En 
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Ar Before September 11 there was August 7
Before 9/11 shook the world, the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa offered a critical warning about the growing threat of Al-Qaeda. Had the U.S. and its allies responded decisively to 8/7, the devastating attacks of 9/11 might have been prevented.
August 7, 1998. It's a date that, for many, doesn’t carry the weight of history. But it should. That day, in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a series of nearly simultaneous bombings targeted U.S. embassies, killing more than 200 people, most of them Kenyans. It’s a day that should be etched into our collective memory, because if we had truly understood what happened on 8/7, we might have prevented 9/11.
One can't help but wonder if the U.S. and its allies failed to respond decisively to the 8/7 bombings because they happened in ‘far-away’ Africa, where Kenyan and Tanzanian lives were the first casualties of a terror plot driven by U.S. foreign policy. Over 200 people – most of them Africans – were killed that day, but did the global response match the gravity of the loss, or did their location make the tragedy seem distant and less urgent? This pattern of overlooking the suffering of African nations in the face of global terror repeats itself today in the Sahel, Somalia, and Mozambique, where lives are still being lost, and the world’s indifference remains as troubling as ever.
The 8/7 bombings marked the moment when Osama bin Laden and his terror network, Al-Qaeda, stepped out of the shadows and into the global spotlight. These attacks did more than just bring chaos and death to the streets of East Africa; they elevated Bin Laden’s profile among jihadists and gave him credibility, legitimacy, and recruits. It was a clear warning to the West that a new kind of war was being waged. Did the US largely ignore this emergent war because of the fatalities were not American?
US President Obama at the Nairobi Memorial Park
8/7: The Moment We Should Have Paid Attention
In the years leading up to the embassy bombings, Bin Laden had already tasted battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan, but the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania were his real coming-out party. Until then, his group had been relatively small, involved in limited attacks in places like Yemen and Somalia. But East Africa was different. It was a large-scale, coordinated attack on American interests, right in the heart of two African capitals, and it introduced the world to Bin Laden’s network and his aspirations.
The U.S. responded to the embassy bombings with cruise missile strikes, targeting suspected Al-Qaeda bases in Sudan and Afghanistan. But these strikes were tragically off the mark, both literally and strategically. In Sudan, a pharmaceutical plant was mistakenly hit, fueling anti-American sentiment. Instead of weakening Al-Qaeda, the strikes seemed to embolden Bin Laden, confirming to him and his followers that America could be provoked, and possibly, defeated. In hindsight, the reaction from the U.S. was a missed opportunity –one that could have stopped Bin Laden before he orchestrated the deadliest terrorist attack in modern history just three years later.
A building adjacent to the US Embassy collapsed, killing dozens of Kenyans
A Prequel to 9/11: How 8/7 Set the Stage for Disaster
By 2000, Bin Laden’s ambition had only grown. The bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 American sailors, was another clear sign that Al-Qaeda was honing its ability to strike U.S. targets with impunity. The response, again, was erratic – more evidence for Bin Laden that he could push further. The attacks on the U.S. embassies and the USS Cole were not random; they were calculated steps in a much bigger strategy. Bin Laden wasn’t just lashing out because of U.S. involvement in Somalia, as he claimed. He was baiting the U.S., trying to pull it into a quagmire in Afghanistan, where he believed he could recreate the defeat the Soviets had suffered a decade earlier.
And yet, the U.S. didn’t seem to grasp the gravity of the threat. The embassy bombings should have been the moment when the West recognized that a new kind of enemy had emerged. One that didn’t just want to drive America out of the Middle East, but wanted to draw it into a larger, global conflict. Instead of addressing the problem with urgency, precision and coordination, the world watched as Al-Qaeda regrouped, reorganized, and plotted. Bin Laden and his allies used the time after 8/7 to deepen their network, recruiting from across the globe and turning Al-Qaeda into a transnational terror brand.
A Miscalculated Global Response
It wasn’t until after 9/11, when the towers fell and America was thrust into the longest war in its history, that the U.S. began to pour serious resources into fighting terrorism. Africa became a key theater in this effort, with increased counterterrorism funding and training. But by then, the damage had been done. Al-Qaeda had firmly established its footprint on the continent, setting up affiliates from the Sahel to Somalia. Despite billions spent on counterterrorism, the franchise Bin Laden built continues to thrive in numerous parts of Africa.
There’s a tragic irony in the way the U.S. has responded to jihadism in Africa. After 9/11, the desire to strike back often led to short-term interventions that made long-term problems worse. Nowhere is this clearer than in Somalia. In 2006, the U.S. encouraged Ethiopia to invade Somalia and remove the Islamic Courts Union from Mogadishu. But instead of bringing peace, the invasion paved the way for the rise of Al-Shabaab, a more radical group that, by 2012, had formally joined Al-Qaeda’s global network.
The Warning That Went Unheeded
The bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were a warning. They were the signal flare that should have told the U.S. and its allies that Al-Qaeda was no longer a distant, shadowy group but a deadly force with the capacity to launch complex, coordinated attacks. If the West had taken the 8/7 attacks seriously, if there had been a more robust response, a more focused effort to dismantle Al-Qaeda in its infancy, perhaps we wouldn’t have had to face the horrors of 9/11.
Instead, the U.S. response to the embassy bombings was limited, and the attacks became a blueprint for what was to come. The same failures in strategy and intelligence that allowed Bin Laden to carry out 9/11 had their roots in the missteps of post 8/7.
The truth is, 9/11 wasn’t the beginning of the story. It was the tragic conclusion of a chapter that began in East Africa. The embassy bombings should have jolted the world into action, but they didn’t. And we are still living with the consequences of that missed signal. Today, Al-Qaeda’s affiliates continue to operate across Africa, finding fertile ground in places where poverty, inequality, and weak governance make it easy to recruit the disenfranchised. The lesson from 8/7 is that ignoring early warning signs of extremism is a mistake we cannot afford to repeat. We must engage with these challenges before they spiral into catastrophe.
If we had heeded the lessons of 8/7, maybe just maybe, 9/11 could have been averted.
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