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?

How We Won the War on Terror

By Tod Lindberg

Monday, August 31, 2026

 

On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush gave a major speech to Congress and the country in which he outlined the coming U.S. response to al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack. He said, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Thus began what would soon be known as the “Global War on Terror,” or GWOT, in its unlovely acronym.

 

Over the quarter century since, a parade of commentators, scholars, and politicians has marched through the media to offer overwhelmingly negative judgments on the GWOT. Here is former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in 2007: “The damage these three words [“war on terror”] have done—a classic self-inflicted wound—is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.” CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in 2008: “Bush’s basic conception of a ‘global War on Terror’… has been poorly thought-through, badly implemented, and has produced many unintended costs that will linger for years if not decades.” In the journal International Security in 2012, John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart pronounced the GWOT “an ill-conceived and remarkably unreflective effort.” Boston University’s hawk-turned-isolationist Andrew Bacevich, who lost a son in Iraq, in 2021 repeated his long-standing conclusion: “The Global War on Terrorism was a needless and costly distraction.” From the anti-interventionist left, here was journalist Spencer Ackerman in 2021: “We’ve learned from the war on terror, that security solutions to political problems are doomed to failure, they’re doomed to making those political problems worse.” In his recent book The Return of the Great Powers, Cambridge University’s Brendan Simms decries “the huge cost and abysmal failure of the ‘War on Terror.’”

 

These blanket judgments are wrong.

 

They are heavily colored by the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, almost as if “GWOT” was just another name for those wars. In fact, the record of the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan is, in its own right, far more complicated. But more to the point, the “war on terror” was indeed “global,” not just focused on these two countries. And it was a war not only in the kinetic sense but also insofar as it marshaled a full spectrum of resources of the United States and allied governments in identifying and targeting malevolent organizations and their support structures abroad before they could effectively target American and allied interests. And this war, the real Global War on Terror in its totality, has been a remarkable success, notwithstanding Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN

 

Let’s begin with the obvious. In the fall of 2001—that is, in real time after the 9/11 attacks but before the opportunity for retrospective judgment arrived—the question of what horror might be coming next for the United States took on an urgency unseen since the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years before. Osama bin Laden’s spectacular plot succeeded not only in destroying the twin towers of the World Trade Center and gashing the Pentagon but also in its more general and visceral objective: It terrorized.

 

What would its perpetrators do next? This was a question whose answer was unknown to government officials and individual Americans alike. One could and did speculate. Would bombs be going off downtown in New York, Washington, and other big cities? What about a dirty bomb producing a cloud of radioactive debris? What about an actual “loose nuke”? Would platoons of would-be martyrs undertake massive urban assaults? Would chemical weapons be unleashed on the subway, like in the 1995 sarin attack in Tokyo? Powdered anthrax of unknown origin was already taking lives through the mails; was a massive aerosolized attack next? Were water reservoirs and the food supply about to be poisoned? Would more airplanes be turned into fuel-air bombs?

 

The answer to all these worries turned out to be no—but that was not for want of terrorist ambition or effort. Following 9/11, foreign-trained or inspired jihadist terrorists attempted numerous suicide or sabotage attacks. Individuals included would-be “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, dirty-bomb plotter José Padilla (who trained with al-Qaeda), and would-be “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. A number of plots targeted infrastructure, including the Brooklyn Bridge, fuel tanks at JFK airport, and a rush-hour backpack-bomb attack on the New York City subway. Financial buildings were another target. A group was planning an attack on Fort Dix, New Jersey.

 

In some cases, the attacks came close to deadly success but were undone by the incompetence of the perpetrators—a bomb that did not detonate properly in Times Square, as well as the shoe- and underwear-bomb failures. Some did come off to lethal effect, such as the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013, which killed three and injured hundreds; an attack at a government building in San Bernardino in 2015, in which two shooters killed 14; and the Pulse nightclub attack in Florida in 2016, in which a gunman killed 49. Yet none of these successful attacks was remotely close in scale to 9/11, and the perpetrators came not from abroad but were self-radicalized jihadists on American soil of Chechen, Pakistani, and Afghan origin.

 

According to a regularly updated New America Foundation database, only one lethal attack in the United States took place under the direction of a foreign jihadist organization: the 2019 shooting at Pensacola Naval Air Station, which killed three. In New America’s tally, the total number of American lives lost to jihadist terror attacks in the United States since 9/11 stands just over 120—barely 4 percent of the direct 9/11 death toll (excluding the 19 hijackers) of 2,977.

 

By the broadest and most important indicator, then, one must ask: If this is failure, what would success have looked like?

 

Meanwhile, numerous other jihadist terrorist attacks were foiled by American authorities, often in collaboration with allied governments. Hundreds of individuals are serving prison terms in relation to these plots. A 2015 RAND working paper analyzed 150 successful and foiled terrorist plots from 1995 through 2012. It found that plots were more likely to be thwarted in the years after 9/11 than in the six years before.

 

Why? Many of the details we will never know. These operations were and are the work of counterterrorism and counterintelligence efforts undertaken internationally, domestically, and locally (the NYPD Intelligence Bureau is the most notable example of the latter). The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces date back to the establishment of the first such regional office, in New York in 1980. After 9/11, the FBI substantially expanded the program, which does its own work but also liaises with other federal, state, and local law enforcement. There are now about 200 JTTFs, including at least one in each of the bureau’s 56 field offices. Protecting the United States from terrorist attack is the bureau’s stated “number one priority.”

 

HARDENING THE TARGETS

 

Substantial resources have also gone into “hardening” potential terrorist targets. The most conspicuous is the airport screening of the Transportation Security Administration, created in legislation Congress enacted in November 2001. The Aviation and Transportation Security Act federalized airport screening and began the process of requiring airlines to report all passenger and crew manifests, including biographical data such as sex and date of birth, to the government.

 

As the shock of 9/11 wore off over the years, the TSA came in for criticism for its randomized practice of selecting the occasional grandmother for additional screening procedures. Nevertheless, the “security theater” so roundly mocked seems to have been an effective deterrent to attempts to smuggle weapons onto planes. Well before 9/11, Americans had largely forgotten how easy that used to be during the hundreds of hijackings worldwide from the late 1960s through the 1970s.

 

Consider the case of the Federal Air Marshals program. The number of armed agents flying incognito increased from about 30 before 9/11 to an estimated 3,000 in the years since. There are hundreds of inbound international flights on American carriers daily, so the program places one to four marshals on routes (including domestic routes) that officials deem high-risk—or in response to specific intelligence on a threat.

 

There’s no public record of marshals foiling a plot in the air, though there have been reports of marshals intervening with unruly passengers, presumably including circumstances in which the reason underlying the unruliness was initially unknown. But does the program deter, as is its major purpose? Hard to say, but would Americans feel safer, and actually be safer, if the Department of Homeland Security announced it was halting the program to divert the resources elsewhere? Should we no longer require that cockpit doors be hardened against easy entry on grounds that only intoxicated or crazy passengers, not terrorists, have tried to bust through them since 9/11?

 

These questions are especially relevant because all initiatives intended to prevent or deter represent an opportunity cost—if you do one thing, you won’t have money left to do another. The resource allocation has been neither random nor frivolous but has rather been the product of risk analysis and deliberation by officials who take their responsibilities seriously. That they may err and that their errors may become clear only after a failure is hardly a warrant for the dismissal of the seriousness of their efforts.

