Frank Gardner’s latest look at the war on terror turns on a simple problem: George W. Bush set a finish line that could not be reached. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, he said the fight would not end until every terrorist group of global reach had been found, stopped, and defeated.
George W. Bush and Al Qaeda
Bush told a joint session of Congress, “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there” and “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” That language widened the target from one network to an open-ended category, and that is where the campaign became impossible to close.
Colin Clarke said, “We basically set ourselves up to fail by making the standard so impossible to achieve.” He added, “It also led to a never-ending war, because, when can you actually defeat ‘terrorism’?” His point was blunt: a war can be fought against a group, but not against an abstract idea that can keep changing shape.
Bruce Hoffman on victory
Bruce Hoffman drew the line more narrowly. He said winning would have required the defeat of Al Qaeda and countering its narrative and ideology, and added, “that is not the same as winning a war.” He also said, “To have won the war on terrorism required the defeat of Al Qaeda—which the U.S. did not achieve.”
He went further: “It would have required countering Al Qaeda’s narrative and triumphing over its malignant ideology. We have failed there, too.” The distinction matters because the United States could blunt attacks without ever reaching the total victory Bush described.
Afghanistan and the toll
Bruce Hoffman said the United States prevented another catastrophic domestic attack for more than two decades. That is the contradiction at the center of the story: the country avoided another strike on the scale of September 11, 2001, but that did not add up to winning the war as declared.
The costs were enormous. About seven thousand American service members died in U.S. campaigns against extremism, and almost a million people were killed directly in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen. Roughly half were civilians, and the United States spent trillions of dollars on those conflicts.
The scale becomes clearer when set against the start of the war. On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda’s hijackers killed almost three thousand people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania. By the time this argument is revisited, the United States has spent more than two decades in conflict with extremism, with the bill measured in lives and trillions of dollars rather than the clean victory Bush promised.
