Forever Wars Are Good, Actually

By Daniel Foster

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the phrase “forever war” — popularized by journalist Dexter Filkins in his book-length account of the early occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan — has hardened from a worry into a despair. A war that lasts forever is ipso facto one that failed. And that is the verdict, nearing consensus, of observers of the Global War on Terror: The United States overreacted, pointed its hegemony at the wrong targets and thereby squandered it, chased “nation-building” and sunk costs, and lacked the wisdom to know when to fold a losing hand.

 

But the truth is more complex. With al-Qaeda and its successors-in-interest destroyed, degraded, or contained; multiple echelons and generations of its leaders killed or incarcerated; governments that had coddled terrorists pressed into counterterrorism cooperation; and multiple terror plots disrupted, the more defensible verdict is that the United States muddled through the post-9/11 era. That through fits and starts, we figured out how to fight a new and very different kind of war. That we built armed forces, intelligence apparatuses, legal architectures, and geopolitical strategies to match it. That we made Americans safer at home by killing and capturing jihadis abroad.

 

We were able to do all this because we conducted and continue to conduct a number of low-intensity wars and quasi-wars against nonstate actors in weakly sovereign states — ignoring borders when we can and respecting them only when we must; using mostly airpower, special operators, irregular forces, and proxies; pivoting from regime change, occupation, and counterinsurgency to a more modest but no less lethal footprint that minimizes “boots on the ground”; and maintaining a mix of precision strikes, targeted killings, intelligence gathering, and support and influence operations that continue to this day in places as far afield as the Philippines and the Caribbean.

 

This way of fighting is expensive in real dollar terms, and in terms of political capital as well, but as the strategy and the tactics coalesced, it settled into a tempo, casualty rate, and psychic load Americans could absorb in exchange for a high level of control over events that protect vital U.S. interests.

 

None of this is to say that the United States didn’t make mistakes. It made many — some of them enormities and tragedies. Invading Iraq in 2003 was obviously one of them. For whatever it’s worth, I opposed it at the time, though as a college freshman my voice did not prove dispositive. Nevertheless, “the Surge” of 2007 was correct because the alternatives were worse. And it is undeniably true that Iraq today, while no Denmark, is a functioning and free-standing state that is neither a Ba’athist dictatorship nor a Salafi emirate.

 

Indeed, the disastrous early occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the harsh lessons and limitations of the “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency we tried there, led us in turn to the mature strategy that eventually produced tangible gains in those countries and elsewhere. In July 2003, General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition forces in Iraq, called the country a “terrorist magnet,” and he meant that in a good way, adding that “this is exactly where we want to fight them.” Vice President Cheney repeatedly made the same argument, saying the United States would face our enemies “with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq today, so we do not have to face [them] with armies of firefighters, police, and medical personnel on the streets of our own cities.”

 

And sure enough, Iraq did become a kill box, drawing jihadists from around the world, fixing them in a battlespace where our intelligence, firepower, and logistics could be brought to bear to detain or delete them before they could attack our allies and interests abroad, much less our people and infrastructure at home.

 

On September 10, 2001, the U.S. intelligence community was still in its Cold War hangover, with a reputation as a bloated, deskbound institution too reliant on gadgets and money. The country’s counterterrorism apparatus, led by the FBI, was unduly constrained by a law-enforcement-centered approach ill-suited to handling both the state-sponsored and transnational nature of the threat.

 

After 9/11 those institutions were reshaped into something much more capable and kinetic: a global behemoth of human and signals intelligence, and an elite force of manhunters, multilateral partners, and paramilitary operators.

 

Law changed, too. Our Islamist enemies exploited the seams between sovereign states. The 2001 AUMF and the legal architecture built around issues like rendition and targeted killing were attempts — some worthier than others — to prevent international norms we helped author and vouchsafe from being weaponized against us.

 

That machinery helped capture the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in 2003. It killed al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006, Osama bin Laden in 2011, and Ayman al-Zawahiri in 2022. And even as it settled old business with the original architects of 9/11, it developed novel approaches to dispatching their successors.

 

The so-called Islamic State lost the last of its caliphate in March of 2019. Its key leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed by U.S. special operations forces that October. But the nihilistic movement that once held vast swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria was destroyed, ultimately, by a coalition of state and substate actors with whom we shared neither morals nor ideals but merely narrow interests. Ironically, the same foreign policy thinkers who chastised our delusion in imposing Western values on Middle Eastern peoples clutched their pearls at “arming the moderate rebels.” But it was such rebels, moderate in the relativistic if not absolute sense, who, bearing Kalashnikovs and M4 carbines and under American air and intelligence cover, helped send Al-Baghdadi to hell and Bashar al-Assad to Moscow.

 

The successes of this more modest, more sober phase of the Global War on Terror show why it was also a mistake for the United States to unilaterally withdraw from Afghanistan. The American political class, beginning under Trump and culminating with Joseph R. Biden, overlearned the harsh lessons of 2003 or 2006, getting locked into frameworks disanalogous with America’s position in 2021, which by then involved a fraction of the troop totals, expenditures, and casualties of those earlier phases. Biden paid for his shambolic retreat in the polls, but many in both parties still share his mistaken way of thinking. That it was unwise to send 150,000 Americans into Iraq to nation-build then does not entail that it is unwise have a few hundred or a few thousand Americans in various Middle Eastern countries now — to gather intelligence, influence clients, and kill bad guys.

 

This is the category error at the center of “forever wars” as a slur. America was not wrong to recognize the threat of transnational radical Islamism or to take dramatic steps to confront it. The folly was the scale of its original ambition, well-intentioned as it was, to remake vast swaths of the Islamic world into liberal democracies via huge occupying armies and open-ended political, economic, and civil-societal commitments.

 

But it turns out that nation-building is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for creating favorable arrangements for the exercise of American power. Sometimes it is enough to have a landing strip, a listening post, a handful of game militiamen or a pliable minister, some drones, and a SEAL team.

 

This version of the Global War on Terror will never result in the permanent eradication of all named enemies. At best, it will maintain an advantageous equilibrium indefinitely, punctuated from time to time by moments of greater promise or more acute peril. But what more is practicable, or required?

 

Whatever this is, then, it is surely something short of a forever “war.” Call it the continuation, by other means, of politics. And nobody ever really thought we’d be rid of that, did they?