What Was the War on Terror?

The war on terror is over. It lasted from Sept. 11, 2001, to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. As we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, it is useful for both historical and policy reasons to define the parameters of this conflict. The war on terror had three primary qualities that define it as a historical period. The first was that policymakers viewed terrorism as a form of war and a high-level strategic threat. The second was that counterterrorism strategy sought not only to protect the U.S. homeland but to change the international system in order to attack the root causes of terrorism. The third was that the war on terror was essentially an attempt to deal with the rise of global jihadism. These three traits have now faded or been eclipsed by other priorities. The era in which terrorism formed the lodestar for U.S. strategy has ended. Realizing this not only helps policymakers situate themselves in the world but offers them the chance to bury habits that plagued U.S. foreign policy during the war on terror itself. These habits included the tendency to concede too much to countries that assisted in fighting terrorism and turning other countries’ terrorist enemies into U.S. enemies. A photograph shows U.S. troops of 82nd Airborne Division stand at attention, saluting as they stand in front of a U.S. flag flying at half-staff. The troops wear beige-colored battle fatigues and matching hats with floppy brims. Most but not all of them appear to be young men. U.S. troops of the 82nd Airborne Division stationed at at Forward Operating Base Orgun-e in Afghanistan stand at attention before a U.S. flag flying at half-staff for the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.Getty Images/Chris Hondros On a basic level, the war on terror was a response to 9/11, which vaulted terrorism to the top of the strategic hierarchy. On a deeper level, however, it was a response to the vulnerabilities engendered by a globalizing world. The 9/11 attacks marked the culmination of modern international terrorism, an asymmetrical strategy in which small groups seek to take advantage of changes in media, transportation, and weaponry to gain leverage and attention. It prompted a shift to a new bipartisan paradigm for viewing terrorism as war rather than crime. This had been a back-and-forth debate for decades, but 9/11 demonstrated that terrorism had the potential to disrupt modern society and destroy human life on a mass scale. It prompted a shift to an offensive military approach that sought not only to hunt terrorist groups around the world but also to remove or punish the regimes that supported them. The war on terror’s next essential trait was that terrorism needed to be countered on a systemic level through political reform. U.S. President George W. Bush and his administration concluded that the stagnant, autocratic status quo in the Middle East was breeding radicalism and needed to be changed. This was the foundation of the Freedom Agenda, or the idea that democratizing and modernizing the Middle East would resolve terrorism’s root causes. Finally, the war on terror stemmed—on a structural level—from the escalating efforts of radical Islamists to collapse the U.S.-backed order in the Middle East by driving the United States out. While this was not a “clash of civilizations,” the United States conducted military operations almost exclusively against radical Islamist. Terrorism was not the enemy; for U.S. policymakers, the enemy was radical Islamist groups and the regimes that sustained them. These were the war on terror’s defining characteristics: the war paradigm, the linkage of reform and counterterrorism, and the struggle with global jihadism. Still, this was not a homogeneous conflict. The war on terror had three phases, which are defined by changes in objectives, domestic politics, and the perception of the threat’s severity, creating significant overlap between presidencies. The first phase, which I call the radical phase, dates roughly from 2001 to 2006, when the George W. Bush administration launched an ambitious project that included regime change wars and intensive nation-building crusades. It asserted a unilateral right to strike nations that were ostensibly developing weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorists, even if it could not prove an attack was imminent. The administration also concluded that the world order and Middle Eastern politics must be transformed in order to address terrorism’s origins, which it believed emerged from the despair and anger bred by the Middle East’s deficits of democracy and modernity. This became a critical justification for the Iraq War as well as increased pressure on Arab allies to open their political systems. This phase of the war on terror was radical in both its means and its ends, but it burned out quickly. Iraq’s collapse into civil war fueled the jihadist problem. In Afghanistan, the security and hope of building democracy faded as the Taliban reemerged in the mid-2000s. Finally, efforts to pressure Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to reform fizzled, and Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Gaza elections soured U.S. officials on democracy promotion. The demise of the radical vision prompted a shift to the second phase: consolidation, which dates roughly from 2007 to 2018. Consolidation was defined by efforts to lower strategic expectations, put counterterrorism on a more sustainable basis, and gradually relegate it behind other priorities. This phase began under the George W. Bush administration with the moderation of rhetoric about democracy and the lowering of ambitions. The 2007 troop surge in Iraq, for instance, was aimed not at democratization but at rescuing the country from civil war. U.S. President Barack Obama continued consolidation, although his counterterrorism policies were more limited in scope and objectives. He had opposed the Iraq War, and he did not prioritize global hegemony or democratization. However, terrorism was still a high priority for Obama, and he intensified nation-building efforts in Afghanistan as a means of counterterrorism. In late 2009, he sent an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan to wage a counterinsurgency war and expand the central government’s writ into the countryside. However, in keeping with his desire for a more balanced approach, Obama also imposed an 18-month timeline for drawing down the surge. In the early 2010s, Obama devised a more sustainable counterterrorism approach that would still be effective but enable a shift to other concerns. In his light footprint strategy, he limited troop deployments while using special forces, drones, and intelligence resources to kill and capture terrorist leaders and disrupt their operational capacity. He defined this as moving away from “a boundless global war on terror” toward “targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists.” Obama stands and speaks at a lectern, flanked by two military vehicles parked slightly behind him while he delivers an address. The U.S. presidential seal is displayed on the lectern. U.S. President Barack Obama delivers an address to the American