The day began in a dull civic deadness. It was an election day, the second Tuesday in September, in one of the world's most political cities. The weather was perfect: a cloudless Indian-summer day. The polls opened at six in the morning. But no one was showing up. Did it even matter who governed? Seven and a half months earlier, a Republican had become president and the sky had not fallen. The federal budget was in surplus. New York was about to enjoy a fiscal windfall from a new 99-year lease on the World Trade Center. The hot issue in the mayoral primary, supposedly, was how the city would spend all the money. But nobody cared. When September 11, 2001, dawned, collective rituals of civic engagement felt like anachronism.

In a sense, their true enemy was less America than an arrogant future to which a vain country lay claim. This was a country that named the previous hundred years the American Century. So as much as the 19 men, who commandeered four airliners nine months, eleven days, and nine hours into the next century, despised America—despised its "pure products [that] go crazy," as William Carlos Williams described them, including a rowdy pluralism, a heedless innovation, an irreverent culture, and a reckless dream that the country named as surely as it named centuries—these men despised the way such American things were expressions of the modern age.

Ten years after the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon, the United States is in bad shape, but our problems have little to do with what al-Qaeda did to us. America's troubles stem from what the country has done to itself—or rather, from what our political leaders have done with the nation's power and resources.

This evening, President Barack Obama is set to announce his plan for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. The speech comes just weeks before the July 2011 deadline for beginning the drawdown of American forces, which the president set when he announced the 30,000-troop "surge" in December 2009.

With Osama bin Laden out of the picture, both conservatives and liberals -- including Prospect contributor Matthew Yglesias -- have pressured the president to expedite the pullout. Others, including outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates and, reportedly, General David Petraeus, have argued for a slower reduction. But as Americans debate the speed of the drawdown, other important questions have been put on the backburner.

When the United States launched its post-September 11 military actions against Afghanistan, the George W. Bush administration issued to the Taliban a set of demands. The Taliban refused to comply, so we went to war. The conventional wisdom has been that the war isn't going well, but the death last week of Osama bin Laden is just the latest and most definitive sign that it's a war we've actually already won. Revisiting the demands Bush issued shows that we've achieved our main aims, and we can and should move expeditiously to reduce our military involvement there.

Here are Bush's original demands:

Last month, when the continuing resolution for the 2011 budget stripped the Department of Homeland Security of hundreds of millions of dollars meant to aid state and local security programs, lawmakers on Capitol Hill had an unusual reaction. That is, they didn't have much of a reaction at all.

This afternoon, news outlets reported that President Barack Obama has decided against releasing any photos of Osama bin Laden's body, even though CIA Director Leon Panetta indicated just hours before that the pictures would be made public. It may seem ghoulish or too triumphant. "The fact of the matter is this was somebody who was deserving of the justice that he received," Obama said on CBS's 60 Minutes, which will air this Sunday. "And I think Americans and people around the world are glad that he's gone. But we don't need to spike the football."