 

The 9/11 attack also brought forth legislation intended to enhance federal authority to detect and disrupt terrorist plots. The first to be signed into law, within weeks of 9/11, was the Patriot Act, which (among other provisions) broadened wiretap rules to encompass multiple devices, thus making it easier to track plotters rather than specific phones. Government officials have credited the new rules as instrumental in foiling the New York subway attack. The Patriot Act also enabled domestic law enforcement and U.S. foreign intelligence agencies to share information; government officials early on identified the firewall separating foreign and domestic counterterrorism agency missions as a leading cause of the failure to detect the 9/11 plot.

 

Next was the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the new Cabinet department and revamped or consolidated numerous protective agencies there. The department would also become a clearinghouse for collecting relevant information from the FBI and intelligence agencies. Meanwhile, the “what went wrong” investigation of the estimable 9/11 Commission produced a slew of recommendations enacted in subsequent legislation. In 2004 came a major intelligence overhaul, which created the coordinating position of director of national intelligence as well as the National Counterterrorism Center. State drivers’ licenses had to meet new federal standards set forth in the REAL ID Act of 2005. Those IDs, which provide confident correspondence between the ticketed passenger and the person boarding a plane, were the last link in the government’s comprehensive knowledge of who is flying where (and it took two decades for states to implement the program fully). The process now has integrated facial-recognition systems, which have the added benefit of speeding up the security checks at airports. Welcome to what U.S. spy agencies refer to as “ubiquitous technical surveillance.” This is worrisome to many civil libertarians. But taken simply as a security measure, the ubiquity provides a new level of deterrence.

 

As Abe Greenwald noted, writing in these pages 15 years ago on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, a decade without a comparable attack on the homeland should have been thought a considerable achievement. At this writing, the record stands at a quarter century. There is no predicting what will come in the years or even days ahead, and if a failure on the scale of 9/11 is in our future, that will be very bad indeed—but it will not negate the 25 years of prevention Americans experienced through 2026.

 

TAKING THE FIGHT TO THE TERRORISTS

 

Beyond the homeland defensive measures of the kind discussed above, a key premise of the GWOT was that taking the fight to terrorist organizations where they were quartered would reduce their ability to target Americans at home and U.S. interests abroad. Again, let’s start with the basics: Even before 9/11, the United States had the ability to identify and strike its enemies, from genocidaires in former Yugoslavia to jihadists. But doing so wasn’t necessarily easy, and the willingness to do so was often lacking.

 

Following the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the revelation of its direct tie to a new type of Islamic radicalism, the FBI led an investigation that produced criminal charges against the conspirators and lengthy prison sentences, then an international manhunt for the ringleader of the attack, Ramzi Yousef. A policy debate erupted in Washington and elsewhere over whether the “law enforcement” model of response was adequate for terrorist attacks or whether the new danger required a new approach. In 1995, Pakistani authorities working with the FBI and CIA nabbed Yousef and transferred him to the United States, where he was tried and convicted—a temporary victory for the complacent “law enforcement” model.

 

The United States made no attempts to target jihadists abroad until the deadly al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. Later that month, U.S. officials tried to target and kill the head of the organization, Osama bin Laden. A Tomahawk attack on al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan reportedly missed him by hours. The Clinton administration, the 9/11 Commission found, had had numerous other opportunities to attempt to kill bin Laden—all, however, “uncertain” and carrying “high risks.” The commission found “no credible evidence that the U.S. government had actionable intelligence that could have prevented the 9/11 attack.”

 

This politick but contentious bipartisan conclusion took President Bush off the hook for his first nine months in office—and President Clinton off the hook for seven years of muted response following the World Trade Center bombing. His refusal to focus on the threat lasted the entirety of his second term—at the start of which, and well ahead of the embassy bombings, the CIA was already well aware of the danger bin Laden posed. The story of Clinton 2 was one of multiple declined opportunities to take out bin Laden and one unsuccessful attempt. Of course, it is impossible to assert that capturing or killing bin Laden would have prevented 9/11, but the commission’s bland assertion that no “actionable intelligence” the U.S. government had “could have prevented” it is hypothetical hindsight speculation that minimizes the undeniable ambivalence of the Clinton administration about how far to go to do it.

 

Here’s another hypothetical: If we had had the drone-strike technology of today at the time of bin Laden’s emergence, especially after the embassy attacks, but before 9/11, would Clinton have tried harder? I think the answer is no, because seriously going after jihadist terrorists abroad required the paradigm shift that 9/11 produced.

 

That shift produced the Global War on Terror as offense. Its charter was the Authorization to Use Military Force, which Congress passed three days after 9/11 and Bush signed into law four days later. It gave the president authority “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attack “or harbored such organizations or persons.” The law included no expiration for this authority, and every president since has relied on it. The executive branch has invoked it for air strikes and military operations against jihadists in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, as well as in “support” of counterterrorism efforts in partner countries from the Middle East to Africa and the Philippines.

 

Its first major use was in the U.S. military and CIA paramilitary operation toppling the Taliban government in Afghanistan. In his September 20, 2001, speech to Congress, Bush delivered an ultimatum to the radical Islamist Afghanistan rulers: Shut down and deliver al-Qaeda or “share their fate.” When the Taliban refused, they were effectively acknowledging their role in the attacks by having harbored and continuing to harbor the 9/11 plotters. The U.S. campaign swiftly toppled the government, dispersing the Taliban and al-Qaeda to remote regions of the country and over the border into largely lawless northwest Pakistan.

 

Our military’s ability to carry out such a mission was little known. The supremacy of U.S. military power was well understood, especially after we demonstrated in 1999 that we could halt a genocide in Kosovo by the judicious application of air power. Nevertheless, the speedy collapse of the Taliban came as a revelation to many.

 

The skill set already available in time for Afghanistan in 2001 would continue to develop over the succeeding years of the War on Terror. The visible culminating points to date—and there is no indication they represent peak achievable U.S. capability—were the destruction of the Fordow nuclear site in Iran in 2025, the raid on Venezuela nabbing its ruler, Nicolás Maduro, and the utter military dominance over Iran in the 2026 war (an intervention whose geopolitical consequences have still to be reckoned, of course). The U.S. military is very good at what it does, and a significant reason is the experience gained fighting the Global War on Terror.

 

WHAT WE’RE GOOD AT

 

The two central means of striking jihadists abroad were (and remain) drone or air strikes and raids by Special Operations forces. Like the FBI’s terrorism task forces, the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) predated 9/11 but got a tremendous boost in its aftermath. The Iraq War was its crucible. During the war’s worst phase, 2004–2006, JSOC was under the command of General Stanley McChrystal. He realized that its highly capable operators nevertheless lacked the skills they needed to defeat the gathering insurgency of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). He embarked JSOC on a crash program of changing its ways to meet the challenge. It successfully did so alongside President Bush’s “surge” of troops to Iraq in 2007–2008 and the “Anbar awakening,” in which Sunni sheikhs switched their sympathies from the fanatical AQI insurrectionists to the United States. The Iraq experience—the turnaround that actually won the war for the United States but has never been acknowledged as such—produced sufficient stability by 2009 to allow President Barack Obama to make good on his opposition to the war from the outset by ending the U.S. military presence there in 2011.

