The war on terror still paralyzes US foreign policy

In 2001, after the horrific attacks of September 11, the frenzied administration of George W. Bush ignored limited congressional authorization to use military force against the perpetrators and their harborers. Instead, it launched a grandiose global war on terror that went far beyond those cleverly limited legislative directives. The congressional authorization sought to limit American retaliation to the al-Qaeda group taking refuge in Afghanistan and its Taliban hosts, who then controlled the country. Instead, President Bush declared a broader war against terrorist groups with “global reach.”

Bush took advantage of the American public’s blind outrage over the September 11 attacks on American soil and its ignorance that not all Islamist groups and even some rulers of Muslim countries were somehow involved in the terrorist attacks on two American cities. Instead of conducting targeted raids and attacks to decapitate the leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Bush ignored the failures of the British (in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and the Soviets (in the 1980s) in the “graveyard of empires” by ordering an invasion of the country to overthrow the Taliban and establish a functioning democracy there. This two-decade attempt to bring democracy to a country that was not developmentally ready for it cost 243,000 lives and $2.3 trillion and ended in failure – with the resurgence of the Taliban, who reimposed their oppressive rule.

Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s main leader, was not killed until 2011 by Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, because despite the dilemma of American counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Bush soon allocated many key intelligence and military resources to his priority invasion of Iraq. By falsely linking Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks, he embroiled the U.S. military in a costly, protracted counterinsurgency against Sunni guerrillas that had sprung up after Saddam’s fall to fight the foreign invaders. One of these Sunni groups, al-Qaeda in Iraq, morphed into the terrorist group Islamic State, or ISIS, which eventually conquered vast swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq.

Bush also waged indiscriminate wars against many other Islamist groups in countless other countries, regardless of whether those groups posed a real threat to the United States or were motivated by local grievances. In doing so, Bush only reinforced the reason why bin Laden had attacked the United States in the first place – excessive U.S. interference in Islamic countries. Finally, Bush’s overreaching war on terror also included illegal surveillance within the United States, the detention of suspected terrorists without charge and without legal means to challenge their detention, the use of illegal torture on them, and the use of questionable sham trials by military commissions instead of constitutionally guaranteed civil trials.

But the war on terror did not end when Bush left office. Obama continued all of these wars and started his own; his successor, Donald Trump, fueled them even further. After seeing and adopting Bush’s weaknesses in Afghanistan and Iraq – a move that proved as disastrous as Bush’s invasion of the latter country – Obama used the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 to overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who had previously been a thorn in the side of the United States and had been in cahoots with the West for several years.

Predictably, the end of an iron-fisted dictatorship holding together a divided country was bound to result in civil war and chaos—and that’s what happened in Libya as well as Iraq. In fact, the rise of Islamist groups began in Africa’s Sahel, a semi-arid region south of the Sahara, when fighters from Mali who had defended Gaddafi returned home with the late Libyan leader’s numerous weapons to start an insurgency. Islamist groups took advantage of the unrest and began to take over towns. Foreign intervention by the French also attracted other Western countries, including the United States, and spread to other nearby West African countries in search of Islamists. France and the United States learned nothing from Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and worked with governments that were perceived locally as corrupt.

This corruption was the death knell for the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaign that the French and Americans waged in the West African Sahel. Unlike conventional wars between mass armies, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the success of such irregular wars, if it is possible at all, depends on good governance, not on military repression of the terrorists or guerrillas. In other words, these irregular forces usually have local problems with particular governments. And in these bush wars, foreign intervention in support of the corrupt governments further fuels the jihadists, as happened when the Islamist rebellion spread against other American or French vassal states in West Africa. Despite the deployment of American and French troops and hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, these foreign interventions have failed. Military coups in several Sahel countries (some with the help of American-trained local forces) have displaced French and American forces, and al-Qaeda and ISIS are regaining strength against these new military juntas.

Governments, especially the superpower USA, never seem to learn. Instead of admitting that democracy cannot be exported by military force to countries that are not developmentally ready to produce a middle class and political norms for their organic development, the US government is merely shifting its nation-building projects to the countries on the coast of West Africa. The Biden administration is naively offering these coastal states a 10-year plan to build solar-powered security lighting and new police stations to combat terrorism.

The bigger problem, of course, is that U.S. officials admit that local grievances, not Islamist ideology, are fueling the insurgency. As a result, even experts say nation-building approaches like water or electrification projects have very little chance of success. And it’s difficult to identify these local Islamist groups as a threat to the U.S. The Chinese may be after minerals, and the Russians may be trying to replace the U.S. and France in order to gain influence, but their efforts are likely to be as much a waste of time and money as the U.S.’s.