TIME TO STEP BACK FROM THE WAR ON TERROR
ERIK GOEPNER AND TREVOR THRALL
President Donald Trump has expanded every
aspect of the war on terror he inherited
from his two predecessors. In his first nine
months Trump has ordered a renewed surge in
Afghanistan, increased the tempo of drone
strikes, and granted the military greater
autonomy. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the
Taliban now control or contest more
districts than at any point since 2001. And
last week four American soldiers died in
Niger, an increasingly active front in the
war on terror. Americans are now fighting —
and dying — in at least eight different
countries across the Middle East and Central
Asia. The deaths of American forces are a
particularly sobering reminder of the war’s
high costs and should prompt people to ask
whether the costs are worth it.
Unfortunately, the evidence of the past 16
years clearly indicates that the answer is
no. Enough time has now passed since 9/11 to
reach two important conclusions. First, the
threat posed by Islamist-inspired terrorism
does not justify such a mammoth effort.
Second, the aggressive military strategy the
United States has pursued since 2001 has not
only failed to reduce the threat of
terrorism; it has likely made things worse.
The attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were
unprecedented. Twice as many people died on
9/11 than in any other terror attack in
history. America’s immediate response — to
attack al Qaeda and invade Afghanistan —
made more sense at the time than it does
today, based on the severity of the attack,
lack of clarity from the intelligence
services, and fear among the public. Many at
the time reasonably believed that terrorism
represented a major new threat to the United
States. A decade and a half later, however,
a more dispassionate examination of the
threat suggests those initial assessments
were wrong.
The 9/11 attacks remain an outlier. No other
attacks like them have ever occurred, and
mass casualty terrorist attacks rarely take
place in the West or North America, much
less the United States. The second-worst
attack on U.S. soil is still the Oklahoma
City Bombing, where Timothy McVeigh —
decidedly not an Islamist-inspired terrorist
— took the lives of 168 in 1995. And the
second-worst attack in North America
occurred more than 30 years ago when Sikh
(again, not Islamist-inspired) extremists
bombed a plane originating from Toronto,
Canada and killed 329. The fact is that
terrorism, including large-scale attacks,
almost always occurs in failed or war-torn
states.
And neither al Qaeda nor Islamic State has
launched a successful attack in the United
States since 9/11. Though every death is
tragic, when compared to the 15,000
Americans who are murdered each year by
“regular” Americans, Islamist-inspired
terrorism hardly registers as a threat.
The persistence of Americans’ inflated view
of the threat stems from a misperception of
the goals of groups like al Qaeda and
Islamic State. Americans tend to believe al
Qaeda and the Islamic State are at war with
the United States. It’s true that Al Qaeda
has attacked the homeland of the “far enemy”
(i.e., the United States ) and ISIS does
dedicate some effort to radicalizing U.S.
citizens. But these groups’ fundamental
goals are more internal: They are engaged in
a generational struggle for power in the
Middle East and Central Asia. Al Qaeda aims
to “rid the Muslim world of Western
influence, to destroy Israel, and to create
an Islamic caliphate stretching from Spain
to Indonesia” and, similarly, ISIL wants to
establish an Islamic caliphate.
These groups’ central problem is the
presence of the United States in the Middle
East, not its existence. Osama bin Laden’s
outrage at Arab states for requesting that
U.S. forces, rather than a Muslim force,
remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991
reveals this point. After Operation Desert
Storm, bin Laden railed against the
continued presence of U.S. military forces
in Saudi Arabia, home to Mecca and Medina,
Islam’s two holiest sites. As long as the
United States continues to intervene, it
will continue to draw the ire of Islamist
groups. Most fundamentally, Al Qaeda,
Islamic State, and other similar groups seek
power and influence over their own
neighborhood.
America’s improved homeland security system
may be another reason for the low threat
level. The 9/11 hijackers legally entered
the United States using their real
identities. They conducted their pilot
training here, with one living with his
American flight instructors. Two even
successfully argued their way back into the
country, assuring U.S. customs and border
agents that they were authorized pilot
training students. Since then, the United
States has started pre-screening all
passengers before they fly into, within, or
out of the country, and 72 fusion centers
have been established to facilitate
information sharing. The risk of terror in
the most important potential safe haven —
the United States — has been substantially
reduced. Homeland security improvements have
not reduced the risk of terrorism to zero,
of course. Nothing can. But they have made
conducting large-scale terrorist attacks
significantly more difficult. These efforts
should have been the extent of America’s
response to 9/11.
Instead, the United States adopted an
aggressive strategy focused on military
intervention. America invaded two countries,
toppled three regimes, and conducted
military operations in eight nations The
plan, in the words of the Bush
administration’s national security strategy,
was to “destroy terrorist organizations of
global reach.” Though Presidents Bush and
Obama talked about the need to rebuild
Afghanistan and Iraq and weaken the
conditions that gave rise to terrorism in
the first place, the American strategy has
in practice emphasized killing as many
jihadist fighters as possible.
