Photo courtesy of BBC.
The recent controversy surrounding the evacuation of Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has brought the legacy of the United States’ “War on Terror” into the spotlight. The U.S.’s final withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan on Aug. 30 ended the longest war in its history. However, the 13 U.S. service members killed in the ISIS bombing near Hamid Karzai airport only a few days before the final evacuation and abundance of military equipment left behind has dampened any positive feelings that could come from this evacuation.
While President Biden rightly shouldered most of the blame for this evacuation, any criticism should be bipartisan. It was former President Trump who signed a deal with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, beginning the withdrawal and releasing Taliban prisoners. A majority of these prisioners then took up arms against the Afghan government in return for the Taliban’s promise to stop attacks on U.S. forces.
In the 2003 National Strategy to Combat Terrorism, the Bush administration declared its central objectives to stopping the war on terror. “The intent of our national strategy,” it stated, “is to stop terrorist attacks against the United States, its citizens, its interests, and our friends and allies to create an international environment inhospitable to terrorists and all those who support them.” These objectives have mostly failed, despite only about 100 Americans dying from Salafist attacks in the U.S. since 2001. This is demonstrated by the fall of the allied government of Afghanistan and the continued persistence of other terrorist-supporting regimes.
This failure of the war on terror is not surprising. In fact, U.S. policy in the Middle East during the last two decades failed to even attempt to achieve the goals espoused in its strategy to combat terrorism.
The U.S. fought jihadist ideology with geopolitical pragmatism, failing to truly attack the true sources of terrorism and in some cases, even supporting these sources before and during the War on Terror itself.
An infamous example of this support for jihadism is Operation Cyclone, where the U.S. supported the Mujahideen with weapons during the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This policy was largely bipartisan and popular at the time, given the fact that these weapons were going to “freedom fighters” who were resisting a communist occupation of their homeland. However, much of these weapons and funding, originally funneled through the Pakistani Intelligence Service (ISI) to the Mujahideen, eventually ended up in the hands of the Taliban.
The U.S.’s support of jihadists and its failure to prevent an Islamic fundamentalist movement from gaining weapons from Pakistan represents the pragmatism within its geopolitical strategy. The fear of Afghanistan becoming a Soviet satellite led the Reagan administration, Congress and U.S. military intelligence to overlook American ideals of liberty and individualism in favor of supporting religious fundamentalists against what they perceived as a greater threat.
One of the most damning demonstrations of this in Afghanistan is the printing of textbooks by the U.S. depicting violent images and militant Islamic teachings for Afghan children, to foment resistance against the Soviets. This policy continued after the U.S. invasion with the distribution of four million textbooks emphasizing Muslim tenents. The corruption in the funding and implementation of the post-Taliban Afghan government further exemplifies the U.S. abandoning liberal ideals in favor of immediate pragmatism.
This ignorance of ideology and lack of understanding of its consequences disrupted America’s ability to truly fight terrorism because it does not allow it to fight the ideals and conditions that create terrorists in the first place.
Canadian-American philosopher Leonard Peikoff predicted this issue in a
New York Times
piece written less than a month after the 9/11 attacks titled “End States Who Sponsor Terrorism.” In this article, Peikoff highlights the primary motivation for the intellectual impotence against attacking jihadist ideology, stating that “the Muslim countries embod[y] in an extreme form every idea — selfless duty, anti-materialism, faith or feeling above science, the supremacy of the group — which our universities, our churches, and our own political Establishment had long been upholding as virtue.”
To summarize Peikoff’s point, the reason the U.S. is unable to fight terrorism is because the basis of their funadmentalist ideas are opposed pragmatically as opposed to ideologically, and even this occurs only in certain cases (e.g. continued U.S. support for the Saudi regime despite their Wahhabist ideology).
This fact holds true to this day and should be evident to anyone who has been subjected to anti-individualist COVID-19 lockdowns and other regulations, as well as the rise of religious fundamentalism and a disregard for science in the form of anti-abotion legislation and vaccine hesitancy.
This point is not to equate the extent of collectivistic ideals and their consequences within the U.S. to those in fundamentalist nations, whose conditions are obviously much worse. Rather, this demonstrates that the anti-individualist and anti-liberty ideology that allows these policies to exist in the U.S. also prevents terrorism from being defeated on ideological grounds.
The reality is that we as Americans have hated terrorism because of the threat it poses to us, not for the ideological basis it stands on. This leaves us unable to actually defeat terrorism during the war on terror, despite attacking and killing many of its most prominent promoters.
In order to fight terrorism in the long run, the U.S. must both advocate for ideals of individualism and liberty at home and promote them abroad. A foreign-policy defined by pragmatism or that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” cannot sustain any positive lasting results; the basis for the first enemy still being an enemy remains.
Policy-wise, the Biden administration and any future administrations should promote the severing of any ties, whether diplomatic, economic, or military, with religious fundamentalists states.
In terms of Afghanistan and any other nation that promotes or supports terrorism, the U.S. should pursue military options to the fullest extent to prevent these terrorists from posing any threat to Americans, whether home or abroad.