Notes

Nick Lopez
WRD 104
Naylor
11/15/21
The United States Succeeded in Failing in the War on Terror
I’ve never been able to arrive at an airport and board the plane within the same hour. ID in hand, I’ve always had to remove my shoes and throw out any water bottle I hadn’t finished because it was against the guidelines defined by Transportation Security Administration. Friends have been taken to private rooms and searched solely based on how they look. All these measures are the result of one day twenty years ago, where nearly 3,000 people were killed in the worst terrorist attack in American history. As a result, President George W. Bush announced the “War on Terror,” an initiative to fight terrorists at home and abroad, most specifically in the Middle East. Since its declaration, the objectives and goals of the war have morphed and changed and have had unintended consequences throughout the world. The War on Terror has ultimately failed its purpose to eliminate terrorist threats in the world, due to poor military logistics, the constantly changing scope of the war, and the inability to understand the people and culture of Afghanistan.
The first threats that the United States identified in the war on terror were al-Qaeda and the Taliban. United States intervention in Afghanistan dates to the Cold War in 1979. Following the Soviet invasion of the country, the US rushed to the aid of the anti-communist guerilla fighters known as the Mujahideen. Ten years and $20 billion later, the Soviet forces withdrew, and the communist Afghan government was dissolved by 1992. The power vacuum left by the collapse of the government induced years of chaos. Daniel P. Sullivan talks about the Taliban’s rise to power in his article Tinder, Spark, Oxygen, and Fuel: The Mysterious Rise of the Taliban. In his article, he describes Afghanistan as a state plagued with kidnapping, rape, and pillaging despite all UN efforts to create power sharing agreements among Afghan warlords. In this chaos, the Taliban would slowly gain popularity in rural communities as they promised to end the lawlessness of Afghanistan (Sullivan).
During the Soviet-Afghan conflict, a wealthy Saudi Arabian man named Osama bin Laden financed large portions of the Afghan resistance. Al-Qaeda was a logistical network founded by bin Laden during the war to expel the Soviet Union. Following the end of the war, they dispersed and scattered across the world, and eventually reestablished a headquarters in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban in 1996. From there, al-Qaeda planned and executed several terrorist attacks on the US, including the bombing of the US navy warship USS Cole and the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The most notable of their terrorist activities was the September 11th attacks on New York City and the surrounding area in 2001.
The origins of the war on terror were noble and warranted by the United States. After such an atrocious act had been committed, retaliation was surely expected. A Gallup poll conducted on November 12, 2001, just two months after 9/11, showed that 66% of Americans favored “sending large numbers of ground troops into combat in Afghanistan, while just 28% are opposed.” Public support was incredibly high for intervention, and even 56% of respondents said they favored using force for more than five years if necessary (Jones). The American people wanted war. However, they wanted a war that they were not prepared to fight. This resulted in poor planning and ineffective military logistics. Carter Malkasian served as a civilian advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan and was the senior advisor to General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2015 to 2019. In his editorial in Politico, he outlines how the US mission in Afghanistan was doomed from the start. The main reason, he states, is that the Taliban had an advantage in their aspiration to fight for their cause. He had a conversation with the Taliban, quoting them saying that “‘The Taliban fight for belief, for janat (heaven) and ghazi (killing infidels) … The army and police fight for money.’” The United States military was the only force in Afghanistan with the drive and determination to fight. This idea was further reinforced in Andrew McCarthy’s article “9/11 Twenty Years Later.” He says that “Jihadists believe that history is on their side, that they are winning, that their opponents are weak of will, and that they will ultimately prevail by patient, ruthless faith (McCarthy).” When the Soviets were defeated, the Jihadists in the Mujahideen saw this as their prophecy fulfilled, and that the “Red Army was pummeled into submission by the ’battalions of Islam’…(McCarthy).” American soldiers often fight with the fear of death, while the Taliban fighters welcome it, as they see it as a necessary sacrifice to achieve their goal. There was only one congressperson in the United States who voted against military intervention in Afghanistan. Gillian Brockell, a staff writer for The Washington Post, discusses how Barbara Lee (D-California) was the sole voice of opposition to the war on terror. Brockell quotes Lee as saying “However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment… and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.’” The United States’ fatal flaw in recent international affairs is that it operates on a reactive basis, not proactive. Lee urged Congress to refrain from a reactive response and instead think about what the implications of their choices may be. She was not anti-war, but against giving the president a “blank check” to start the War on Terror, that “had no fixed goal or end date (Brockell).” The term “War on Terror” is incredibly broad and presents the opportunity for the war to never end. Just as Barbara Lee feared, the war on terror became more than just Afghanistan, and continues to this day. The word “terror” as defined by the Merriam Webster dictionary, is a “violent or destructive act (such as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands.” The problem with dubbing the reaction to the 9/11 attacks as the “war on terror” is that the definition of such a war is up to the discretion of the United States. What is “terror”? There is no definite enemy in this war except for an idea itself. The US did not declare war on al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or any governing body or group. Purposefully, America declared a war on “terror” so that it could have a limitless reach into international affairs and do as it pleased under the guise of the “war on terror.” The words of Barbara Lee ring clear here, as the war is never ending, as she warned.
