Hal Brands & Michael O’Hanlon
Abstract
The error that American policymakers are most likely to make is abandoning a struggle that the United States has now developed a reasonably efficient approach to waging.
A generational struggle has reached a sobering milestone: this year marks two decades since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. The result of those attacks was what the George W. Bush administration called the ‘global war on terror’, or GWOT. Though the name and tactics have varied, the basic goal of using all forms of American power to prevent major terrorist attacks on the United States and its key interests and allies has persisted. With the advent of the Biden administration, the campaign against transnational violent extremism – and particularly Salafist extremism, a movement based on a perverted interpretation of Sunni Islam – has now continued into its fourth US presidency. Yet it is hard to find many observers who would declare that campaign a strategic success.
During the 2016 campaign and throughout his presidency, Donald Trump argued that America had failed to wage counter-terrorism aggressively enough, while also mocking as pointless the country’s open-ended military operations in the greater Middle East. Today, many Democrats and some conservatives call for ‘ending endless wars’. The war in Iraq is seen as the exemplar of misguided and mishandled military intervention.1 Two successive presidents, one from each major party, tried to withdraw from Afghanistan. A third, President Joe Biden, has now done so, more out of sadness, resignation and frustration than any real sense of accomplishment. Some charge that the war on terror has come home in ugly ways, through high rates of veteran suicide, militarised policing and a flourishing of white-nationalist movements and right-wing domestic terrorism. From this perspective, the war on terror could certainly seem like a case of strategic backfire.
There is no question that the GWOT has not gone as planned. Few analysts or policymakers envisioned that, after 9/11, the United States would spend the next 20 years fighting in Afghanistan, much less that it would then withdraw with the Taliban on the march. Or that it would send troops back to Iraq in 2014 to destroy a terrorist caliphate that the American invasion – and subsequent withdrawal – had helped produce. Or that America would have spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of lives in a struggle that still lacks a clear endpoint. Or that the greater Middle East would be a nastier, more violent place now than it was in 2001. Or that rates of global terrorism, measured in terms of violence and loss of life, would be higher today than at the start of America’s war on terror.
Yet it would still be wrong – and rash – simply to discard the GWOT as a strategic failure. The fact that consecutive presidents have found it so difficult to extricate the United States from ongoing operations in the greater Middle East reflects the reality of a persistent threat from extremist organisations and their allies. Opinion polling consistently shows that the American people fear terrorism as much as any other security challenge. And the GWOT has been considerably more fruitful than it might first appear.
There are six key criteria on which analysts can assess the success or failure of that endeavour. On three of those criteria – protecting the American homeland from another catastrophic attack, denying or destroying terrorist sanctuaries, and decapitating and otherwise dismantling terrorist organisations – the GWOT has been a relatively clear success. On two more, improving regional stability and decreasing overall levels of terrorism worldwide, it has been a relatively clear failure, which is why the threat will not disappear anytime soon. On a final criterion, cost, the verdict is mixed. The GWOT has taken a human, financial and geopolitical toll higher than all but the most pessimistic analysts initially predicted, but that price has fallen dramatically as the United States has quietly adopted a cost-conscious, limited-liability approach to keeping the most dangerous threats at bay. Today, the error that American policymakers are most likely to make is abandoning, out of undue pessimism, a struggle that the United States has now developed a reasonably efficient approach to waging – and that will require strategic persistence for years to come.
More success than failure
From the beginning, the most important objective of the GWOT was protecting the homeland from mass-casualty terrorism that might fundamentally disrupt the American way of life. Achieving that goal, in turn, required preventing or disrupting any major Salafist safe havens, while pummelling the terrorist organisations and leaders aiming to conduct such attacks. By these measures, the United States has enjoyed far more success than failure.
