On September 14, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that “the U.S. response to the [9/11] attacks should be a ‘sustained, broad campaign’ against targets well beyond al Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld’s injunction, ‘Don’t over-elevate the importance of al Qaida,’ indicated that the war on terrorism was going to be a general one against all purveyors of terrorism and not just against those who aided, abetted, and perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.”
– Jeffrey Record, Wanting War, Page 28