 

Unfortunately, Obama proved wildly off when it came to the emerging successor to AQI, the Islamic State. A civil war that blew up in Syria in 2011 proved a magnet for jihadist foreign fighters against the Assad regime, and many consolidated their loyalties under the Islamic State’s founder, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. As late as January 2014, Obama pooh-poohed the Islamic State as a “JV” squad compared with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda—even as its all-black flags were rising over considerable swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq, including the strategic city of Mosul, which fell less than six months after Obama’s glib comment. The atrocities of the newly proclaimed caliphate were boundless, from beheadings and sex slavery to genocide against the Yazidi people of Iraq.

 

The necessity of destroying the Islamic State was obvious. But the challenge was greater due to Obama’s unnecessary withdrawal from Iraq and then his reluctance to provide adequate resources to make good on his new pledge to “degrade and destroy” the caliphate.

 

Painfully slowly, U.S. Special Operations deployments increased, this time to lead allied Iraqi Army and Kurdish forces in pushing the Islamic State back. This culminated in urban combat to retake Mosul house by house in 2017. This was the U.S. military’s “by, with, and through” model, first advanced in the 1990s, in action. We fought an enemy in partnership with local forces, with U.S. Special Operations fighters on the ground effectively running the show and directing air power in support. The approach became paradigmatic for ground operations in the Global War on Terror. The idea was that American boots on the ground in large numbers would be unnecessary with properly trained and led local forces. The eventual victory over the Islamic State was the product primarily of the ingenuity and efficacy of U.S. Special Operations forces implementing the model.

 

Afghanistan was likewise a proving ground. The role of JSOC and CIA paramilitary operators evolved over two decades from initial successes on horseback directing precision air strikes in October 2001 to a key role assisting the Afghan army in keeping the regrouped Taliban at bay. JSOC developed a specialty of finding and killing or capturing “high-value targets”—al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Special Operations raids in 2008, for example, hit 550 targets, killing about 1,000. To his credit, Obama saw great value in JSOC capabilities and leaned on them even more heavily than Bush had. Al-Baghdadi met his end in a Trump-era raid in Syria in 2019. He detonated a suicide bomb vest, taking out as well two children who were with him.

 

President Trump, in his first term, wanted out of Afghanistan but got talked out of it. Unfortunately, President Biden could not be. His rigid timeline produced the appalling, unnecessary, and lethal spectacle of the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces in August 2021. Note that in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the failures to stem the revival of terrorist satrapies were the product not of military inefficacy but of political decisions made by the commander in chief, the U.S. president. And the military and political successes the United States achieved in the past quarter century required brave U.S. leadership under extreme pressure, which the United States got from Bush during the Iraq surge and from Obama after his belated recognition of the Islamic State threat.

 

The Philippines, by contrast with Afghanistan, provides an example of efficacious military operations that ended well. Starting in the 1990s, several Islamist separatist groups conducted a bubbling insurgency in the south Philippines, replete with kidnappings, bombings, and beheadings. The Joint Special Operations Task Force-
Philippines deployed 500–600 personnel from 2002 to 2017. CIA paramilitary officers joined as well. The counterinsurgency efforts of Filipino forces aided by Americans—“by, with, and through”—culminated in 2017 with a five-month battle in Marawi, which wiped out the jihadists but for local remnants.

 

One must not omit mention of the greatest Special Operations raid of all time, orchestrated in close collaboration with the CIA. In May 2011, Navy SEAL Team Six entered a walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden. This raid, like many others, also yielded a substantial cache of intelligence, including letters lamenting the decline of al-Qaeda in recent years—as well as bin Laden’s personal collection of porn videos, which in turn prompted the greatest New York Post front-page headline of all time: OSAMA BIN WANKIN’.

 

In some cases, the potential for collecting intelligence stemming from elimination of a high-value target through a raid justifies the greater risk of a JSOC operation. In others, taking an enemy off the board is sufficient reward in itself to allow for a drone or air strike. A 2006 air strike called for by Special Operations forces took out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Qasem Soleimani, the head of Quds Force, the branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps working outside the country, met his end in a 2020 drone strike in Iraq.

 

Targeted drone and air strikes numbered in the multiple thousands in Afghanistan and in the hundreds in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Although he would claim credit for reducing U.S. reliance on targeted killings by drone in 2013, Obama in his first term took the number of strikes to its peak, in 2010. During his time in office, the United States killed or captured 45 jihadist leaders from al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and Al Shabab in East Africa. This seems to be an indication of the indispensability of drones and targeted killings to presidents in the overall scheme of protecting the country.

 

The United States has lost about 660 Special Operations personnel fighting the Global War on Terror. More than half died in Afghanistan, with Iraq accounting for about 1 in 5. Other theaters of the GWOT claimed a total of about 90. The figure is just under 10 percent of the total U.S. service members killed over the past quarter century, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. Add another 140 or so CIA paramilitary fatalities, about whom the public record is understandably much thinner.

 

Was this success? In Afghanistan, it was—until Biden’s catastrophic bugout, which threw success away. Afghanistan was hardly easy duty, but the total number of American combat deaths there from 2020 until the chaotic withdrawal itself, during which 13 service members lost their lives in a suicide bomb attack, was four. The number was fewer than 20 in each of 2017, 2018, and 2019. If this were truly a “forever war,” as critics took to calling it contemptuously, by 2021 it was “war” only in the sense of a support operation that gave Afghan forces the spine they needed to keep the Taliban at bay.

 

In Iraq, the rise of the Islamic State after we had quelled the post-Saddam chaos counted as a failure of vigilance, its destruction as a success. Notably, Iraq is no longer a source of security concerns outside its borders. And recall that Iraq was very possibly the single most destabilizing country in the world from 1969 onward, after Saddam Hussein took power.

 

If Saddam Hussein had been left unmolested, would Iraq be as placid as it is today? Would Saddam have kept a lid locally on the global rise of Islamic State–style radicalism, or would he have humored it and helped it along? Most observers note that the gravitational power of terrorist organizations rises with success (for example, 9/11 and the declaration of the Islamic State caliphate) and declines over time with setbacks, such as the defeat of the Islamic State. As a 2022 study by George Washington University researchers observes, “Both IS and al-Qaeda—the two brand names of global jihadism—are severely weakened. Both have suffered crippling blows to their leadership, and neither appears to have the stature, manpower, territorial control, and ability to operate on a global scale they had in their heyday.” Far-reaching international plots—the 2015 attacks in Paris, for example—seem to have receded in favor of retail jihadist efforts to recruit local “lone wolf” actors. Bigger attempted plots tend to be thwarted. That’s an improvement.

 

THE TOOLS OF THE GWOT

 

From its inception, the Global War on Terror has been subject to criticisms large and small, ranging from tactics to overall conception. From their first use in the War on Terror, drone strikes have come under sharp attack. Some expressed concern about civilian casualties, and that’s a legitimate issue insofar as it is morally wrong and illegal to target civilians. But no U.S. drone strike goes forward without an assessment of risks to civilians. Numerous anecdotes describe strikes called off due to civilians being too close to the target. Unfortunately, civilian death as “collateral damage” has always been an element of warfare, and it will stop only when the use of force is no longer necessary as an instrument of national policy.