Homeland security
Most obviously, the United States has not suffered another catastrophic terrorist attack since 9/11. Nor have its major European and Asian allies suffered spectacular events on the scale of 9/11, although some have absorbed larger attacks than the United States has. The world did experience, in the four years after 9/11, significant attacks in Bali, Saudi Arabia, Spain and London, each claiming from dozens to hundreds of lives. Europe was hit by a slew of Islamic State and al-Qaeda attacks between 2014 and 2017. There were many other attempts – shoe bombers, underwear bombers, Times Square bombers – to carry off mass-casualty attacks in America and other countries.2 But since 9/11, there have been just over 100 Americans killed on US soil by those with Salafist leanings or connections – far fewer than the number of fatalities caused by right-wing extremists over the same period, and only a tiny fraction the nation’s overall murder total.3
It could have been far worse. After 9/11, the threat-stream reporting that reached the White House was terrifying. There were widespread fears, fuelled by the anthrax attacks of late 2001, that 9/11 might presage repeated mass-casualty attacks, perhaps involving weapons of mass destruction. One need not agree with vice president Dick Cheney’s infamous ‘1% doctrine’ – the idea that if there were even a 1% chance of a terrorist attack using nuclear weapons, the risk had to be treated as a near-certainty – to understand why he and his colleagues were so alarmed.4 Indeed, the Bush administration’s greatest fear was that sustained, catastrophic terrorism might force the United States to dramatically change its democratic way of life by accepting harsher restrictions on privacy, movement, public gatherings and other civil liberties as the price of safety.5
The reasons America has so far avoided that outcome are still subject to debate. Luck has played a role in frustrating attackers, as in the case of the individual who, having slipped through American defences, sought but failed to bring down an airliner over Detroit in 2009 using a bomb concealed in his underwear. And most attacks in the West since 9/11 have seemed relatively modest in scale partly because 9/11 set the bar so high that subsequent jihadists struggled to approach it. The projection of US military power into the Middle East also gave Salafists a chance to kill Americans ‘over there’ rather than killing them ‘over here’. Finally, ongoing instability in the Middle East has made it more attractive to attack the ‘near enemy’ (Middle Eastern governments and polities) or the ‘intermediate enemy’ (certain less vigilant, or more accessible, European countries) rather than an increasingly hardened ‘far enemy’ (the United States) – though American strategists should of course hesitate before interpreting these facts as proof of any success.
But clearly, US policies have played a role. Integration of terrorist watch lists, advance screening of cargo headed for the United States, better technology at border-crossing sites, good police work on America’s streets, and fuller funding for intelligence and homeland security since 9/11 have all helped.6 Increasingly precise financial sanctions have made it far harder for terrorist groups to move money via the international banking system. Improved cooperation with law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in other countries, from Southeast Asia to the Arabian Peninsula to Western Europe, has resulted in the detention or killing of untold numbers of terrorist operators. Covert action, paramilitary strikes and sustained military operations have put extreme pressure on terrorist groups. The United States made itself a far harder target, in other words, while also making it far harder for terrorists to survive. Three analysts, writing roughly a decade ago, summed up the effect of post-9/11 policies:
Since 2001, the United States has relentlessly hunted terrorists around the world, shut down training facilities, dried up sources of funding, disrupted active plots, and maintained constant pressure on terrorist networks. Al Qaeda operatives and leaders have reportedly been killed, captured, or reduced to preserving their personal safety. Evidence also suggests that US homeland security has improved since September 11. High value targets have been hardened; coordination between military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies has increased; and authorities at every level of government have heightened the scrutiny of suspicious behavior.7These policies were so successful that Barack Obama, despite having campaigned against the excesses of Bush’s war on terror, ended up adopting many of them.8 There has emerged a bipartisan consensus supporting the quieter aspects of counter-terrorism since 9/11 out of recognition that those measures have consistently proven their worth.
Moreover, the United States has protected itself without destroying its domestic institutions in the process. To be sure, the post-9/11 use of torture left a moral stain, even if overall interrogation efforts may have contributed – in coordination with other tools – to preventing subsequent attacks. The USA Patriot Act and domestic-surveillance programmes have modestly decreased privacy for some Americans. On balance, however, the American way of life has survived largely intact. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans continued to enjoy free movement across jurisdictional lines and, for the most part, internationally. Identification checks to prevent terrorism are not a frequent or normal part of American life, except in specific places such as iconic sites and skyscraper entrances. The burden of tighter airport security is modest and sensible. And the US government hardly possesses untrammelled powers to pry into Americans’ private lives, as Apple’s refusal to unlock the iPhone of a terrorist involved in the San Bernardino shootings of 2015 demonstrates. Not all is well; American Muslims have sometimes been the victims of persecution, vigilantism and (under Trump) political demagoguery. But the United States has attained greater security, with greater regard for civil liberties, than many experts thought possible in 2001.
