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.

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.

Applying Iraq’s Hardest Lessons to Iran

By Michael Baumgartner

Friday, March 06, 2026

 

For more than 45 years, the Iranian regime has relied on nuclear brinkmanship, proxy militias, and missile and drone proliferation to destabilize the Middle East and project power beyond its borders. Iran and its proxies have kidnapped and killed Americans in Iraq, Yemen, Israel, and in countries as far-flung as France and Argentina.

 

In recent days, as U.S. and Israeli strikes have targeted key elements of that system, I have heard the same phrase repeated in the halls of Congress, in member briefings, and on cable news: Iraq 2.0.

 

Colleagues I respect are sounding the alarm. They see airstrikes in the Middle East, hear talk of regime change, and conclude we are sleepwalking toward another 2003.

 

I understand the instinct. I served at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad during the first year of the surge in 2007. In Iraq, I saw the follies, the successes, and most of all the bravery — and I learned hard lessons. Don’t confuse battlefield success with political outcomes. Don’t dismantle institutions you can’t replace. Don’t invade without a plan for the insurgency that follows. And never enter a conflict the American people cannot clearly understand.

 

Those lessons argue not for passivity, but for discipline. In Iraq, I also saw up close the hand of the Iranian regime: its proxies and its operatives armed with IEDs and rockets that killed and maimed Americans while we bore the burden of ownership.

 

What is unfolding against Iran is not Iraq 2.0. And if you look closely, you can already see some of Iraq’s toughest lessons being applied — even as the hardest work still lies ahead.

 

In Iraq, we toppled a regime and then sent troops and civilians in to govern the country we had just shattered — without a plan to confront the insurgency that followed. We dissolved institutions and discovered that rebuilding them was far harder than defeating them.

 

This campaign is structured differently. There are no American divisions massing for Tehran and no American interim government waiting to run the country. The goals are narrower: Stop a nuclear breakout, degrade the proxy network, limit the missiles and drones that carry Iran’s reach, and fracture the regime’s war-making core to compel verifiable restraint. That means targeting the launch network and strike apparatus — launchers, crews, command links, and missile and drone supply lines — and sustaining pressure long enough to force behavioral change.

 

If that pressure exposes fractures inside the regime, that is a consequence of coercion — and potentially an opportunity — not a blueprint for American management. The objective is behavioral change backed by concrete capability loss: no nuclear weapon, no proxy war machine, no unchecked missile and drone proliferation.

 

That objective preserves options for U.S. interests. If sustained pressure produces verifiable restraint from Iran’s current leadership, that is a success. If it accelerates internal fractures that lead to a different Iranian leadership willing to accept those limits, that too is a success. The United States should not promise regime change, but neither should it close off outcomes created by pressure.

 

The broader possibility — one only Iranians themselves can determine — is that as we degrade the regime’s war machine, we also damage its internal police state to an extent that long-suppressed voices can rise into leadership. That outcome cannot be engineered from Washington, but neither should it be foreclosed.

 

Iran’s response is calculated. For Iranian hardliners, survival is victory. If the regime endures, it claims success. Their playbook is familiar: Widen the fight, raise costs, squeeze oil traffic, and wait for political will to weaken. Part of that strategy is to burn through our interceptors and strain regional alliances. That vulnerability is real. And this will not be resolved in a news cycle. Even President Bill Clinton’s air campaign in Kosovo required 78 days of sustained bombing. Technology has advanced since 1999 — but so have hardened targets and countermeasures.

 

There are no guarantees. Escalation risks are real. The translation of military leverage into durable political outcomes is never automatic.

 

Iraq also taught us something that matters just as much as sequencing and restraint: A campaign the public cannot understand will not be sustained. This is a test of endurance, and Iran’s strategy is to raise costs and fracture will. Americans deserve a plain explanation of purpose and limits.

 

The purpose is clear: Destroy the missile and drone arsenal Iran uses to terrorize the region, and gain leverage to reduce its capacity for proxy war and prevent a nuclear breakout. The limit is equally clear: This is not an invasion, not an occupation, and not an open-ended promise to govern Iran’s future.

 

We are in the early phase of a difficult campaign. The only responsible course is to keep options open, aligned with core U.S. interests. Iraq taught us the cost of confusion and shifting goalposts. Iran presents a different challenge — one that demands discipline and strategic patience.

Trump’s Approach to Venezuela Lives Down to the Left’s Caricature of the Iraq War

By Noah Rothman 

Thursday, January 08, 2026 

To hear Donald Trump tell it, it’s mission accomplished in Venezuela. 