people on U.S. policy and the war in Afghanistan during his visit to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan on May 2, 2012.Getty Images/Kevin Lamarque-Pool/ However, Obama’s attempt to level out the war on terror was disrupted in 2014 by the Islamic State’s seizure of swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State also formed or inspired cells that carried out attacks in Europe and the United States. Obama responded with a “by, with, and through” strategy that provided weapons, intelligence, training, special operations, and air support to forces combatting the Islamic State. Obama also had to reescalate in Afghanistan in response to a series of Taliban offensives in 2015 and 2016. While the number of U.S. troops devoted to counterterrorism declined significantly under Obama, his role in the war on terror was essentially consolidation of terrorism as a major priority of U.S. foreign policy. U.S. President Donald Trump’s first two years in office continued consolidation while taking a further step back from political reform and nation-building. He blasted the Freedom Agenda and counterinsurgency wars as a waste of lives and resources. Instead, he promised a legally unrestrained counterterrorism campaign. As president, he increased the use of drones, loosened targeting restrictions, and embraced autocratic allies in the struggle against terrorism. Nonetheless, Trump’s impulses were modulated by his tendency to let his more conventional advisors handle policy details. Much of the counterterrorism machine that Bush and Obama had created churned onward, especially in the continuing struggle against the Islamic State, wherein Trump essentially continued Obama’s strategy. Trump, however, also planted the seeds for the third and final phase of the war on terror: extraction. Two key developments drove this shift. The first was the defeat of the Islamic State as a territorial entity in 2017-2018. This enabled Trump to declare victory and begin lowering the U.S. troop presence in Iraq and Syria. The second was the stagnant situation in Afghanistan. Trump believed this was a pointless conflict, and he initiated talks with the Taliban that led to the 2020 Doha Agreement. Under this deal, the United States declared that it would withdraw all troops within 14 months if the Taliban agreed to a cease-fire, talks with the Afghan government, and a guarantee to not support terrorist groups like al Qaeda. The agreement was a critical step in ending the war on terror because the United States was extracting itself, however cynically, from the original campaign of this conflict. U.S. President Joe Biden then continued Trump’s policy by beginning the removal of all troops from Afghanistan in April 2021. As the Afghan government disintegrated, he fatefully decided against reinserting U.S. forces, which enabled the Taliban to retake the country. A photograph shows a lone U.S. Air Force aircraft flying low over the city of Kabul after taking off, seen against the backdrop of the mountains that surround the city. An U.S. Air Force aircraft takes off from the airport in Kabul following U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, seen on Aug. 30, 2021.Getty Images/Aamir Qureshi August 2021 marked not only the end of the war in Afghanistan but also the end of the war on terror. Both Biden and Trump in his second term relegated terrorism to a lower place in the strategic hierarchy and avoided major ground deployments in support of counterterrorism. They shifted to a new set of priorities: great-power competition, nuclear proliferation, regional wars, industrial policy, and so on. Terrorism is no longer a central paradigm for U.S. foreign policy as it was during the war on terror. The idea of defeating terrorism through reform, moreover, is dead in both parties. Despite their differences, Biden and Trump finished the extraction phase of the war on terror and effectively ended this conflict. A photograph shows U.S. President Joe Biden from behind as he walks through a field of identical white military tombstones in Arlington National Cemetery. Biden wears a dark suit and carries a black umbrella. U.S. President Joe Biden walks through Arlington National Cemetery to honor fallen veterans of the Afghan conflict, seen in Arlington, Virginia, United States, on April 14, 2021.Getty Images/Brendan Smialowski Saying that the war on terror is over does not mean that the United States is no longer conducting counterterrorism operations, as it remains engaged against al Qaeda, Islamic State-Khorasan, and a variety of partner support and training missions. The term “war on terror” would have little value if it simply referred to any counterterrorism operation at any time. This statement also does not mean that the governmental structures and legal regimes created during this conflict have dissolved. No historical period has clean endings, but the legacy of a conflict is not the same as the conflict itself. The Cold War has enduring effects that are still playing out, but as a global competition between communist and democratic-capitalist superpowers, it firmly ended between 1989 and 1991. The same is true for the war on terror, a conflict whose consequences will spin out for decades but has essentially ended. The war on terror created many habits among U.S. policymakers that are best left in the past. One was the willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to countries like Russia and Pakistan, which, while supporting the war on terror, were working cross-purposes to U.S. interests at the same time. Russia, for example, was a critical partner in fighting jihadism in Central Asia and in sustaining logistical networks for the war in Afghanistan. However, cooperation on terrorism not only created the false hope of a better relationship with Russia but also prompted policymakers to downplay increasing signs of Russian authoritarianism and revanchism in the late 2000s and 2010s. Another problematic tendency was making other countries’ terrorist enemies into Washington’s enemies. For example, Bush dramatically expanded U.S. aid to Colombia after 9/11 to combat the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) insurgency, which the country’s leaders sold as part of the war on terror. This was a questionable use of resources to combat a group that did not threaten the U.S. homeland, and it fed the Colombian government’s brutal counterinsurgency war. In the present, the United States should not enter new wars or compromise its principles to combat other countries’ enemies, like Hamas or Hezbollah, that do not pose a significant threat to U.S. territory. Finally, acknowledging that the war on terror is over should push U.S. policymakers to accept that terrorism is a fact of life in a globalized world but not an existential threat. The belief that the United States had to conduct regime change and nation-building campaigns to remain safe from terrorism led to a vast and wasteful overextension of U.S. power that made the initial problem worse. A mix of military, intelligence, and legal tools to combat terrorism can still be effective without letting this menace swallow U.S. grand strategy as it did for the first two decades of the 21st century.