Denying and dismantling safe havens
One reason for this is that America has also fared well in denying terrorist adversaries the geographic sanctuaries they require to plan and operate effectively. Some scholars contend that the importance of territorial safe havens is overblown, because modern terrorist organisations can thrive even without controlling large swathes of land. Yet since 2001, US officials have believed – correctly – that safe havens are a critical force-multiplier for extremist groups.
Dating back to the 1980s, many terrorist groups – including al-Qaeda – took root when extremists occupied specific pieces of territory where they could assemble and organise. Admittedly, most detailed planning for 9/11 occurred outside of Afghanistan. But terrorist networks were largely built there, and al-Qaeda used its stronghold in that country as a platform from which to recruit, organise and execute progressively more ambitious attacks. The Islamic State made even greater use of the lands it conquered in Iraq and Syria in 2013–14. It exploited its territorial gains to train operatives that struck France, Belgium and other countries; to produce propaganda that radicalised and attracted tens of thousands of foreign fighters; and to control oil and other resources that funded its attacks in the Middle East and beyond. It did all this while avoiding much of the sort of intelligence penetration that is more feasible when security services have geographic access to the areas where terrorist groups plan and organise.
Denying safe havens has thus been the prime operational objective of the GWOT. After 9/11, US special-operations forces and intelligence operatives worked with the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban and deprive al-Qaeda of its principal base. Over the succeeding years, and with considerable difficulty, the United States used its bases in Afghanistan, as well as a quietly lethal drone campaign, to reduce al-Qaeda’s freedom to operate in the nearby Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Washington inadvertently created terrorist sanctuaries by invading Iraq in 2003 and again by withdrawing prematurely from that country in 2011. Yet in both cases, American forces and their local partners subsequently destroyed the ‘caliphates’ that had emerged, killing or capturing large numbers of the terrorists that inhabited them. By the end of 2017, for instance, the Islamic State had lost 95% of the chunks of Iraq and Syria it previously controlled.9 Similarly, the French, with American help, took back large sections of Mali that had fallen to extremists. Unfortunately, parts of Somalia, northeastern Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria remain relatively hospitable to terrorist groups. But the United States has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to disrupt those havens if the threat reaches intolerable levels.10
Its approach to doing so has, of course, evolved considerably. The initial model for denying safe havens, which involved state-building efforts with 100,000 or more troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, was far too costly in blood as well as treasure to be sustained indefinitely. After US forces found and killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, the Obama administration shifted to a lighter-footprint approach, featuring drones and special-operations forces, that ultimately failed to prevent extremist groups from reconstituting themselves in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. From 2014 onward, Washington thus shifted towards something like a ‘medium-footprint’ approach in key areas, relying heavily on local forces, enabled by American airpower, logistics, training and assistance, and modest numbers of US ground forces to clear out safe havens and maintain pressure. This approach, when coupled with multilateral diplomatic, demographic and economic isolation of the terrorist movements, is relatively cost-effective.11 It can generally be conducted with a few thousand US forces, together with deployed air assets capable of delivering up to thousands of strikes a year in certain circumstances. Over the past several years, for example, the US military presence in Iraq has averaged around 5,000 troops, and that in Afghanistan between 5,000 and 10,000 troops, complemented by several thousand NATO troops.
Yet the strategy remains an intuitively unsatisfying ‘mowing the grass’ approach, focused on suppressing enemies rather than destroying them permanently. By design, it must therefore be continued indefinitely, until local politics or other indigenous factors deprive future terrorists of the ability to train, recruit and organise. As the US intelligence community warned in 2019, the Islamic State ‘will exploit any reduction in [counter-terrorism] pressure to strengthen its clandestine presence and accelerate rebuilding key capabilities’. Left undisturbed, the group ‘very likely will continue to pursue external attacks from Iraq and Syria against regional and Western adversaries, including the United States’.12 The good news, then, is that America has gradually developed a sustainable approach to denying or disrupting terrorist safe havens. The bad news is that this approach promises little rest for the weary.
Decapitation of leadership and decimation of the ranks
Then there is the matter of terrorist leadership. To be sure, not all extremist organisations require continuity in top leadership and other key positions: the Taliban in Afghanistan have lost many of their field commanders, not once or twice but multiple times. Organisations that have developed a straightforward method of operation, or adequate depth in their hierarchy, can often survive the loss of key leaders and operatives.