 

Drones are also remarkably precise, far more so than the cruise missiles lobbed toward bin Laden. True, drone strikes anger those in proximity to them. Some claimed that drone attacks would call forth a flood of new recruits committed to jihadist terror. There has been no such flood. Jihadist movements in Africa have been growing in recent years, but their ambitions lie only distantly in attacking Americans and U.S. interests. Their agendas are primarily locally focused.

 

Some have also questioned the overall efficacy of drones and targeted killing. Critics acknowledge that such operations hit their targets efficiently and, in the case of drones, at effectively no risk to U.S. military personnel. But won’t junior members of terrorist organizations simply step up to fill the shoes of their eliminated superiors, whether they died by drone or raid? Certainly, but as captured documents have revealed, the disruptions have created difficulty and friction in jihadist organizations in the descriptions of their leaders themselves.

 

We should also keep in mind the moral dimension of targeted killing in wartime. Let us not mince words. In the characterization of future CENTCOM commander and Defense Secretary James Mattis, speaking to his Marines early in the Iraq War, “There are some a******s in the world that just need to be shot.” This is true, and the reason in the case of jihadists is that they are evil and intend to do evil.

 

At a broader level, some, like Brzezinski, took early issue with the very idea of a “war on terror” or with “global war on terror” as a descriptor of what lay ahead for the United States after 9/11. Time proved them wrong. Of course, a nation shouldn’t go to war against a tactic in the expectation of crushing it as the favored means of policy of your enemies’ organizations, especially when terrorism is all they’ve got. But you can go to war against those who plot and practice terrorism and those who house and fund them. You can take the armed conflict to them, where they are. Waging war on terrorists is what the United States has done for 25 years with more success than failure, Biden’s Afghanistan tragedy excepted.

 

STOPPING THE MONEY FLOW

 

The Global War on Terror has had two other main components, one on the economic side, one diplomatic. The U.S.-led clampdown on terrorist financing has been one of the singular achievements since 9/11. If money is the mother’s milk of politics, that’s no less true for the means to pursue jihadist politics through terror.

 

The basic principle has been to interrupt the flow of funds before the money can get where the jihadist paymasters want it. Various points in the flow offer different opportunities for disruption. One almost amusing example from 2016, as the war against the Islamic State was picking up steam: U.S. air strikes blew up more than $500 million in physical cash in Islamic State distribution centers, where the paper dollars were awaiting payout for various expenses, including the salaries of fighters.

 

The process of disruption is generally less kinetic, however, with the U.S. Treasury Department in the lead role. A 1990s law gave the secretary of state the authority to brand malign entities with the designation of Foreign Terrorist Organization, subjecting them to sanction. A quick post-9/11 executive order from President Bush granted the Treasury Department the authority to name Specially Designated Global Terrorists and substantially increased the scope of available sanctions. Following designation, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control can move in to freeze assets, deprive designees of access to the international banking system, and prohibit transactions with U.S. citizens and entities, from businesses to NGOs. Whereas pre-9/11, money used to flow alarmingly freely, now jihadists and their supporters have to work much harder to finance their activities. Designated entities have increased from several hundred a few years after 9/11 to more than 900 by the mid-2010s to more than 3,000 today.

 

In 2004, Treasury announced the establishment of its Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence as a consolidated clearinghouse for its activities and its liaison with other government agencies, including the Justice Department, the FBI, the IRS, and the intelligence agencies.

 

The United States has also pressed banks and other private-sector financial institutions into service in combating terrorism and other crimes. One such requirement is called “Know Your Customer,” an anti–money laundering program that predated 9/11 but was enhanced after. Banks must demonstrate that they have done what is necessary to have a “reasonable belief” that their customers are who they say they are. They also have to engage in assessing the potential risk a customer poses and monitor for suspicious transactions. They and other institutions have a strong incentive—a “safe harbor” protection from civil action against themselves—to file Suspicious Activity Reports about whatever they encounter with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, another part of Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. The key point is that each bank has a compliance officer overseeing the green-eyeshade version of “If you see something, say something.” Numerous individuals convicted of abetting terrorist plots have faced charges of bank or wire fraud as well.

 

The United States has not merely focused within its own borders but also worked internationally to establish a global system for bank-customer identification and monitoring and reporting on suspicious activity. Global sanctions also contributed to putting the squeeze on Islamic State finances.

 

As in the case of the international crackdown on terrorist financing, so too did the kinetic element of the War on Terror involve international partners and diplomacy, as did counterterrorism intelligence gathering. The U.S. leadership role in international politics has long required the support of allies and other partners. Unsurprisingly, the 9/11 attack was a turning point.

 

Pre-9/11, Saudi Arabia, though itself conventionally Sunni in religious outlook and a kingdom as authoritarian and repressive as they come, was also a significant funder of radical Islamist ideology—Salafism or its Wahhabi variant. No doubt some members of the House of Saud were true believers in terrorist jihad. Others probably concluded pre-9/11 that providing a payoff to the radicals would result in less domestic pressure for a revolution to install a caliphate at home. In any case, the Saudi government spent billions on madrasas teaching radical Islam around the world. Fifteen of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals, as was bin Laden prior to being stripped of his citizenship for denouncing Saudi Arabia’s hosting of U.S. forces during and after the 1991 Gulf War to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Saudi ambivalence continued after 9/11, even as the United States turned up the diplomatic pressure on Riyadh to crack down on financial flows from the Kingdom to al-Qaeda. Then a series of al-Qaeda suicide bombings inside Saudi Arabia from 2003 to 2006 produced a greater sense of urgency. Major cuts in funding for madrasas abroad ensued.

 

Well aware of the threat it faced from the radicalism it had helped promote, Saudi Arabia was also keenly aware of a potentially greater danger that entered the scene in 1979: Iran. Iran’s Twelver Shiism regards Sunni Islam as erroneous and the Gulf states that embrace it as rivals seeking to thwart Iran. For different but no less heartfelt reasons, revolutionary Iran has long sworn to wipe Israel off the map. Israel, for its part, was never a proponent of the United States going to war to topple Saddam Hussein; it saw Iran as the bigger problem. This view converged with the Saudi view and, by various accounts, led to the development of a security and intelligence dialogue between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

 

That exchange increased after the 2006 Lebanon war and intensified further around 2009–2010. The head of Israel’s Mossad met repeatedly with Saudi counterparts. The Iranians, for their part, were aware of this budding relationship, and they hated it. In 2011, the Justice Department announced it had unraveled an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, by detonating a bomb at the Georgetown restaurant he frequented. But—why him? It seems plausible that he was playing an outsize role in developing stronger covert ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which were little reported on at the time.

 

In any event, the perception of where the biggest terrorist threat comes from was evolving, with events from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to Iran. U.S. diplomacy to develop the subtle Sunni–Israeli dialogue into something bigger eventually yielded the Abraham Accords—still a work in progress, especially with regard to Saudi Arabia itself, but a great diplomatic breakthrough nevertheless.