Donald Rumsfeld raised questions about this
military-centric strategy as early as 2003,
asking whether the current situation was
such that “the harder we work the behinder
we get.” American military commanders have
understood the difficulties posed by
irregular warfare against insurgents and
terrorists, leading to the adoption of an
updated counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq
in 2007 and later in Afghanistan. Despite
this innovation, General Stanley McChrystal,
the former head of Joint Special Operations
Command who led U.S. forces in Afghanistan
in 2009 and 2010, answered Rumsfeld’s
question in the affirmative six years later.
Calling it “COIN mathematics,” McChrystal
noted that military attacks likely create
more insurgents than they eliminate “because
each one you killed has a brother, father,
son and friends, who do not necessarily
think that they were killed because they
were doing something wrong. It does not
matter — you killed them.”
Scholarship has also weighed in, concluding
that “repression alone seldom ends
terrorism” and “military force has rarely
been the primary reason for the end of
terrorist groups.” Most commonly, terrorism
ends when groups eventually implode for lack
of support or become politically integrated.
To date, American efforts to create
political solutions have been overrun by the
dynamics generated on the battlefield.
The recent battlefield successes against
ISIL in Syria and Iraq have led some
(including Trump) to argue that the military
approach is working and should be expanded.
This is mistaken on two levels. First, the
“victory” over Islamic State has not created
conditions conducive to peace and stability
in the long term. In both 2001 and 2003,
decisive military victories gave way to
escalating insurgency and terrorism. Most
observers agree, moreover, that ISIL will
not disappear after military defeat, but
rather melt away into the population to
continue the fight. Second, the military
campaign that defeated ISIL in Raqqa and
Mosul was effective only because the
terrorist group adopted a strategy of taking
and defending territory. To date, neither
American airpower nor other military means
have proved useful against small and
dispersed groups of terrorists or
insurgents.
U.S. efforts have not materially reduced the
terror threat in the Middle East and may
well have increased it. Sixteen years after
9/11, the United States has not defeated Al
Qaeda, and Islamic State has arisen and
spread throughout the Middle East. In 2000,
the State Department identified 13 active
Islamist-inspired terrorist groups, fielding
a total of roughly 32,000 fighters. By 2015
the number of groups had climbed to 44 and
the number of fighters had ballooned to
almost 110,000. Terror attacks in the
countries where America has intervened
increased 1,900 percent after the war on
terror began as compared to the 15 years
prior to 2001. The terrible irony is that
although Islamist terrorist groups pose
little threat to the United States, American
intervention to confront them may have
inadvertently made things worse for everyone
else.
In spite of mounting evidence for the
failures of the war on terror, Trump is
doubling down. Secretary of Defense Jim
Mattis recently noted that the United States
would be expanding its war on terror in
Africa even as it again prepares to surge
forces into Afghanistan. Trump has promised
victory in Afghanistan and a quick defeat of
ISIL, but he has offered little on how this
strategy will change or accomplish U.S.
objectives. History suggests these efforts
will do little to change the facts on the
ground in Afghanistan or elsewhere, and even
less to make Americans more secure.
Instead, continued U.S. action is likely to
fuel grievances, amplify instability in the
region, and generate more anti-American
sentiment. Evidence for growing anti-
Americanism in the region since 9/11 is
plentiful. Survey data from the Pew Research
Center reveal a steady increase in anti-
American views after the invasion of Iraq.
Several studies, as well as survey data,
make it clear that Middle Eastern publics
have almost uniformly negative views of
American drone strikes, one of the most
popular tools of the war on terror. Even
worse, the Arab Barometer found that between
53% and 74% of citizens in Egypt, Jordan,
Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia, and Algeria felt that
U.S. intervention justified “attacks on
Americans everywhere.” Finally, a recent
study of Arab Twitter discourse found deep
levels of anti-Americanism among Arabs and
concluded that: “levels of anti-Americanism
are primarily driven by the perceived
impingement of America on the Middle East,
and specifically by United States
intervention in the region.” Sadly, the
jihadist leadership appears to have a firmer
grasp on this dynamic than Americans do. In
a 2005 letter to ISIL founder Abu Musab al-
Zarqawi, Ayman al-Zawahiri (the current al-
Qaeda leader) wrote, “The Muslim masses … do
not rally except against an outside
occupying enemy, especially if the enemy is
firstly Jewish, and secondly American.”
As we argued in our recent Cato Institute
policy analysis, the United States should
step back, withdraw military forces, and
instead focus on incentivizing local actors
towards stability, capability, and
transparency. The removal of U.S. military
personnel will require local governments to
professionalize their bureaucracies and
security forces — a difficult task, to be
sure, but one the United States has not
managed despite 16 years of direct effort.
Curtailing the flow of billions of U.S.
dollars and weapons into failed states
should also help reduce corruption and limit
the available spoils of war. The terror
threat to the American homeland does not
warrant a continued military presence in the
Middle East or South Asia, and the
military-centric strategy has failed to
achieve the stated objectives of successive
administrations. Fortunately, the United
States has the luxury of not needing to win
any war on terror.
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