Yet individuals still matter. When new, complex plots are to be attempted, or terrorist groups undertake major campaigns on the battlefield, individuals with strong technical and organisational skills are essential. When an organisation seeks to develop a narrative of long-term survival and inevitable victory, the resilience of its top leadership can itself serve as testament to the credibility of the group’s vision.13 Arrests or killings of leaders, by contrast, can fracture groups, as would-be successors contend for influence. Effective attacks on leaders can force successors to spend most of their energies avoiding targeting – which also means avoiding modern communications – and simply staying alive. Removal of financiers, facilitators and operational commanders disrupts existing routines, destroys institutional memory and keeps terrorist groups in a state of ongoing churn. This is why counter-terrorism is, at a tactical level, often synonymous with manhunting. And the United States has built a manhunting machine unparalleled in human history.14
After 9/11, by some estimates, US forces and their international partners killed or captured 80% of al-Qaeda leaders and operatives in Afghanistan.15 These included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and later Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria and, over the years, most second-tier al-Qaeda leaders in the tribal areas of Pakistan. These ruthless yet talented individuals, in addition to countless other mid- and upper-tier members of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other groups, have been taken off the battlefield. The late Mullah Omar of the Taliban spent his later years in increasing obscurity, just trying to stay alive. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor, now appears to be doing largely the same.
This progress has not come cheaply. It is an understatement to say that Washington has taken a resource-intensive approach to capturing or killing relatively small numbers of terrorists. But the combination of ever more refined surveillance tools from reconnaissance drones to signals-intelligence capabilities, the tactical proficiency of American specialoperations and paramilitary forces, the expansion of intelligence-liaison and other information-sharing programmes, and continual innovation in military, law-enforcement and intelligence operations honed by 20 years of conflict has afforded the United States an unprecedented ability to find and neutralise its enemies, even in some of the most remote areas of the world.
If offered this deal shortly after 9/11, the outcomes the United States and its partners have achieved to date – no major follow-on attacks on American soil; no transformation of the country into an illiberal ‘garrison state’; the consistent disruption or destruction of terrorist sanctuaries, especially in the heart of the Arab world; and the severe attrition of terrorist leaders and other operatives – most policymakers would have unhesitatingly accepted it. Alas, there have been major failures which complicate the net assessment – and which have ensured that America’s achievements in the GWOT remain continually fragile.
Metrics of failure
From 9/11 onward, it was clear that any lasting victory in the GWOT would require translating tactical gains into longer-term diminution of Salafist movements and amelioration of the political conditions that allowed them to flourish. On this score, the record is unimpressive, even ugly.
Size, strength and lethality of Salafist movements
If violence from Salafist terrorism has been relatively modest in the West since 9/11, that is far from true in the Islamic world itself. There is no religious determinism here: some of the world’s largest countries in terms of their Muslim population – including Indonesia, Bangladesh and India – are largely free of Salafist violence. Others, such as Jordan, Morocco, Oman and Tunisia, have been fairly successful in preventing massive violence. But in many of the countries that have been focal points of American strategy – particularly Iraq, Syria, Yemen, parts of West Africa, parts of the Horn of Africa and parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan – levels of terrorism and religious violence have reached appalling heights.
The annual number of victims of terrorism peaked in 2014–15, the time of the Islamic State’s greatest military success. Yet despite declining since then, the annual number of victims is still – depending on the exact measure or database – three to five times higher than it was at the time of the 9/11 attacks, even counting the aberrational year of 2001.16 Similarly, death tolls from civil wars – most of which have occurred in the broader Islamic world in recent years, often stoked by an Islamist or Salafist element – are greater than global aggregates during the 1990s and 2000s (if still lower than those in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s).17 In the late twentieth century, the world’s worst civil conflicts were in Africa, Southeast Asia and Central America; they have since been more concentrated in the broader Islamic world. Most of this violence does not claim American lives.18 But it still poses a strategic danger given American interests in the Middle East, and has produced humanitarian devastation.
It is simplistic to say that the violence is the result of America’s war on terror, and it is logical that Washington would be most deeply involved in countries where Salafists run amok. In Iraq and the Levant, security deteriorated most dramatically amid relative American disengagement from counter-terrorism operations in 2011–14. Likewise, violence has increased in Afghanistan as America and NATO’s role has ended; it may well spike further as the Taliban and its enemies contend for power undeterred by outside parties.19 The persistently high level of terrorism in these locales mainly reflects the enduring failures of local governance, the perversion of Islam by groups that weaponise its tenets, and other pathologies that Washington has neither solved nor created.
