The U.S. Was Never Going to Win the “War on Terror”

Twenty-five years ago, President George W. Bush made a sweeping pledge shortly after Al Qaeda’s airborne hijackers slaughtered almost three thousand people, from more than a hundred countries, at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania, on September 11, 2001. “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” he told a joint session of Congress, about the deadliest terrorist attack in history. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” He received rousing applause.Since then, about seven thousand American service members—more than twice the number of people killed on 9/11—have died in U.S. campaigns against extremism, and almost a million people have been killed as a direct result of conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen, roughly half of whom were civilians. Millions more have died from the by-products of those conflicts, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project, on top of untold injuries. Then there are the trillions of dollars spent on those conflicts. And, this year, the U.S., alongside Israel, has launched another vaguely defined war in the Middle East, this time against Iran. The U.S. has spent nearly the entire twenty-first century in conflict with various—and now multiplying—forms of extremism. Yet the consensus among experts who have spent their professional lives dealing with the aftermath of 9/11 is that the “war on terror” was never winnable.“We basically set ourselves up to fail by making the standard so impossible to achieve,” Colin Clarke, the executive director of the Soufan Center, in New York, and a fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, in The Hague, told me. “It also led to a never-ending war, because, when can you actually defeat ‘terrorism’? A war against al-Qaeda would have made a lot more sense, but in the US, we love to wage war on abstract concepts like drugs, poverty, and crime.”Still, the U.S. has prevented another catastrophic domestic attack for more than two decades—a “towering accomplishment,” Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University and the author of “Inside Terrorism,” told me. After 9/11, the U.S. scrambled to reorganize national-security agencies, pass legislation, reallocate funding, and coördinate better at the local, state, and federal level, he said. But, Hoffman explained, “that is not the same as winning a war. To have won the war on terrorism required the defeat of al Qaeda—which the U.S. did not achieve. It would have required countering al Qaeda’s narrative and triumphing over its malignant ideology. We have failed there, too.”In 2000, I drove with another reporter over the steep, hair-raising roads from Pakistan, across the Khyber Pass, into Afghanistan. Under the Taliban, the United Nations reported that, “in most aspects,” Afghanistan was “worse off than almost any country in the world.” Poverty was rampant. Annual per-capita G.D.P. was less than two hundred dollars. Almost two-thirds of adults were illiterate. With farmers in Jalalabad, we walked through poppy fields that at the time produced a significant amount of the world’s opium and heroin, a major source of Taliban revenue. We rode near a training camp for Al Qaeda, which had been given free rein by the Taliban. In the capital, the few other women we saw were hidden behind burqas with only small meshes through which to see. We pooled resources and bought plastic slippers for eight hundred shoeless kids—stuffed thirty-eight to a room and two to a bed—at the Kabul orphanage, some of whom had living parents who simply could not afford to feed them.In 2002, I travelled back to Kabul under wildly different circumstances. I was in a press pool accompanying the then Secretary of State, Colin Powell, as he reopened the U.S. Embassy after Operation Enduring Freedom had helped the Northern Alliance, an Afghan opposition group, topple the Taliban and force Osama bin Laden to flee. “We are back in business. We are here to stay,” Powell vowed. “We are committed to the future of this country.” Over the next two decades, the U.S. Congress appropriated nearly a hundred and fifty billion dollars to aid Afghanistan’s economic development and support counterterrorism programs. The benefits from that period were many: Thousands of schools were built, and the student population went up almost tenfold, with millions of girls entering school and more than a hundred thousand in universities. By 2021, women held more than a quarter of the seats in a democratically elected parliament. The last two Afghan Ambassadors to the United States, Adela Raz and Roya Rahmani, were women. Health care was more accessible; life expectancy went up by almost two decades between 2004 and 2010. Local, independent TV and radio stations were established, and the internet became available.But the U.S. strategy for Afghanistan was fatally flawed. The U.S.-backed Afghan government was corrupted by patronage networks and regional strongmen who demanded bribes in exchange for jobs or basic services. International aid was siphoned off, with little oversight, by government officials and their cronies. The majority of the U.S. funding went toward creating a new military, but many of the supplies were pilfered, and Afghan commanders created so-called ghost soldiers to pocket their income and supplies.On my last trip to Afghanistan, in 2021, as the U.S. was in the final stages of planning its withdrawal, I took a picture in front of a mural of a female police officer, in uniform, with her face uncovered and a military hat on her head. Next to it was a slogan in huge letters, declaring “Afghan Female Police: A Force for Good.”Five months later, the Taliban militia, which had no airpower and unsophisticated weaponry, seized control of Kabul in just ten days. In the end, Afghans were no longer willing to fight for a deeply flawed U.S.-backed government. On the day Kabul fell, I went to Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery to visit the grave of Sergeant First Class Antonio Rey Rodriguez, one of the last U.S. soldiers to die in Afghanistan. Only twenty-eight, he had been on his ninth tour. His widow, Ronaleen, another Special Forces officer, was back in Afghanistan to help with the evacuation of U.S. troops. “Final sprint,” she posted on social media. Fourteen acres of Section 60 are largely devoted to U.S. service members who died in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are so many heroes, like Rodriguez, who nobly forfeited their lives in the war on terror, and Afghanistan is now worse than it was during the Taliban’s first rule; it is once again controlled by an extremist, authoritarian, and misogynist government—one that is better armed than it was in 2001. In December, the U.N. noted that Al Qaeda has reportedly established a presence in many of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces since the Taliban’s return. Al Qaeda also “provides ideological guidance to a range of groups,” and “acts as a service provider and multiplier for other groups in Afghanistan, providing them with training, advice and logistical support,” the report said. Afghanistan is once again a “permissive haven.”