Shortly after 9/11, as the War on Terror was being constructed and advertised to the public, we were told repeatedly that it would be a very different type of conflict from the large-scale ground wars of the last century. I don't think anyone imagined at the time exactly how different it would be. Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq occurred within two years. Both of them lead to long-term insugencies; in Afghanistan because of the difficulties of constructing the strong central government the US clearly needed there, in Iraq because the astonishingly fast transition from authoritarian state to near-anarchy gave tensions that had been simmering for decades all the oxygen they needed to burst quite literally into flames.
President Obama came into office in significant part because of his rejection of that heavy-handed approach to anti-terrorism policies. He saw Afghanistan as an unpleasant but necessary conflict, and Iraq as a catastrophic error. His goal was to end Iraq as quickly as was feasible and do enough to stabilize Afghanistan before getting out of there too. He had, to put it mildly, mixed success pursuing those goals. He succeeded in drawing down US combat troops from Iraq, which scarcely two years later was afflicted by the meteoric rise of ISIS. After he increased the US presence in Afghanistan, the military situation ground to an eight-year stalemate that has still not been broken.
Yet, while he disdained and to my knowledge never used the phrase "War on Terror" while in office, Obama was nonetheless very committed to fighting it. That being said, he fundamentally changed the way it was fought. His aversion to the use of conventional military force has been well-documented, and his response was to rely increasingly on drone actions while also enlarging the area in which they were free to operate to countries like Yemen and Somalia. He had in a sense only halfway removed himself from President Bush's policy. Averse to a course that could lead to ground wars at any time, he committed to one that would guarantee a lesser but very real form of war all the time. This form of war has been used increasingly by President Trump, who by all accounts has none of Obama's qualms about the use of force abroad.
The point I am attempting to make is one that has been made many times already, but it is importat to keep sight of it. The United States has now been at war in the Middle East for approacing 16 years without interruption. It is true that every al Qaeda or ISIS leader who is killed decreases the likelihood of American deaths to terrorism. That is a fact. But is it also a fact that every civilian casualty, every airstrike that bends rules of national sovereignty beyond recognition, and every time we don't take world opinion into account as we act, only serves to gift propaganda victories to anti-American and anti-Western groups. Those things also do real damage to local communities in the Middle East, encouraging still more anti-American sentiment.
There comes a point where we have to question the utility of a policy that manages to create more radicals every time it eliminates one. We cannot crush radicalism from the air. We cannot crush radicalism even from the ground. Political problems - and make no mistake terrorism is very much a political problem - do not in general have military solutions. In 16 years, has the Middle East become more stable, or has terrorism become any less of a global issue? Do people feel safer in their beds? Are we more optimistic about the future?
I think the level of ineffectiveness we have seen in countering rising tides of radicalism worldwide, in stark contrast to our very keen and clinical responses to inidivudal potential attacks, is damning for our strategy do date. The question "how will we know when we've won?" is unanswerable for the War on Terror, which as a result demands that it be either abandoned, refined, or continued into the indefinite future. Even beyond that, perpertual war can only serve to make us more of a security state than we have become in the last 16 years. If we don't seriously reevaluate how we're attacking this problem, in another 16 years we'll be having the same discussion.
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