Yet there have been cases in which US policy has accelerated rather than retarded the momentum of Salafist movements. US intelligence officials conceded in 2006 that ‘the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse’ by inflaming anti-Americanism, producing a new cohort of recruits and turning Iraq into a training ground for the next generation of zealots. The US-led humanitarian intervention in Libya in 2011 had a similarly counterproductive, if more modest, effect. In the Syrian civil war, America did just enough to encourage and stoke opponents of the Bashar al-Assad regime, without providing the means for their success; terrorist-friendly anarchy ensued.20 At minimum, the growth of terrorist activity since 9/11 shows that America is nowhere close to achieving the objective that key policymakers identified early on: pushing terrorism to the margins, cutting off the flow of recruits, and otherwise creating conditions that would allow Washington to declare victory and come home. ‘Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?’ Donald Rumsfeld asked in 2003.21 The question continues to haunt us, because the answer is clearly no.
Promoting political reform and stability in the greater Middle East
Sadly, the same answer must be given to the related question of whether political conditions in the greater Middle East have changed for the better. American officials typically saw the GWOT ending through political and social transformation, leading ultimately to greater regional stability. Bush advanced this thesis with his Freedom Agenda; technocratic analysts pushed for educational reform and expanded economic opportunity as ways of draining the terrorist swamp.22 Yet for the past decade, after a period of great expectations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fleeting opportunity created by the Arab Spring, the regional situation has been mainly terrible.
Violent instability convulses countries from the Arabian Peninsula to North Africa. The International Crisis Group’s list of ten conflicts to watch in 2021 includes five in the Sunni Arab world.23 The Arab Spring ultimately led to jihadist-fuelled chaos, severe repression or both in far more countries than those where it led to pluralistic stability.24 Iraq is, at best, a semi-functioning democracy. Democratic governance in Afghanistan has been sustained only by foreign aid, military support and political intervention. It may not survive the departure of US and NATO forces, although it is possible that a de facto rump state may emerge in the country’s north, even as the Taliban gradually seize large portions of the south. There are a few relatively bright spots – Jordan, Morocco, Oman and Tunisia – and the Saudi government has recently tempered its penchant for brutal repression and state violence with a more promising effort to break the grip of a toxic religious establishment. Without American support, key US partners such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan could have been far more seriously destabilised after 9/11, or during the Islamic State’s rampage.25 But on the whole, no American policymaker can look with satisfaction on what the region has become.
The invasion of Iraq looms large in this regard. That country was supposed to serve as the keystone of a larger project of regional transformation. Instead, the US invasion and mishandled occupation unleashed waves of instability and violence, in all likelihood discouraging democratic reform in the region.26 The subsequent US surge delivered remarkable results, both in reducing violence and creating hints of a non-sectarian politics. But so much had to go well to make it work, and so many of its benefits proved transient, that it may demonstrate as much about the inherent difficulty of state-building in divided societies with violent pasts as about the possibility of its success.27 In any event, much of that success was lost as Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister from 2006 to 2014, governed in an increasingly sectarian fashion from 2010 onward – especially after the US departure and the start of the civil war in neighbouring Syria in 2011.28
The Iraq experience demonstrates why regional political progress has proved so elusive. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States set remarkably high goals for itself, then failed to stick to consistent state-building strategies for more than a few years at a time. Across the broader region, a daunting combination of factors – rapidly growing populations, stagnant wages, a perceived lack of opportunity, corruption, autocracy and long legacies of political violence – skewed developments towards instability and repression. The United States was not the source of most of these problems. Yet it did – in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere – periodically make them worse, and it certainly never showed sufficient skill in or commitment to solving them. On balance, moreover, American intervention contributed to costs far higher than virtually any leading policymaker anticipated in 2001.
