Biden Continues the War on Terror Beyond Afghanistan

This litany of numerous terrorist groups that have cropped up across two continents ought to make us realize what a colossal, destructive failure the war on terror is.

The president delivered a good speech tonight defending his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and end the U.S. war there. Here was the key point:

So we were left with a simple decision: Either follow through on the commitment made by the last administration and leave Afghanistan, or say we weren’t leaving and commit another tens of thousands more troops going back to war.

That was the choice — the real choice — between leaving or escalating.

I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit. 

Biden has come under intense criticism for the last few weeks, and it has been remarkable how he has persisted in following through on his commitment to end the war. He seems convinced that the only practical alternative to full withdrawal was escalation, and I think he was right about that. We know what the reaction in Washington would have been if U.S. forces had come under attack again and if there had been more American casualties. There would be the same atavistic demand for revenge and “action” that drives so much of our foreign policy thinking. The clamor for escalation would have been deafening, and Biden would have found himself boxed in. To Biden’s credit, he didn’t let things get to that point, and he took a chance on doing the right thing for the United States.

The demand for escalation is built in to the war on terror. As Spencer Ackerman explains in Reign of Terror, the security state responds to failure by escalating, and even when the U.S. fighting a losing battle escalation is their answer. Ackerman writes, “The Security State escalated to maintain, a position that kept it from achieving any finality, let alone one that passed for victory.”¹ What I think has so infuriated the security state and its supporters in think tanks and the media is that Biden was expected to follow the script of escalating to maintain, and instead he chose to break the pattern and got our forces out of harm’s way instead. That is why Biden’s foreign policy is now being absurdly described as “nationalist” and “Trumpian,” and it is why his speech tonight is being misrepresented as a rejection of liberal internationalism. Biden’s speech was in many ways a very conventional liberal internationalist statement.

There was one encouraging line that might point towards a better Biden foreign policy in the future: “There’s nothing low-grade or low-risk or low-cost about any war.” If Biden followed through on that thought to its logical conclusion, he would recognize the bankruptcy and futility of the war on terror as a whole. The U.S. could dismantle the apparatus it created to wage this war, but to do that requires recognizing that militarized counterterrorism has been a profound and costly failure.

Unfortunately, Biden did not fully repudiate the war on terror in his speech. He repeated his view that the U.S. had more important threats that it needed to confront in other parts of the world. Biden said:

 The terror threat has metastasized across the world, well beyond Afghanistan.  We face threats from al-Shabaab in Somalia; al Qaeda affiliates in Syria and the Arabian Peninsula; and ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq, and establishing affiliates across Africa and Asia. 

This litany of numerous terrorist groups that have cropped up across two continents ought to make us realize what a colossal, destructive failure the war on terror is. If the “terror threat has metastasized,” that is probably because of the carcinogenic policies of the war on terror that radicalize new cohorts and create new enemies all the time. Regrettably, Biden is using it to justify the continuation of the war on terror beyond and after the war in Afghanistan. That is why the U.S. continues to conduct strikes in Somalia, it is why U.S. forces remain in Syria and Iraq, and it is why U.S. special forces are being sent off on bizarre, unauthorized missions in eastern Congo. The forever war goes on in a number of countries, and getting out of Afghanistan is not sufficient to end it. Considering how much resistance withdrawal from Afghanistan has encountered, it will be even more difficult to shut down the war on terror entirely.

1. Ackerman, Reign of Terror: p. 233.