“We succeeded—for now—in securing the homeland from a major terrorist attack,” Hoffman, the Georgetown terrorism expert, said. “But we lost the battle of ideas, which President Bush had of course also proclaimed in the aftermath of 9/11 and which was as critical as our military power to winning.”During the past quarter century, terrorism has metastasized, and not only in the Middle East. There is “no single scoreboard” because the U.S. is fighting “parallel battles against different terrorism ecosystems,” according to Magnus Ranstorp, a strategic adviser at the Centre for Societal Security at the Swedish Defence University and the author of “Understanding Violent Radicalisation: Terrorist and Jihadist Movements in Europe.” Four American Presidents, aided enormously by NATO or allied coalitions, have inflicted major defeats on extremists, but neither the groups nor the threats they pose have disappeared. They have instead adapted, migrated, fragmented and decentralized, evolving into different forms, Ranstorp told me.The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, was an offshoot of Al Qaeda that took more than a third of Syria’s territory and forty per cent of Iraq’s—twelve years after the U.S. helped disperse Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. ISIS became the world’s first transnational terrorist state. It lured more than fifty-three thousand foreign fighters from some eighty nations, reportedly including three hundred Americans. Its practices—such as beheadings, massacres, and putting women or alleged adversaries in cages and setting them on fire—were more draconian than those of the Taliban.In 2017, I was on the front line along the Tigris River, in Mosul, as Kurdish and Iraqi troops, aided mightily by U.S. airpower and intelligence, forced poorly trained ISIS fighters to slowly retreat from what had been the commercial capital of Iraq. The fighting was house to house. Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, the commander of the U.S.-led coalition running Operation Inherent Resolve, said, “This is the most significant urban combat to take place since World War Two.” I saw decaying bodies littering devastated neighborhoods. I visited the ruins of the University of Mosul’s library, once one of the finest in the Middle East, with manuscripts spanning a thousand years. It had been torched by ISIS, who used books as kindling. ISIS also hid improvised explosive devices in classrooms, corridors, and stairways across the campus.A couple of years later, in 2019, I was in Syria as a U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led militia coalition forced the collapse of the Islamic State. In all, major U.S. operations against ISIS lasted for six years, at a cost of some thirteen million dollars per day, the Congressional Research Service reported. Yet ISIS today is still waging an insurgency in both Iraq and Syria, and is branching out into other countries and continents. “Iraq is a mess and the Taliban are back in Kabul,” Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. terrorism specialist and a founder of the Soufan Center, told me.Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, failed for some of the same reasons that Operation Enduring Freedom failed in Afghanistan. Inherent Resolve misread public sentiment and cultures on the ground. It detained and interrogated thousands of people—sometimes torturing them—in turn generating new anger and flash points. It threw money at issues, without long-term political strategy or military endgames.Later this month, the U.S. is scheduled to pull its last forces out of Iraq. Yet, today, the State Department lists five times as many groups with extremist ideologies, as were designated in 2001, Hoffman noted. Al Qaeda has spawned more than two dozen offshoots threatening governments on three continents, from Europe deep into Africa, and across Asia. ISIS has nearly as many branches. “Decapitation disrupted organisations; it did not decapitate the ideology of Salafi-jihadism,” Ranstorp said. Before 9/11, militant groups had identifiable headquarters; the terrorist ecosystem in 2026 “has regional franchises, digital platforms and self-selecting followers.”Terrorism is now harder to define, Soufan said. The lines have been “significantly blurred” between terrorism, insurgency, state proxies, hate crimes, political violence, and lone-actor violence. There is also no longer a single narrative; ideology can at times be secondary. Ranstorp added that, today, jihadist terrorism “coexists with white-supremacist, accelerationist, anti-government, misogynist, left-wing and ethno-nationalist violence.” The more relevant threat, Clarke told me, is from so-called “salad bar” extremists who “pick and choose specific grievances from across the ideological spectrum, left to right.” He is worried about fast-food terrorism and “TikTok radicalization” through social media and the dark web. A recruiting process that once took many months can now happen in a few days.U.S. priorities on terrorism have changed under President Donald Trump. In 2025, his decision to designate eight Mexican criminal organizations, such as the Sinaloa cartel, redefined the traditional definition of foreign terrorism to include narcotics trafficking and organized crime. His inclusion of transnational gangs, such as MS-13, based in El Salvador, has also tapped into U.S. resources, funding, and personnel. This past January, the U.S. military intervention to capture the then Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was based on charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. On Wednesday, the U.S. added Los Tiguerones, an Ecuador-based gang, to the list of foreign terrorist organizations.And, though international terrorism on U.S. soil has “significantly diminished,” the threat of domestic terrorism by American citizens at home has accelerated since 2012, especially since 2020, Evelyn Farkas, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and now the executive director of the McCain Institute, told me. Globally, Russia under President Vladimir Putin has become “the biggest state sponsor of terrorism” since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she said. Putin’s government has launched more than a hundred and forty attacks on military, civilian, and commercial targets in Eastern and Western Europe to intimidate Europeans from supporting Ukraine, and to weaken NATO.On this twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, terrorism is enormously more complex and diffuse—and “terrorist groups don’t exist to do nothing,” Hoffman said. The current trend lines “harken back to the 1990s,” when the threat from Al Qaeda was “dismissed” as “local and inconsequential.” For all the lives lost and treasure spent, “the underlying causes of international terrorism that led to al Qaeda’s anti-Western bent remain largely unaddressed,” William Braniff, a former senior Homeland Security official who is now the executive director of the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University, explained. “Most terrorist organizations today seem to be channelling that violence more locally,” he told me. “That, of course, was probably what most analysts would have said of overseas terrorist organizations on September 10th, 2001.” ♦