 

THE 25-YEAR ODYESSEY

 

The 25-year Global War on Terror has had many successes—and where it has failed, especially in Afghanistan, the reason was not that the United States was in the fight, but that we precipitously left for gratuitous reasons. The same had been true with the rise of the Islamic State, thankfully corrected by its eradication.

 

Look again at that quotation from George W. Bush’s speech of September 20, 2001. Of the War on Terror, he said: “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

 

There aren’t many terrorist groups of global reach left in business. That’s impressive in its own right, but put it aside. Bush’s rhetoric seemed to imply an achievable end point—but only superficially. Terrorism of some sort will always be a threat, and so the Global War on Terror will continue. The terrorists themselves will see to that. The question is whether we can maintain our vigilance.

Biden’s $7 Billion Taliban Weapons Tab Is Still Coming Due

By Michaell Baumgartner

Wednesday, August 05, 2026

 

Nearly five years after President Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, American-funded military equipment left behind is making terrorists more lethal across the border in Pakistan.

 

I recently traveled to Islamabad to meet with military boss Field Marshal Asim Munir to discuss the conflicts raging across the region, including more than 1,000 terrorist attacks in Pakistan last year — it’s now more affected by terrorism than any other country in the world is. Joining me on the trip was Representative Ryan Zinke. Neither of us approached the trip with illusions about the challenges of the region. Zinke is a former Navy SEAL Commander. I previously worked as an embedded adviser on an Afghan-government counternarcotics team in Helmand Province and occasionally lectured in the Afghanistan-Pakistan program at the U.S. National Defense University.

 

Field Marshal Munir predicted that Pakistan’s fighting with both terrorists and the Taliban government in Kabul is likely to grow. Last February, a suicide bomber attacked a mosque in Islamabad, killing 31 and wounding more than 200. A few weeks later, Pakistan responded by bombing Kabul in an attack that killed nearly 300. The Field Marshal also made clear his frustration that Pakistani counterterrorism forces are confronting the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) — fighters equipped with American-origin night-vision devices and sophisticated sniper weapons left over from the chaotic Biden pull-out.

 

Congressman Zinke and I both sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Task Force. The FMS process is mired in red tape that can make partner nations wait years to acquire U.S. weapons systems they’ve already paid for. The consequences are visible in Pakistan: China provided 81 percent of Pakistan’s major arms imports between 2020 and 2024. When America cannot deliver, we drive potential partners toward Russia and China, while weakening our industrial base. During our meetings in Islamabad in July, Munir noted a bitter asymmetry — that he has been unable to purchase U.S. attack helicopters to defend against terrorist forces using U.S. weapons to attack his troops and police.

 

This is not simply an allegation from Islamabad. United Nations monitors have reported that the TTP possesses NATO-caliber weapons obtained in Afghanistan and that its access to night-vision equipment has increased the lethality of attacks on Pakistani border posts.

 

The equipment is part of the dangerous military inheritance of the Afghan collapse. According to the Department of Defense inspector general, $7.12 billion in American-funded military equipment remained in the former Afghan government’s inventory when it fell in 2021. This was principally materiel previously transferred to Afghan security forces; departing American troops removed or destroyed nearly all the major systems they used directly.

 

More than 316,000 weapons, including specialized sniper rifles, remained in Afghanistan, along with approximately 42,000 pieces of specialized equipment, including night-vision, surveillance, biometric, and positioning devices.  The Afghan air force had roughly 40 American-funded UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, and the Taliban captured and returned several to service. Those aircraft are not being used in the terrorist attacks now confronting Pakistan, but their presence illustrates the extraordinary scale of the military arsenal that the Taliban now control. The condition and precise disposition of this arsenal remain uncertain, but there is now mounting evidence that some of the equipment captured after the collapse has migrated into terrorist hands.

 

During America’s war, the Afghan Taliban exploited sanctuaries in Pakistan to attack Afghanistan. Today, the conflict has partly reversed direction: The TTP operates from sanctuaries in Afghanistan and mounts increasingly lethal attacks inside Pakistan.

 

The TTP and Afghan Taliban are distinct but closely connected organizations. Their relationship operates through the Pashtun belt straddling a permeable border, where tribal, familial, and commercial ties long predate the modern frontier.

 

President Trump’s strong rapport with Munir — they met in person twice last year and speak frequently — creates an opening to broaden cooperation. The United States should negotiate a tailored counterterrorism and security-assistance framework, with Pakistan focused on mutually defined threats, particularly the TTP and ISIS-K. Washington should streamline access to carefully selected night-fighting equipment, intelligence and surveillance support, counter-drone systems, and border-monitoring capabilities. Such cooperation must be mission-specific, rigorously vetted, and subject to strong end-use monitoring. It should be conditioned on measurable Pakistani counterterrorism cooperation and structured to prevent diversion or misuse. It should also be limited to capabilities that do not materially alter the conventional military balance with India.

 

Congress must also confront the underlying equipment problem. The No Equipment Left Behind Act of 2026, for example, would require the Pentagon to prepare for the possibility that a partner government receiving American equipment could collapse, so a debacle like Biden’s Taliban weapons bonanza doesn’t happen again.

 

A more capable TTP threatens more than Pakistan. It strengthens a regional terrorist network in which the TTP, al-Qaeda, ISIS-K, and other groups maintain overlapping networks, compete for recruits, and exploit many of the same ungoverned spaces. Instability along the Afghan-Pakistani border also carries obvious dangers in a nuclear-armed country. Counterterrorism should be the beginning of renewed engagement with Pakistan, not its outer limit.

 

Pakistan’s 250 million people make it the fifth-most populous country in the world. Its relatively young population — about 60 percent of Pakistanis are younger than 30 — means that it will probably grow in economic importance. It’s also home to immense mineral wealth; a high-end estimate of $8 trillion of copper, gold, and critical technology minerals lie in Pakistan’s mountains. In September of last year, the U.S. and Pakistan announced a $500 million mining agreement, the first of its kind between the two nations, although actual production is still likely years away. By comparison, China is already actively mining in Pakistan but doing little value-add processing in the country as it prefers to ship bulk material straight back home. The challenge is that much of the mineral wealth downstream is located in the same border regions undergoing regular terrorist attacks by Baloch militants. So far, there is no evidence that left-behind American-origin weapons have been used in attacks on mineral projects, but this region borders Afghanistan, and if those weapons spread more widely, they could make an already dangerous operating environment even harder to secure.

 

The question is whether Pakistan can establish enough security and stability for American companies to invest, mine, and process minerals there. Surging demand for copper in an increasingly electrified world and critical minerals needed for the AI supercomputing race make Pakistan enticing. Biden’s $7 billion blunder leaving weapons to the Taliban certainly complicates any decision to invest in the region.

 

The central lesson is not just about cleaning up the past administration’s mess. It is that security is a necessary prerequisite of economic engagement. Terrorists may kill people and damage buildings, but their real target is the stability of society and government. America’s Pakistan policy should therefore begin with counterterrorism, but extend to the investments, trade, technology, and mineral partnerships that give both countries a stake in a growing, safe, and prosperous Pakistan.

A Forever Defeat

By Abe Greenwald

Monday, June 15, 2026

 

For two decades, we’ve lamented that George W. Bush launched two wars and never quite achieved American victory in either one. I have expressed this frustration to some degree myself.