Another issued that plagued the American campaign against terrorism was the limitless definition of the war on terror, and thus the constantly changing scope of the war. After 9/11, President Bush said himself in a speech to Congress that the goal of the war on terror was to eliminate terrorist threats around the globe. And initially, this was achieved in Afghanistan. The Taliban government had collapsed by December of 2001, just three short months after 9/11. Recognizing that al-Qaeda leaders were still at large, the US retained a military presence in the region and executed several plans, such as the Anaconda Plan, which was a plan to track and eliminate over 800 al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, to ensure that the terrorist threat remain as low as possible. This plan proved successful in decentralizing and weakening al-Qaeda substantially, but they still retain a presence to this day. However, the US shifted its focus from anti-terrorist operations to nation building and democratizing the Afghan government. Of course, the US holds responsibility for damage caused in Afghanistan throughout the war and should have maintained a relationship with the country to rebuild what was destroyed. Instead of this, President Bush decided that it was America’s responsibility to police Afghanistan and manually reconstruct the government for them. Russel A. Berman, a professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, says it best in his commentary on French journalist and war correspondent Renaud Girard’s thoughts about Afghanistan:
The initial intent of defeating a fanatic adversary became a plan for nation-building and modernization. Future historians will have to deliberate as to how this metamorphosis took place, and whether that aspiration to remake Afghan society as a liberal democracy was genuinely plausible. Was it merely abandoned too soon—or did it simply assume too much transformative capacity on the part of any occupying force?
The expectation that the United States could suddenly install a liberal democracy in a conservative, Islamic country was a major misstep in the Afghanistan conflict. Instead of choosing the government for the people of Afghanistan, they should have been able to decide on it themselves. Due to the inability to form a stable government, the interim government failed to hold itself up upon the withdrawal of American forces in August of 2021, falling to the Taliban in a number of days and again subjugating the people of Afghanistan to their regime.
The final way in which the United States failed in the war on terror was its inability to understand the people, culture, and terrain of the regions in which they were involved. The Taliban held the homefield advantage. They knew the area of Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan. After the major battles had been fought, they found safe refuge in the vast mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush. US Special Forces would find this terrain less than ideal, and the war was prolonged due to this. However, it was the Taliban’s understanding of the people and culture of Afghanistan which gave them the true advantage. In the late 20th century when the Taliban first came to power, it was by the people that they retained their strength. They know that the people of Afghanistan are people who hate corruption and greed. Both communist and democratic forms of government were seen as havens for these qualities, so when the Taliban came in with a swift plan to destroy corruption and maintain order, they were welcomed. The Taliban know the people of Afghanistan because they are the people of Afghanistan. The liberal democratic regime that the US attempted to arrange was cursed with distrust from the start and was doomed to fail. The influence of an outside power in their land was the catalyst that brought the Taliban into being. How would another outside force drive them out? Aside from US influence, the armed forces of Afghanistan were well equipped, but unfortunately, poorly motivated. How is the United States expected to fight a war with a people who have no desire to win it? American intelligence did not successfully establish a relationship with the government of Afghanistan that promoted its wellbeing and survival. Instead of the US supporting their Afghan counterparts, they ended up becoming intertwined with them, and the Afghan government could not survive without American aid. This proved fatal when President Biden withdrew the last remaining American troops from Afghanistan in a hurried and unorganized fashion. Within weeks, the Taliban had regained control of most of the country and the capital of Kabul. The twenty years spent expelling the Taliban and propping up a democratic Afghan government had failed.