The price
Start with the human and financial toll. The direct costs of campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have each been about $1trn; factoring in knowable and inevitable costs of future veterans’ benefits, even a conservative calculation pushes the tab to roughly $4trn, equal to some 20% of total US publicly held federal debt.29 The dollar costs pale next to the human costs. More than 7,000 Americans died. Ten times that number were seriously wounded or maimed, many suffering from post-traumatic stress and other mental challenges, with resulting implications for increased suicide and divorce rates, all borne by an all-volunteer force that constitutes roughly one-half of 1% of the nation’s population.30 These costs must be kept in perspective – the total number of US fatalities from 20 years of the GWOT remains roughly half the number of fatalities American forces suffered in the single worst year of the Vietnam War – but they are tragic nonetheless.
The cost in lives paid by other people has been even greater. In Iraq, for instance, it is estimated that somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000 people were killed in the American invasion and its long aftermath. That fact represents a major humanitarian travesty. It has also taken a strategic toll on America by fuelling cynicism about the moral claims underpinning its foreign policy throughout the broader region.
On top of this, the GWOT – particularly the Iraq War under George W. Bush – inflicted geopolitical costs. It ruptured relations with European allies, stirred up long-standing rivals such as Russia, decreased freedom of action to confront (even diplomatically) rogue-state proliferators in Iran and North Korea, and distracted attention from the emerging yet visible challenge of a rising China. The Bush administration initially saw the GWOT as a way of reinvigorating American leadership and primacy, yet Washington ultimately exited the most intense period of that struggle in a geopolitically worse position than it was in when the conflict had started.31
Some would argue that the catalogue of costs also includes serious domestic problems such as militarised policing, xenophobia and political violence.32 Here, the accounting becomes more tenuous. It is easy to identify ways – the provision of surplus military goods to police departments, for instance – in which the GWOT has ‘come home’.33 But many problems attributed to the GWOT predate, and have roots that run much deeper than, that conflict.
If one contends that the GWOT has had a corrosive, illiberal effect on the nation’s policies, it is essential to consider the counterfactual. Had the United States taken a more relaxed attitude towards terrorism and paid no price for it in terms of security, America’s domestic politics might well have been more stable and tranquil today. Yet if that attitude had led to additional attacks and heightened insecurity, the result might have been a climate even more conducive to xenophobia and fearmongering of the sort Trump practised at the height of the Islamic State’s power in 2015 and 2016. Alternatively, if the United States had chosen a strategy that focused almost exclusively on domestic hardening rather than attacking terrorist organisations militarily, it might have required more restrictions on civil liberties than the country experienced after 9/11. And the Middle East could be in significantly more turmoil as well, perhaps even including war or extreme instability in places like Saudi Arabia.
Crucially, moreover, the GWOT’s costs have fallen dramatically over time. The number of American servicemembers killed in combat has been in the low dozens each year since 2015, compared to the high hundreds at the peak of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The overall US military presence and strategy for the broader Middle East region costs some $50 billion to $60bn a year now, as measured in terms of ‘overseas contingency operations’ costs, but these include deterrence of Iran and general vigilance in a region that is still important, if somewhat less so than 20 or 30 years ago, to US and allied security and prosperity. The United States currently stations between 50,000 and 60,000 military personnel in the greater Middle East, compared to well over three times that number roughly a decade ago. The problem of geopolitical distraction has become more pressing as security challenges elsewhere intensify, but even that toll has fallen along with the size of the American military commitment. This reduction of costs is evidence of how much more bearable American strategy has become. But it is also an implicit reproach of how costly American strategy once was.
Assessing US strategy and Biden’s Afghanistan decision
So far, the United States has mostly achieved its fundamental strategic objective in the GWOT. The American homeland, citizenry, polity, economy and way of life have been reasonably well protected, in no small part because the United States has inflicted such severe punishment on the extremist groups that threaten the country most. But the United States and its allies appear no closer to safely bringing the GWOT to a conclusion because the problems of Salafist violence and regional instability are significantly worse than they were when the conflict began. In short, American strategy has produced acceptable but hardly desirable outcomes, and the fact that the costs have been so high suggests to some that Washington might have made do with a less resource-intensive approach all along.
