President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan has provoked a flood of commentaries on our “forever war.” This obviously isn’t the war in Afghanistan, which lasted a long time but not forever. Indeed, Fred Smoler has made a strong case that Biden ended it too soon, given the consequences of defeat for Afghan women. I would be inclined to agree; my political sympathies lie that way. But I suspect that the war failed disastrously long ago, and Trump’s agreement with the Taliban, a virtual surrender, effectively ended it. The agreement led to a reduction in the number of American troops beyond the number necessary to sustain the existing stalemate—which wasn’t actually a stalemate: in the final months the Afghan army was losing ground every day. And, what was more critical, the agreement undermined the Afghan government by excluding it from the negotiations. By Biden’s time, many provincial officials and military officers, seeing what was coming, had made private deals with the Taliban.
The “forever war” is the “war on terror” that began immediately after 9/11. Our Afghan engagement was only briefly a part of that war, only briefly a response to the 9/11 attacks. After the first few weeks, with the Taliban government overthrown, its militants in hiding, and Al Qaeda’s networks disrupted, it became something else. It was a war to create a liberal democratic (and America friendly) Afghan state—an under-resourced war since America’s leaders already had their eyes on Iraq and a war fought in alliance with warlords and tribal leaders who had little interest in liberalism or democracy. Our real allies were the democratic activists, the trade unionists, and the feminists who “came out” under American cover—and they were our only reason for staying. Not reason enough, as things turned out, for staying “forever.”
Smoler’s comparison with Korea is helpful here, though I don’t think that it supports staying on in Afghanistan. The military stalemate in Korea was followed by a negotiated cease fire; the opposing armies were separated by a demilitarized zone; and after that we kept some 30,000 troops in the South. By contrast, even if we imagine a stalemate on the ground in Afghanistan, there was no prospect of a long-term cease fire or of a division of the country marked by anything like a demilitarized zone; and we would not have been ready to add tens of thousands of soldiers to guarantee the stability of the cease fire, if there was a cease fire. In Korea, it was the end of the fighting that enabled us to stay on (for decades, as it has turned out); in Afghanistan it was the fact that there was no end in sight that made it very hard to stay on.
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So what is the “war on terror”? It isn’t like any of our major foreign wars: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. It’s actually a lot like the “war on crime”—and both of these are indeed “forever wars.” There is no reason, in either case, to expect a victory celebration like V-J Day, the definitive end of crime or terrorism. The world is full of religious fanatics and ideological zealots, full of men and women possessed by fierce anger and simmering resentment. More simply, the world is full of madness, and it has never been easier for a mad individual or a group of mad individuals to find the means to kill. Overcrowded cities that are poorly policed; corrupt governments and failed states; vulnerable technologies and readily available weapons: this is the world we live in. We have to expect terrorist attacks—the murder, again and again, of innocent people for some religious or political purpose or simply as an expression of religious or political fury. There will be more or less terror at any given moment, just as there is more or less crime—a crime wave and then a sharp drop in assaults and murders; a terrorist “success,” like 9/11, and then a lull. But the “war on terror” is endless; we have to accept that. Critics of the war, who focus on its forever-ness, are naive or silly; criticism should focus elsewhere.
What’s necessary is to insist that the “war on terror,” like the “war on crime” (and the “war on poverty”) isn’t actually a war. Our metaphors sometimes get the better of us. What this metaphor means is that the struggle against terrorism is serious and tough. But military action ought to be a small and occasional part of the war; mostly it involves police work, ideological work, and diplomatic work. We won’t do any of this work well, however, if we rely too much on the use of military force.
Police work is obviously required; abolitionist agitation here (no police! no prisons!) seems radically misplaced. But we have learned how important it is to watch suspiciously the activities of the CIA, the investigations and interrogations, the undercover spying and the use of informers. All this may be necessary, but it is also necessary to police the secret police, to make sure that what is done is done carefully, subtly, in ways that respect individual rights and democratic decision-making. Police work doesn’t require mass surveillance, lawless detention, or torture. Zealous policemen/women are no better than zealots of any other sort. But make no mistake: people everywhere want to be protected against terrorist attacks. Those of us who are committed to defend political freedom and civil liberty have to figure out how that can be done in ways consistent with everyone’s safety.
In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, the ideological opposition to terrorism was focused on Nazis and Stalinists, who ruled by terror over vast territories. The struggle against Nazism required an actual war—not only against terror but also against aggression, tyranny, and genocide. The struggle against Stalinism is a better model for the “war on terror,” since it was fought and won at least in part by ideological criticism and “cold war” diplomacy. Today’s terrorists are more likely to be religiously than politically driven; rightwing nationalism, in the US and elsewhere, is also a threat, but religion is implicated there, too. We need an ideological campaign against religious fanaticism, which is manifest today in almost every one of the world’s religions. This shouldn’t only be a governmental campaign; the engagement of civil society organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch is important; and all of us who talk, write, and argue should be involved. I am involved right now; please consider this article a defense of secular democracy.
State terrorism and state support of terrorist groups require the full range of diplomatic responses: alliances, sanctions, aid and the refusal of aid, even UN investigations and condemnations. Diplomacy here extends to the use of force short of war, as in the effort to constrain Saddam Hussein’s murderous attacks against the Kurds in northern Iraq—which included a naval blockade and a no-fly zone. Both of these were endorsed by the UN and (at least for a while) multilaterally enforced, signs that diplomats had been hard at work.
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“Short of war” is a critical limit, but military engagement may sometimes be necessary. I don’t mean to rule it out, only to insist that we look skeptically at every claim of necessity. When we (the US) engage with air power, drones, or “special forces,” we have to make sure that our targets are actual terrorists, that we have reliable on-the-ground intelligence (which requires the military version of police work), that we have local support, and that this is an integrated effort with diplomatic and political engagement before and after the attack. I have difficulty thinking of examples—perhaps the brief campaign against the ISIS Caliphate and the rescue of the Yezidis suggests what ought to be done—where the ground war was fought entirely by local forces with the US supporting the effort from the air.
But this last campaign would not have been necessary if we hadn’t invaded Iraq in 2003 and then left too quickly in 2011 (well short of forever). Iraq in 2003 was actually the first time the “war on terror” was used to justify a full-scale war that had little to do with terrorism. Regime change was a better reason for that war, though I didn’t think it good enough—another argument, for another day. Meanwhile, let’s take control of the metaphor: we have to “fight”—forever—against terror the same way we “fight”—forever—against crime and also the way we “fight”—forever—against inequality, racism, poverty, and corruption. We have to fight without war, without violence of any kind for as long as we can.