 

But as I look at the American surrender that Donald Trump is engineering in Iran, I’m not even sure why I ever entertained the thought that we lost in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Today, we are leaving the enemy regime in place with access to a new tool of global blackmail, billions of dollars, and the knowledge—I wish I could say “impression”—that the U.S. doesn’t have what it takes to stop it. 

 

It’s true that Trump didn’t get us into a “forever war”; he just got us into a lost one. This is defeat.  

 

In Iraq, the U.S. didn’t topple Saddam Hussein only to hand over the Baathist tyranny to one of his sons or Tariq Aziz when we couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction. When the Sunni insurgency arose, we didn’t declare a cease-fire and negotiate the terms of our departure (despite many Americans hoping we would do just that). And we didn’t depose the Taliban only to leave Afghanistan once we couldn’t find Osama bin Laden.  

 

Nope. We stayed and, yes, we won. Say what you want, but Iraq is now a parliamentary democracy. And its leaders haven’t made trouble for its neighbors or the United States in decades. And before Joe Biden did give Afghanistan back to the insurgent Taliban, the country was governed, however fitfully and fragilely, by a pro-American technocratic reformer. 

 

I know that the promotion of human rights is now for sissies, but the U.S. also facilitated miraculous progress in alleviating mass suffering for the people of both countries. Scoff at that if you must, but Donald Trump is the one who told the Iranian people that help was on the way. Which means he’s now notched a total defeat for them as well. 

 

You may think that the cost of victory in Iraq and Afghanistan was too high—and you may very well be right. But don’t tell me that our current surrender to the Iranian regime was worth tens of billions of taxpayer dollars (with billions more soon to come) and the lives of 15 American service members. If we wanted to tell Iran (and the world) that it finally won its near-50-year battle with the U.S., we could have done that for free. 

 

Of course, the total cost of a consequential defeat is unknowable in the moment. We don’t know what Iran will do with its forthcoming billions or the nuclear “dust” or its dug-up missiles or its demonstrated ability to close the Strait of Hormuz at will. And we don’t know what will follow the actions the regime will take. At the time of Biden’s effective surrender in Afghanistan, we didn’t know that Russia would read it as a signal to invade Ukraine six months later. And we still don’t know the ultimate cost of that war.

 

Because the price of defeat is compounded by an unpredictable series of chain reactions. The costs accrue as history continues to play out. Or, one might say, forever.

In Negotiations With Iran, Trump Risks Repeating the Mistakes of Afghanistan

By Mike Nelson

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. President Donald Trump is growing increasingly frustrated by a conflict with no clear end in sight. Despite initial overwhelming success and ongoing tactical victories against an enemy outmatched in skill and technological prowess, the war’s continuation has not brought the U.S. any closer to victory. His heart really isn’t in it, and he sees it as a distraction from the things he’d rather be focusing on.

 

Growing concerned about the costs of the conflict, Trump seeks a negotiated settlement to bring the fighting to a close. While this does seem like the most likely resolution to the war, our adversary proves to be a difficult and duplicitous negotiating counterpart. We find ourselves constantly offering concessions to our enemy—not as part of the final settlement, but just to convince its leaders to continue talks that they seem more than willing to walk away from. Our desperation to continue discussions is in part because, since the start of the negotiations, the enemy has avoided targeting American troops directly, instead continuing attacks on partners, allies, and their civilian infrastructure.

 

This constant pattern of concessions pulls America further and further from what we actually hoped to achieve in a settlement, and the act of negotiating becomes the goal in itself in hopes of getting a deal—any deal—that allows us to walk away from the war. Our nominal friends, Qatar and Pakistan, are offering questionable advice while pretending to act as honest brokers between the warring parties.

 

The situation above encapsulates the president’s current predicament as he seeks to end the war with Iran. But it is also a description of the first Trump administration’s approach to the Doha negotiations with the Taliban—a disastrous agreement that, while not the final conclusion to our longest war, almost guaranteed our embarrassing defeat.

 

First, let me concede there are obvious distinctions between the two conflicts. The duration and human toll of the war in Afghanistan both significantly outpace those of the war with Iran. Trump initiated the Iran war and will (hopefully) be the president who is ultimately responsible for its conclusion, whereas in Afghanistan, Trump inherited the ongoing conflict from two previous administrations, and he was not the commander in chief who oversaw the catastrophic end. His government, however, signed the agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that began the NATO withdrawal later that year and promised its completion by 2021. This timeline neither attributes sole responsibility to nor absolves Trump or Joe Biden of the disaster that followed with the 2021 fall of Kabul; as fellow Dispatch contributor Paul Miller has pointed out in his excellent book, there is plenty of shared blame among the four administrations that conducted the war.

 

But while there are distinctions between the two conflicts, there are also similarities specific to the Trump administration’s negotiating philosophy.

 

In 2017, President Trump announced his South Asia strategy—a plan for dealing with the war that had dragged on too long, with various shifting goals, nebulous end states, distracting mission creep, and too little focus on creating conditions for lasting stability in Afghanistan. Among other things, the strategy confronted a truth that many U.S. officials had been unwilling to face: We had not succeeded in ending the Taliban’s operations through military force, and were not likely to do so in the future. Therefore, there needed to be some plan for their reintegration into a post-conflict Afghanistan. The strategy envisioned reconciliation and the eventual political integration of the Taliban into the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

 

Yet to achieve this goal, American negotiators agreed to Taliban demands that planted the seeds of future disaster. The Taliban refused to allow the Afghan government to participate in the talks and made promises (that were never honored) to later negotiate directly with then-President Ashraf Ghani’s government only after a deal with Washington had been reached. In 2020, the U.S. agreed to the release of Taliban fighters in Afghan government custody—something Afghan officials were neither aware of prior to the deal nor supportive of, only doing so eventually, and begrudgingly, following U.S. arm-twisting. Their concerns proved legitimate: A large number of the thousands of fighters released then returned to the battlefield and participated in the final assault on Kabul in August 2021.

 

Today, the president seems to be walking down that same path, one where his need and desperation to keep negotiations going could lead him to agree to otherwise unacceptable terms—not even as part of a final settlement, but just for the potential for the other side to show up to the table.

 

Last week, the Iranians announced they were walking away from negotiations because of continued Israeli strikes against Hezbollah in response to rocket and drone attacks from the latter. Rather than take issue with this Iranian recalcitrance, Trump once again threw his ally under the bus. During an adversarial phone call with Benjamin Netanyahu, the president reportedly called the Israeli prime minister “crazy” for jeopardizing negotiations with Tehran. He then publicly claimed that he had gotten Israel to agree to the Iranian demands to halt hostilities in Lebanon, despite the fact that Hezbollah had given no such assurances.

 

If one of the White House’s stated goals for the war with Iran was severing the links between the Islamic Republic and its regional proxies, Tehran’s ability to demand protection for these militias, and the administration jumping to comply, do exactly the opposite—it codifies that connection.

 

Any extended protection over Hezbollah or other proxies in the final settlement would be unacceptable, as would any other conditions that run contrary to our stated goals. But rather than haggle over them in the process of diplomatic horse-trading, Iran is all but guaranteeing these conditions will be included by baking them in before the real negotiations happen. By making such demands preconditions for even talking, Iran preemptively weights the outcome, having notched a series of wins before we establish what is on the table regarding starting positions. It’s galling that a man who sold himself as a master dealmaker does not see or does not care how much he is willing to give away in advance.

