks.
The only stated goal of the attacks that can be charitably interpreted as having come to pass is the removal of U.S. soldiers from Saudi Arabia specifically. Those soldiers had been there as a force against the former Iraqi regime, no longer a concern.
Thus, I maintain the attacks were a huge failure at accomplishing the attackers' political agenda.
Your and your mother's ill-treatment at the hands of U.S. officials is indeed an offense to good sense, common decency, and good government. But that injustice and inconvenience does not appear on the political goals of al-Qaeda. It is a consequence of domestic maladministration, sloppiness, and corruption.
tl;dr: If Clippy fails at turning the world into paperclips and is shut down, but some asshole uses Clippy's existence as an excuse to punch you in the gut, we would not say that Clippy had accomplished its goals. We would say it sucks that some asshole punched you, but Clippy still failed.
Thus, I maintain the attacks were a huge failure at accomplishing the attackers' political agenda.
Osama Bin Laden (2004):
......All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qa'ida in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies. This
Edit: The purpose of this question is not to make the world worse, but to see whether we actually have concrete ideas of what would, and my guess is that most of us don't, not in a really concrete way. From the downvotes I'm wondering if everyone else is thinking way darker directions than I am. If so please share.
There is a lot of discussion here about effective altruism. Organizations like GiveWell with donations, using criterion like quality-life-years-saved-per-dollar. People distinguish warm-and-fuzzy giving from the most effective use of dollars from various utilitarian perspectives.
But I want to ask a different question: What would effective anti-altruism be?
To make it more concrete:
I am an eccentric multimillionaire, proposing a contest to all of you, who will for the purposes of this exercise play greedy and callous, yet honest and efficient, contest entrants.
Whoever can propose the most negative possible use for my money, in the sense that it causes the greatest amount of global misery, (feel free to argue for your own interpretation of the details of what this means) will receive $1 million to carry out his or her proposal and $1 million to keep for him or herself to with as desired.
A few rules:
1) Everything must be 100% legal in whatever jurisdiction you propose. Edit: People had trouble with the old phrasing, so I'll add that it should not only be legal in the letter of the law, but also in some reasonable interpretation of the spirit of the law.
1a) In fact, I encourage you to think of things that aren't merely legal but that would also be legal under whatever your favorite hypothetical laws are. Maybe that means non-coercive, non-violent, or something else in that vein.
2) This money may be used as seed funding for a non-profit or for-profit anti-altruistic venture, but I will take into account both the risk and the marginal impact of only the first million dollars.
3) Risk and plausibility are factors just as they would be in any investment for effective altruism
4) If you're going to propose that you keep and embezzle the first million dollars, you should have an extremely good justification for why such a mundane plan would match my standards for anti-altruism.
I hope this pushes you all to think of truly anti-altruistic means of spending this money. I think you may find that effective anti-altruism is a good deal harder than you'd believe.