The days since the Caracas raid and the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the Chavista regime in Venezuela is “giving us everything that we feel is necessary,” the president told the New York Times. Indeed, the president maintained, the regime now led by Maduro deputy Delcy Rodríguez doesn’t have much choice. 

Trump has repeatedly insisted that the Caracas raid essentially transformed Venezuela from a rogue socialist state into a satrap of the United States. He has claimed that “we’re in charge” now. He’s mused publicly about dispatching American commercial and political assets to Venezuela to “run” the joint. And, in his interview with the Times, Trump revealed his expectation that America will manage Venezuela as though it were a colonial enterprise for the foreseeable future. 

When asked how long the U.S. plans to “remain Venezuela’s political overlord” — “three months? Six months? A year? Longer?” — Trump confirmed his interlocutor’s suspicions. “I would say much longer,” the president contemplated, adding, “only time will tell.” 

That’s pretty weird. There are moments in this interview in which Trump appears to be aware of the fact that the regime established by Hugo Chávez in 1999 is, save for Maduro’s absence, wholly intact. Indeed, he contends that the United States is now “getting along very well” with Maduro’s equally criminal successor, the head of an illegitimate regime to which the president now refers to as an “administration.” 

But Trump seems to have been convinced that Venezuela is now an American vassal state. Thus, its resources are, for all intents and purposes, America’s to do with as we see fit: 

“We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” Mr. Trump said during a nearly two-hour interview. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.” 

For an administration beholden to a political movement that regards anti-George W. Bushism as its foundational ideological precept, this statement is even weirder. It is as if Trump and his inner circle internalized the caricature of the Bush administration and the Iraq War crafted and promulgated by the American left — a “war for oil,” a campaign of “conquest,” “imperialism,” and “colonialism” — and resolved to do it for real this time. For this iteration of the Trump administration, it’s as though real Bushism has never been tried. 

Democratic narratives and the popular myths retailed by progressive content creators in the mid-aughts notwithstanding, the Bush administration bent over backward to mollify its left-wing critics. The American military footprint in Iraq was lighter than necessary — as the 2007 “surge” subsequently confirmed — to avoid confirming the left’s worst suspicions about the colonialist nature of Paul Bremer’s provisional administration. Despite the growing insurgency, Bush insisted on holding elections in Iraq as soon as possible — a firmness that was criticized as “pigheaded, uncompromising, and stubborn” by those who thought the security situation was too dire to risk a national plebiscite. 

Not only did the Bush administration not “take the oil” — something that Trump himself has insisted was a grave mistake for decades — but Bremer’s administration privatized Iraq’s oil industry in the early fall of 2003. Congress appropriated billions to support the redevelopment of the Iraqi oil industry, as well as helping Baghdad establish funds and export mechanisms for the crude it produced. By early 2005, the Iraqi government was dependent upon oil export proceeds for over 90 percent of its revenue. 

According to the American left, this is a story not about how the United States did everything in its power to return the funds generated by Iraq’s oil wealth to its people. Rather, it’s a tale of how terribly Bush mismanaged his expropriative project in Iraq — the one they just knew he sought all along. How could it be otherwise? 

Perhaps Trump himself was persuaded by the left’s delusions. After all, at the time, he was a game show host in relatively good standing among the nation’s liberal cultural icons, content creators, and politicians. Perhaps he took some of those formative preconceptions with him into office, resolved to do imperialism better than his hapless predecessors. 

But the U.S. is not Venezuela’s colonial administrator. There are no American viceroys ruling over the Venezuelan people. America can threaten, muscle, cajole, and entice the Chavista regime in Caracas to do its bidding, but the regime’s cooperation is still a prerequisite. After all, the regime remains in place. 

The Maduro-era military and intelligence officials are still there. It is still beholden to the militias and the drug cartels for stability at home. It continues to rely on anti-American powers like Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba for support abroad. The Venezuelan people are still captive to a hostile regime that violates their rights as a matter of course. They have earned the emerging “dismay” — a crushing fall from the emotional highs they experienced after Maduro’s downfall. Rather than seeking their liberty, the Trump administration seems content to legitimize the criminals who preside over their oppression and subjugation. 

The left talked itself into a variety of untruths about the Iraq War in the first decade of this century. Today, the president and his allies seem to be convincing themselves of their own set of empirically unverifiable beliefs about the conditions that supposedly prevail inside Venezuela. Both phenomena were and are bizarre. 

But if the president has persuaded himself that the real problem with the Iraq War was that it didn’t live down to the left’s expectations for it, he may soon discover a new appreciation for how that war and its aftermath — despite its many flaws — were handled.