 

The president is apparently spooked—both by the whispers that a settlement would be viewed as too sweet a deal for Iran and by the prospects of continued human costs, economic disruption, and depletion of critical military weapons if he were to reinitiate hostilities. So he commits to neither—doing anything to continue negotiations or maintain the appearance of negotiations and making repeated and increasingly far-fetched claims of a forthcoming deal. Perhaps he views this as Schrödinger’s negotiation, where all potential outcomes are possible and exist within the theoretical box as long as he never commits to one, keeping alive the hope of a glorious and undisputed victory.

 

But today, thanks to Trump’s missteps during the war, there are only outcomes with significant downsides within the box—and the drawbacks grow in number and severity the longer he dithers. In addition to waning public support for a military campaign that never enjoyed popular backing (primarily because the president never attempted to rally it), the president now faces growing congressional pushback, most recently in the form of a House measure to restrain the executive branch’s war powers. While the vote will prove largely symbolic, the fact that four Republicans joined Democrats is a sign of brewing bipartisan resistance to the president. 

 

As the president faces the headwinds of domestic opposition, he further narrows his range of options through public statements meant to calm markets spooked by the prospect of full-scale renewed hostilities. Not only is he conceding Iranian demands for extended protections for Hezbollah, but he is also casting off much of America’s leverage by implying he would not reinitiate offensive operations unless Iran kills more U.S. service members and signaling possible accommodations in nuclear negotiations. While there may be wiggle room to reach an agreement on these and other issues in a final deal, conceding them in advance removes them as levers to gain Iranian concessions.

 

Rather than continue his desperate overtures for diplomacy, Trump should take an approach similar to the one currently working in Iran’s favor and back away from talks until such a time as the Islamic Republic is willing to comply by engaging in good-faith negotiations and refraining from attacks on international shipping or civilian infrastructure. 

 

As Nick Catoggio notes, many observers continue to encourage the president to “finish the job,” including some who think regime change is still within the U.S. grasp. But ultimately, the burden, effort, and cost of overthrowing the Islamic Republic are well beyond the already demonstrated fleeting level of presidential interest. Insofar as Trump put any thought into the war’s outcome, the only real effort was his wishful and unrealistic plan that initial decapitation strikes in the first 24 to 48 hours would solve everything.

 

There are others, including me, who encouraged the president earlier in the conflict to at least achieve some quantifiable goal based on any of the objectives he enumerated at the start of the fighting. But since I made that case, America’s position has grown weaker through a combination of concessions, desperation, disinterest, naïveté, and neophyte bumbling from a president who never learned why the conflict with Iran has simmered for 47 years. So now, “finishing the job” may mean avoiding a truly disastrous deal and instead working to bring about a merely bad one. In his desire to avoid any blame or criticism for a negative outcome, Trump makes one in which there are conditions worthy of blame more likely—and fails to recognize the hard reality that the possibility of dodging well-deserved blame stopped existing long ago.

 

Ultimately, this war is going to end in a settlement, and sadly, because of the president’s decisions, it is likely to be a settlement that’s favorable to Iran. At a minimum, the outcome of the conflict will come with tacit recognition that the Iranians are the masters of a maritime chokepoint, with the ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz at any time they choose, and that they got away with murdering tens of thousands of their own citizens—a grim signal to the Iranian people the next time they get notions about liberty, democracy, and human rights.

 

There will always be war between nations, and military force is a necessary tool in any president’s toolkit. Sometimes wars result in failure, despite the best planning and intentions of the governments that start them, or the incredible valor and skill of the soldiers who fight them. In this case, we have an abundance of the latter and a dearth of the former. For there are few things less forgivable than deciding to go to war without any willingness to invest the personal effort or political capital to win it.

 

In the end, whatever the specifics of the deal, this conflict will not prove to be the conclusion of a 47-year conflict, as the White House claimed in its ham-fisted communications at the war’s start. Rather, it will be just one chapter in the enduring clash between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic—one which makes the coming chapters more difficult than they needed to be.

Reclaiming Bagram Would Leave U.S. Troops Vulnerable

By Henry Olsen

Saturday, September 27, 2025

 

President Trump recently floated the possibility of regaining use of Bagram Air Base outside of Kabul. This is a very bad idea.

 

Trump’s narrow logic for wanting the base back makes sense on its own terms. Its strategic location near western China makes it a good place to base American air and missile assets. In the event of war, possession of Bagram would allow America to threaten China’s rear, especially its nuclear weapons bases.

 

That doesn’t mean that the U.S. would bomb the bases, as attacking a country’s nuclear deterrent could cause it to launch those weapons. Still, having the capability to threaten them would add another layer to the military puzzle China would face.

 

The trouble with Bagram is that its location is on balance a strategic weakness. It’s not the proximity to China that makes it so; it’s the position within Afghanistan and proximity to Pakistan that undermines the efficacy of this proposal.

 

Bagram would be surrounded by Taliban-held territory. In the event of war, the Taliban could easily blockade the base to prevent resupply by land or even attack it. Preventing that would require the pre-positioning of ground troops and supplies. That’s not a good use of scarce U.S. resources.

 

Even worse, Bagram’s ability to survive a war with China rests on America’s ability to resupply it by air over Pakistani airspace. That’s how the U.S. kept its forces in Afghanistan for 20 years.

 

The Pakistani military often played a double game in that war, allowing American resupply while covertly shielding Taliban forces within Pakistan when the going got tough. Pakistani generals have long thought a friendly, Islamic-controlled Afghanistan provides it with strategic depth in its eternal conflict with India.

 

Since America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Pakistan has shifted significantly toward China. It now purchases the bulk of its weapons from China, including China’s most advanced airplanes and air defense systems.

 

The two nations are also drawing economically closer. Pakistan is an active participant in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which uses Chinese money and trade to build infrastructure and tie recipient nations closer to Beijing.

 

Last December’s signing of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor Phase 2.0 highlights this growing dependence. This initiative uses Chinese funds to construct roads and other avenues of transportation connecting China to Pakistani ports along the Arabian Sea.

 

If completed, this gives China the ability to bypass the narrow Malacca Strait near Singapore and Indonesia when it imports oil from the Middle East. Such ability is crucial to reducing China’s economic exposure to American naval power and would also make Pakistan economically tied to Chinese imports.

 

Pakistan is also fiscally reliant on Chinese loans. China owns 22 percent of the nation’s foreign debt and has been eager to extend even more credit to the beleaguered nation.

 

In short, there is every reason to believe that Pakistan would tacitly back China in any war with the United States. Denying American resupply to its forward Bagram base would be the least belligerent way of helping its creditor and harming the U.S.

 

This, in effect, would make Bagram-based forces hostages to our enemies.

 

America possesses the military might to rescue these hostages or even to force its way through Pakistani airspace to keep them in place. But that diverts ships and aircraft from the decisive theaters in the Eastern Pacific to support a minor sideshow.

 

China would love to see the United States put one or two of the seven or eight aircraft carriers potentially active worldwide at any time in the northern Arabian Sea rather than the Pacific Ocean defending Taiwan and Japan.

