Blogpost: Effects and sideeffects: Was it worth it?

After 9/11, national security decisionmakers agreed on a multi-pronged strategy hastily crafted in fear and anger: hardening the U.S. at home against terrorist attack; preventive and preemptive strikes against terrorists abroad wherever they could be found; war against governments that harbored terrorists; and nation-building, on the argument, as President George W. Bush put it, that the U.S. model of liberal market democracy should be exported because it is right and good.  

There was as also, some will recall, a Madison Avenue like marketing strategy led by Charlotte Beers to promote American values and win friends among potential terrorists in disaffected populations. Let’s call that GWOT 1.0.
 
The consensus that underpinned the GWOT 1.0 is fractured. The Biden Administration has, at least for the moment, rejected occupations and nation-building, ostensibly ended one war in Afghanistan, and is for the moment keeping only a small military presence in Iraq.  
 
The core of the GWOT doctrine remains intact and essentially unchallenged. The Biden team favors “over the horizon” counterterrorism, what might be called GWOT 2.0. or GWOT without nationbuilding. In other words, the tentacles of our counterterror military operations continue to reach not only into Afghanistan but into more than 80 countries across the globe, including Algeria, and Burkina Faso, Indonesia, the Philippines, Somalia and Yemen. 
 
These operations are proxy or semi-proxy wars where the U.S. supports allies of sometimes questionable merits against potential terrorists by providing money, equipment and training. But these wars are sometimes not so hands-off or remote controlled — the U.S. has its own troops, CIA operatives, and contractors serving as advisers, conducting drone strikes and covert operations, sometimes fighting side by side with allies.
 
Further, the U.S. has turned to confronting China in the Asia-Pacific region.  I come back to China later.
 
The August 29th drone strike in Kabul that preemptively targeted an imminent attack by ISIS-K in Afghanistan illustrates the problems with a preemptive counterterror strategy. The tactical brilliance of the strike was seemingly manifest. Without the risk of sending troops on the ground or a manned aircraft, using careful intelligence, the drone honed in on suspected militants driving a white pickup truck loaded with explosives. After hours of careful surveillance, the U.S. drone operators launched a precision weapon against the target “before” it got close to innocent civilians. Pentagon spokespeople immediately announced that there were militants killed and a terror attack averted.
 
Of course, as has happened before, the strike only killed civilians, including 7 children. The intelligence was flawed, the truck filled with water, the people innocently gathering. Evidence that there was no threat posed by the people or the truck was seemingly discounted. Pentagon spokespeople have assured us that the killing of civilians was a tragic mistake, a regrettable loss of life. All efforts will be taken to find out what went wrong.
 
But investigating an errant drone strike, or even all the errant strikes, risks overlooking problems with the entire strategy. As the U.S. keeps waging preventive war in one version or another, including preventive drone strikes, we will see tactical brilliance and tragedy repeated.  
 
Indeed, tragedy is a foreseeable feature of drone strikes and the strategy itself, not a bug. Apart from efforts to protect the homeland — and those could be improved — the preventive war part of the Global War on Terror is ineffective and counterproductive.
 
Unsurprisingly for students of history, a great power has once again overreached in an effort to control everything, everywhere, all the time.  The U.S. has spent and in some cases squandered its resources in the search for perfect security against the risk of terrorist attacks. And we have arguably made the problem worse; there are more “terrorists” now than in 2001. The societies we went to change are worse off, with large swaths of cities in rubble and agriculture devastated. The governments we promised would be more democratic are less so because we backed autocrats in our hope that they would lead us to terrorists. Civilians in the many war zones who didn’t want to fight, who were perhaps even against terrorism, may turn to support those who promise to strike back against the U.S.
 
U.S. wars rarely work as promised because war itself rarely works as promised.  U.S. leaders, since the war of 1812, through the U.S. Mexico War, and the Civil War, as well as the occupation of the Philippines, promised quick, effective, and low casualty contests.  And so, also each increment of force in Vietnam — from Rolling Thunder, to Linebacker I and Linebacker II, to the torching of villages —was supposed to bring lasting victory.
 
If war rarely works, why do we keep doing it?  Because the fundamental beliefs that underpin war itself remain unchallenged.  Most of the elite thinks that force works — that people will back down if confronted with superior firepower.  We also tend to think that force is more effective than the alternatives and that the quick resort to violence beats sanctions, diplomacy, or support for people building democratic institutions.  
 
But we should have learned the lesson in Vietnam, and indeed on 9/11 itself, that people don’t like it when you kill their friends and family.  They get mad and get even.  They resist occupation. They line up to fight against those who they see as aggressors.
 
What would be a better policy?  The U.S. should reassess the GWOT, and probably pull out of the many places where we are currently operating.  This will likely lead to a diminished terror threat as the U.S. stops inadvertently killing civilians and as the governments the United States supports stop oppressing religious and ethnic minorities and learn to live with them.  
 
Smart sanctions can deprive bad actors of financial and material resources, diplomacy can avert conflict, and only the slow growth of democratic norms and institutions is durable.  War undermines democratic norms.
 
The U.S. needs to treat terrorism as a crime not as war.  Though Homeland Security can be improved to reduce the racial profiling and the civil liberties violations that have sometimes been characteristic of these efforts, the search for large scale terror plots and their disruption is a useful and largely effective law enforcement activity.
 
To reduce the threat from abroad, the U.S. should continue working with Interpol and the law enforcement arms of other states to deter, detect and disrupt terrorist actors and groups, to track and cut off terrorist financing, and to arrest terrorists.  Starving terrorist financing by electronic means is safer than bombing oil wells or burning poppy fields.
 
Some may agree that we should rethink the GWOT, but in the next breath suggest that the U.S. should turn to the real threat: fighting a new Cold War with China.  Not so fast; the same lessons would apply, but this time with two nuclear armed states.  A cold war with China would further militarize the Pacific, be as draining of our treasure as previous hot and cold wars, will likely bolster the hardliners in China, and potentially lead to tremendous loss of life as we clash over islands and market share. 
If we continue with GWOT 2.0 and the mobilization against China, the other major threats to US and global security — climate change, inequality, economic insecurity, and the pandemic — will take a back seat to preparing for war.