There is something to this critique. The need to wage the GWOT in a costcontrolled, politically sustainable manner eventually produced what might be called a medium-footprint approach – neither the heavy interventions employed in Iraq and eventually in Afghanistan, nor the minimalist approach first attempted in Afghanistan. This strategy of focusing on counterterrorism operations, supporting local partners (even very flawed ones) and eschewing armed state-building never delivered a measure of stability to Afghanistan in the early 2000s, which is why the United States gradually – and, ultimately, enormously – expanded its presence there in the latter Bush and early Obama years. (The scar tissue from that difficult experience, in turn, may have influenced the psychological and strategic outlook underlying Biden’s decision to end the US and NATO military mission in 2021.) Consistently pursuing a more disciplined, counter-terrorism-focused strategy also would have required Americans to accept, from the outset, a bitter reality: that the GWOT was destined to be unsatisfying and indefinite because its underlying causes would remain unaddressed. Yet, on balance, this probably would have been the wiser course.
It is certainly the wiser course today. For all the handwringing about ‘forever wars’ over the past several years, the United States has arrived at a reasonably effective, reasonably sustainable strategy for managing a terrorism problem that will not be solved anytime soon. By maintaining numerous regional footholds with military and intelligence capabilities, using trainers and enablers to empower committed local forces, and suppressing the most serious threats while playing a long game with respect to political reform, the United States can likely achieve an acceptable degree of security at an acceptable cost.
This is what makes the course that the Biden administration is following in Afghanistan so fraught. Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is, in some ways, a viscerally understandable response to the high cumulative costs and frustrating results of US intervention there. But his announcement of the withdrawal was more a critique of the unsustainably expensive GWOT that America was fighting in 2009, when he was vice president, than the more efficient, slimmed-down conflict it had recently been prosecuting.34 The US presence in Afghanistan, as of 2020, had already been scaled back roughly 95% from peak troop levels – and even more than that in terms of the number of American casualties suffered each year. By withdrawing from Afghanistan, Biden is ending, for now, hands-on American involvement in a conflict that was not likely to be resolved in a satisfactory fashion soon. Unfortunately, the administration is also accepting a significantly higher chance that Afghanistan will once again become a terrorist sanctuary, either through a takeover by the Taliban – which remains closely linked to al-Qaeda – or a collapse into the violent chaos in which extremist groups thrive.
There are steps that the United States can take to mitigate that danger from afar. It can fly military aircraft out of air bases in the Persian Gulf, off aircraft carriers or large amphibious ships in the Indian Ocean, or perhaps facilities yet to be acquired in Central Asia to strike the personnel or assets of resurgent terrorist groups. It might mount periodic raids against terrorist targets using special-operations forces or paramilitaries. These intermittent military efforts would be paired with the ongoing provision of funding, equipment and other security assistance to Afghan forces seeking to hold the Taliban and their allies at bay. The threat of economic sanctions and international opprobrium might be wielded to discourage the Taliban from allowing terrorist proxies to operate freely, or running any territories it controls in a future Afghanistan with a brutal, misogynistic hand. As CIA Director William Burns and US Central Command commander General Frank McKenzie have publicly argued, addressing the ongoing terrorism threat in Afghanistan from neighbouring regions will be very difficult, but perhaps not impossible.35
Yet this strategy – if pursued proactively – may not be significantly cheaper than the boots-on-the-ground presence of late 2020 and early 2021, which cost US taxpayers some $10–20bn annually. It may not wind up being safer for American personnel, as the country begins to fall apart and over-the-horizon raids have to be conducted in an increasingly hostile, inaccessible environment. And it almost certainly would not be more effective in containing threats, because conducting counter-terrorism from a distance – particularly in landlocked Afghanistan – is extraordinarily hard.
With American forces and at least some diplomatic personnel having departed, the United States will lose some of its influence with the Afghan government, just as the Obama administration lost influence with an increasingly sectarian Iraqi government following the US withdrawal in 2011. Once the United States is operating from over the horizon, it will also lose much of its awareness of what is happening on the ground. Human-intelligence networks are the best means of finding terrorist needles among civilianpopulation haystacks, but they only work if Americans are present to build rapport and trust with likely sources – and if Afghanistan’s own intelligence agencies maintain access to large parts of their own country. Drones can provide some situational awareness, but only when cued to a small region: their soda-straw photographic apertures cannot scan large land masses comprehensively, and they work far better when deployed from nearby bases than from distant bases in Qatar or the Indian Ocean. Unless the United States negotiates access to a Central Asian country, airstrikes or surveillance flights from the Gulf would also require permission from Pakistan, which looks to be at best an unreliable future partner. In this light, the expansion of extremist sanctuaries, with or without explicit Taliban blessing, seems not merely possible but probable.
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