In addition to invading Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda, there were also multiple other interventions the US made to fight the war on terror. Most notably, the United States invaded Iraq on the premise that their leader Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and harboring terrorists, much like Afghanistan. However, these claims made by President Bush were not valid and were eventually proven wrong. This is a primary instance where the US used the guise of the war on terror to carry out attacks on foreign countries that they saw as a threat. Even the French president Jacques Chirac and German chancellor Gerhard Schroder condemned the actions of the participants in the Iraq war. The actions taken by the US to invade Iraq spawned a new feeling of islamophobia and anti-Islamic imperialism throughout the Arab world. While Saddam Hussein was in fact guilty of multiple human rights violations, this did not constitute the murder of millions of Iraqi civilians and the destruction of their homeland. Iraq had been in the process of complying with the UN Security Council when the US began to make plans to invade the country. Had the US been more diplomatic in their reaction to Iraq, they would have been able to prevent years of turmoil in the country after the war. Even more shocking is that in July of 2004, a US bipartisan commission formed to investigate the September 11th attacks concluded that there was no evidence of a “collaborative operational relationship” between the government of Iraq and al-Qaeda. This revelation directly contradicts the accusations made by President Bush prior to the invasion of Iraq. Hans Blix, a Swedish diplomat, and head of UN weapons inspections in Iraq, says in a CNN opinion article that the decision to invade Iraq was a “terrible mistake.” He goes on to mention how the purpose of the war was to eliminate the tyrant Saddam Hussein, WMDs, and the al-Qaeda threat in Iraq. He does acknowledge the positive outcome that was the trial and death of Saddam Hussein, but mentions how there were no WMDs found in Iraq, and that al-Qaeda only became present in the country after the US invasion had been completed. The most interesting quote I found from Blix’s commentary was:
However, suspicions are one thing and reality is quite another. U.N. inspectors were asked to search for, report and destroy real weapons. As we found no weapons and no evidence supporting the suspicions, we reported this. But U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield dismissed our reports with one of his wittier retorts: ‘The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’
This commentary is provoking because it reveals how the entire premise for the US war in Iraq was a sham. American high command wanted an unnecessary war. They actively pursued evidence that was not real, and when it was revealed that there was no reasonable cause for war, they still chose military action. Innocent civilians are a constant byproduct of war, and when a country actively seeks a war that is not necessary, they kill innocent people and waste taxpayer money.
A global response to the September 11th attacks on the United States was certainly appropriate. However, the war on terror was the worst response that the United States could have come to. The vague declaration that was made by President Bush resulted in a twenty yearlong engagement that went far beyond its initial intentions. As a result, hundreds of thousands of civilians lay dead, and after twenty years of battle, the Taliban again have control of the government of Afghanistan, proving that the US failed in its goal to eliminate the terrorist threat in Afghanistan. This was mainly due to poor military logistics, the constantly changing scope of the war, and the inability to understand the people and culture of Afghanistan.






Works Cited
Berman, Russell A. “The Consequences of Afghanistan: Comments on Girard.” Telos vol. 2021, no. 196, Fall 2021,pp 163-165. AcademicSearchComplete, doi10.3817/0921196163 http://journal.telospress.com/content/2021/196/163.full.pdf+html.
Blix, Hans. “Why Invading Iraq Was a Terrible Mistake | CNN.” CNN, 19 Mar. 2013, https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/18/opinion/iraq-war-hans-blix/index.html.
Brockell, Gillian. “She Was the Only Member of Congress to Vote against War in Afghanistan. Some Called Her a Traitor.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 18 Aug. 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/08/17/barbara-lee-afghanistan-vote/.
Jones, Jeffrey M. “Americans Seem Committed to Winning War on Terrorism.” Gallup.com, Gallup, 6 Oct. 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/5050/americans-seem-committed-winning-war-terrorism.aspx.
Malkasian, Carter. “What America Didn't Understand about Its Longest War.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 6 July 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/07/06/afghanistan-war-malkasian-bookexcerpt-497843
McCarthy, Andrew C. “9/11 Twenty Years Later.” New Criterion, vol. 40, no. 1, Sept. 2021, pp. 27–34. AcademicSearchComplete.com.ezproxy.depaul.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db= a9h &A N=151945789&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Sullivan, Daniel P. “Tinder, Spark, Oxygen, and Fuel: The Mysterious Rise of the Taliban.” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 44, no. 1AcademicSearchComplete,, 2007, pp. 93–108, doi:10.1177/0022343307071659.
“Terror.” Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terror?utm_campaign=sd
&utm_medium=serp&utm_source=jsonld. Accessed 15 Nov. 2021.