 

President Trump was right in his first term to press for U.S. withdrawal from this vulnerable and extended position. He should resist any temptation to reverse course and once more put American troops in harm’s way, this time with a potentially catastrophic result.

The Enduring Betrayal of America’s Afghan Allies

By John McCormack

Friday, August 15, 2025

 

Four years ago today, as America’s 20-year mission in Afghanistan neared its end, the city of Kabul fell to the Taliban. The next day, August 16, 2021, produced the most indelible images of America’s betrayal of Afghan civilians and allies, as cameras captured footage of desperate Afghans clinging to the side of American military aircraft taking off, and at least two Afghans fell to their deaths.

 

Over the following two chaotic weeks, tens of thousands of Afghans were evacuated from Kabul’s main airport, where 13 U.S. service members and about 170 Afghans were killed by a suicide bombing outside of an entrance to the facility known as Abbey Gate. But the majority of America’s Afghan allies, including interpreters and their families, were left behind.

 

That initial betrayal carried out under the Biden administration has endured—and in some respects has been exacerbated—under the Trump administration. While 195,000 Afghans have been resettled in the United States since Kabul fell to the Taliban, there are at least 250,000 Afghans abroad who are eligible for resettlement in the United States, including 167,000 applicants for Special Immigrant Visas (SIV), a program for Afghan allies and their family members.

 

The pace of U.S. government admitting vetted SIV applicants and their family members to the United States has slowed from 3,000 to 4,000 a month at the end of the Biden administration to 200 per month under the Trump administration, according to Jessica Bradley Rushing, a former State Department official who was laid off from her government post in July and now works at AfghanEvac, a nonprofit that helps Afghan allies and refugees. (Trump administration officials did not provide statistics in response to questions from The Dispatch about how many Afghans have been admitted to the country this year through Special Immigrant Visas.) Under the State Department program Enduring Welcome, the U.S. government was funding the relocation of Afghans, including by paying for commercial flights from Afghanistan to countries like Qatar, Albania, and the Philippines, but President Donald Trump’s executive order issued on January 20 cutting off foreign aid stopped that relocation funding. “Now that the U.S. government isn’t doing all the relocations, it’s dramatically slowed,” said Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran and the president of AfghanEvac. “The vast majority are in Afghanistan, but there are Afghans in 90 countries around the world waiting to come here.”

 

Even if funding were restored for relocation efforts, it would take an additional act of Congress for all SIV-eligible applicants to come to the United States. Congress has authorized only enough visas for roughly 40,000 of the 167,000 SIV-eligible applicants and their family members, according to AfghanEvac.

 

While SIV applicants continue to be processed, the Trump administration shut down the U.S. refugee program on January 27. That has affected Afghans who weren’t directly working for the United States but nevertheless face the threat of persecution from the Taliban based on things like their careers—working for Western-allied nonprofits or in academia, for instance—or religious faith. The situation is particularly dire for Afghans who fled to Pakistan and Iran, whose governments are actively deporting tens of thousands of Afghans back into the hands of the Taliban. Just 76 Afghan refugees have been admitted to the United States since January 20, an official for the Department of Homeland Security told The Dispatch.

 

Behind every statistic, of course, is a real human story. Justin Alexander Yousufpoor, who served as an Afghan interpreter for U.S. forces until his father was brutally murdered by the Taliban for working for the United States in 2010, told The Dispatch about his efforts to get his family to the United States.

 

Yousufpoor himself came to the United States on a Special Immigrant Visa in 2010 after his father’s murder. In 2012, he joined the U.S. Army, returned to Afghanistan as an interpreter, and became a U.S. citizen. Despite his father losing his life because of his work for the United States, Yousufpoor’s family remained stuck in Afghanistan until 2021. His mother and her children had a letter of recommendation provided by a brigadier general. While she and two of Yousufpoor’s siblings were able to evacuate from the Kabul airport, three of his siblings were unable to get inside the airport after the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate.

 

Within months of the fall of Afghanistan, Yousufpoor helped his sister flee to Pakistan, while his two brothers fled to Turkey. Four years later, the family has not been reunified—his sister’s application is still pending while his brothers are languishing in Turkey due to a perceived discrepancy over their birthdates. If returned to the Taliban, “they’re going to kill my brothers, or they’re going to recruit them to join the Taliban fighters,” Yousufpoor said. “If [my sister] is captured by the Taliban morale police or the intelligence, they’re going to immediately take her to the Taliban trial, and then she’s going to be prosecuted in public by stoning,” he added, explaining that before she fled the country his sister had been found guilty in Afghanistan for not wearing a head covering.

 

As for Afghans who have already made it to the United States, the Trump administration has made thousands vulnerable to deportation by revoking Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole for Afghans who arrived without legal status. This spring, thousands of Afghans received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security telling them that they would be “subject to potential criminal prosecution, civil fines, and penalties, and any other lawful options available to the federal government” if they did not immediately self-deport. Afghans who lost their protected status due to Trump administration policies can still apply for asylum. “We’ve heard there have been some denials of asylum cases, but in the vast majority, they’re being approved,” VanDiver told The Dispatch. “There’s no real pattern [to the denials], but I do think that people who crossed the southern border … are at a higher danger than those who came through other means.” A Department of Homeland Security official told The Dispatch that 1,841 Afghan nationals have been granted asylum since the start of the new Trump administration, but the official did not provide statistics on the number of asylum requests that have been denied.

 

One woman named Ashley, who was born and raised in the United States, spoke to The Dispatch about the plight of her brother-in-law—a Christian convert who fled Afghanistan because he feared for his life. Requesting not to use her last name due to fear of what would happen to her brother-in-law if he were returned to the Taliban, Ashley told The Dispatch that her brother-in-law crossed the southern U.S. border on January 11 of this year and approached border patrol agents requesting asylum. He has been held in detention since then, and on August 7, his request for “withholding for removal” was denied by an immigration judge. “There’s clearly a lack of belief in the severity of what it means to be a Christian in Afghanistan,” Ashley told The Dispatch.

 

Earlier this year, The Dispatch highlighted the case of Afghan Christians threatened with deportation at one church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Members of the church say the asylum hearings for those Afghan Christians have been repeatedly postponed.

 

VanDiver and other advocates say they are unaware of any Afghans in the United States who have been deported to Afghanistan. Chelsea Sobolik of World Relief, a Christian charity that operates worldwide, noted that the U.S. is unlikely to deport Afghans directly to Afghanistan because of a lack of diplomatic relations with the Taliban. But she warned that deporting Afghans to other countries would still endanger them. “The reality is, if we deported Afghans to Qatar or to any one of these third countries, they would likely deport those individuals back to Afghanistan,” she said. “It is not an overstatement to say that Afghan Christians, if returned, would certainly face torture or worse.”

 

As for the Afghan allies stranded overseas, VanDiver warned that remains a national security issue as well as a humanitarian issue. “These are all folks who, for one reason or another, served alongside our military or diplomats or intelligence services. They all took risks because they believed that the return on their investment—their risk investment—was going to be really high,” he said. “They thought they were going to be able to come and pursue their American dream, and instead, we’ve pulled the rug out from under them at every turn.”