The fallout from 9/11 was first felt in Bangladesh during the second Iraq War.
Just a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its Islamist allies secured a landslide election victory. By December, the first Taliban government was toppled by the US.
President George W Bush’s binary doctrine — "You are with us, or you are with the terrorists" — was still in its infancy, primarily impacting the Middle East and the West, while Bangladesh remained largely peripheral to Washington's immediate focus.
The BNP-led administration faced its first major test regarding America’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) in November 2004.
Fresh from the overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Dhaka with an explicit request: deploy troops from the world's third-largest Muslim-majority nation to support US war efforts.
The Awami League (AL)-led opposition, alongside Islamist parties and leftist critics of American hegemony, staged street protests against any potential deployment.
Ultimately, the BNP government — allied with Jamaat-e-Islami — rejected the demand. In hindsight, it was a practical and most sensible decision.
The invasion of Iraq was launched on false premises that Baghdad possessed weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein held considerable anti-imperialist appeal among the Bangladeshi public.
While the BNP averted an immediate diplomatic crisis, it was ill-prepared for the domestic security storm brewing quietly in the background: the rise of Jama'at-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) and its vigilante offshoot, Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB).
Intelligence agencies had known since the late 1990s that Bangladeshi Afghan-war veterans were forming militant outfits.
They were aware that these groups carried out high-profile attacks, including the Udichi cultural convention in Jessore, Chhayanaut's Bengali New Year celebration at Ramna Batamul, and several targeted killings at Sufi shrines. However, security apparatuses failed to synthesize these incidents into a broader structural threat.
For its part, the AL-led government (1996–2001) downplayed its own security oversights, its failures glossed over and because these attacks preceded 9/11, they drew minimal international scrutiny.
The narrative shifted dramatically in early 2005.
The brutal lynching of ultra-leftist Sarbahara operatives by Siddiqul Islam's (known as "Bangla Bhai") JMJB men in the Atrai region made international headlines.
Local political support for JMJB’s violent campaign against the Sarbahara was framed globally as the emergence of a Taliban-style movement operating with tacit state backing.
The BNP government failed to counter the narrative actively cultivated by AL-aligned journalists, civil society, and domestic media. Its foreign minister Morshed Khan was, at best, dimwitted and inept.
Western powers grew increasingly anxious, sensing a new front in the War on Terror. Those fears materialised on August 17, 2005, when JMB coordinated over 400 near-simultaneous molotov cocktail blasts across 63 districts.
The Morshed Khan-led foreign ministry failed to grasp the depth of Western concern. Although the government responded quickly and decisively with mass arrests and captured key leadership — including Bangla Bhai and Shaikh Abdur Rahman — the narrative that the administration was soft on extremism had taken root.
The AL capitalised on this alignment with Western security priorities. Their own past security lapses were forgotten, as was their prior political alliance with Jamaat in the mid-1990s; instead, they successfully branded the BNP-Jamaat coalition as soft on extremism.
This geopolitical framing heavily influenced the military-backed caretaker regime established in January 2007 under General Moeen U Ahmed. While the regime executed top militant leaders in March 2007, the broader War on Terror narrative dictated the terms of the eventual political transition.
During behind-the-scenes negotiations, the AL deployed Indophile and Harvard- and Oxford-linked advisers like Gowhar Rizvi to reassure foreign stakeholders and the military establishment that the AL was the sole reliable partner against extremism. Meanwhile, op-eds in foreign media pushed claims that Islamist ideology had infiltrated Bangladesh's armed forces – a groundless allegation.
The resulting 2008 election returned the Awami League to power with an absolute majority, initiating a major realignment of Bangladeshi politics. The election was rigged to an extent that AL could romp with a two-third majority. Some six million BNP men faced spurious charges, Jamaat-e-Islami was systematically dismantled, and key democratic checks were removed, including the eventual abolition of the Non-Party Caretaker Government system.
Large segments of what we knew as independent press aligned with the AL ideology and state apparatus, normalising the crackdown on opposition figures. A domestic version of "You are with us, or you are a Jongi (militant)" took hold.
Opposition leaders, including Khaleda Zia, faced prosecution, while security operations were broadly conducted under the banner of counter-terrorism.
The political trajectory of Bangladesh following 9/11 demonstrates how international security paradigms can redefine domestic governance. It highlights how the ground beneath your feet can shift so swiftly!
The BNP-led government failed to anticipate how domestic security incidents — such as the 2005 bombings — would be interpreted through the lens of Washington's post-9/11 foreign policy. By underestimating how local events intersect with global superpower priorities, the then government allowed its political opponents to capture the international narrative, ultimately altering the country's democratic framework for nearly two decades.
In today's multipolar world, deeper understanding of geopolitical analysis is even more essential. Modern nation-states are vulnerable to a complex web of great-power rivalries, supply-chain dependencies, and rapid information flows.
For Bangladesh sandwiched between hostile neighbourhoods, understanding global trends is not merely an exercise in foreign affairs — it is a prerequisite for preserving national sovereignty and political stability. Without an accurate reading of global geopolitical dynamics and acting decisively to face the challenges, domestic leadership risks being caught unprepared by broader international shifts.
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Shafiqul Alam is the Editor of Daily Waadaa