terrorism in afghanistan essay

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Afghanistan’s Terrorism Challenge: The Political Trajectories of al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and the Islamic State

Asfandyar Mir

Afghanistan remains at the center of U.S. and international counterterrorism concerns. As America prepares to pull out its military forces from the country, policymakers remain divided on how terrorist groups in Afghanistan might challenge the security of the U.S. and the threat they pose to allies and regional countries. Advocates of withdrawal argue that the terrorism threat from Afghanistan is overstated, while opponents argue that it remains significant and is likely to grow after the drawdown of U.S. forces. This report evaluates the terrorism challenge in Afghanistan by focusing on the political trajectories of three key armed actors in the Afghan context: al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and the Islamic State.

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1. Executive Summary

2. Introduction

3.  Background on Terrorism Threats from Afghanistan

4.  Is Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan Still A Threat? For Whom?

5. Afghan Taliban’s Relationship with Al-Qaeda: The Ties That Bind

6. The Afghan Taliban’s Cohesion and Prospects of Fragmentation

7. The Future of the Islamic State in Afghanistan

8. Conclusion

9. Endnotes

10. About the Author

Executive Summary

Afghanistan remains at the center of U.S. and international counterterrorism concerns. As America prepares to pull out its military forces from the country, policymakers remain divided on how terrorist groups in Afghanistan might challenge the security of the U.S. and the threat they pose to allies and regional countries. Advocates of withdrawal argue that the terrorism threat from Afghanistan is overstated, while opponents say that it remains significant and is likely to grow after the drawdown of U.S. forces. This report evaluates the terrorism challenge in Afghanistan by focusing on the political trajectories of three key armed actors in the Afghan context: al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and the Islamic State.

Three sets of findings are key. First, al-Qaeda remains resilient in Afghanistan and seeks a U.S. withdrawal. The U.S. government believes al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri is in Afghanistan. After several challenging years, al-Qaeda appears to have improved its political cohesion and its organizational capital seems to be steadily growing. The status of the group’s transnational terrorism capabilities from Afghanistan is unclear; they are either constrained or well-concealed. Al-Qaeda retains alliances with important armed groups, such as the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani insurgent group, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

Second, contrary to portrayals of the Afghan Taliban as factionalized, the group appears politically cohesive and unlikely to fragment in the near future. Major indicators suggest its leadership is equipped to manage complicated intra-elite politics and the nationwide rank-and-file without fragmenting. Much of the Afghan Taliban leadership seems to have no real intent to engage in transnational terrorism, but parts of the group have sympathy for the global jihad project espoused by al-Qaeda. Going forward, the Afghan Taliban is unlikely to crack down on al-Qaeda, although there are some indicators that it will seek to regulate the behavior of armed groups with foreign fighters, including al-Qaeda.

Third, the Islamic State in Afghanistan is in decline. The group has suffered back-to-back military losses; in recent months, its top leadership has been successfully targeted. The group has also politically fragmented, with some important factions defecting and joining the Afghan Taliban. However, its residual presence in major Afghan cities continues to pose a security threat to civilians. Outside of Afghanistan, there is no meaningful indication that the Islamic State in Afghanistan has the intent or capability to mount transnational attacks, especially in the West.

Introduction

Afghanistan remains at the center of U.S. and international counterterrorism concerns. As the U.S. government seeks to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan and power-sharing talks between the Afghan Taliban and the Afghan government continue, there are competing judgements on the nature and scope of the threat of terrorism from Afghanistan. Advocates of withdrawal argue that the terrorism threat from Afghanistan to the United States is overstated. 1 Those opposed say that Afghanistan continues to a pose a major threat, and this threat is likely to grow once U.S. forces draw down. 2

Between these two camps, the main contention centers on al-Qaeda — the group which attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. Some officials, such as U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, argue that American targeting has weakened al-Qaeda to the point that it poses no meaningful threat. 3 However, other analysts are divided on the Afghan Taliban’s relationship with al-Qaeda. 4 There is also considerable concern about the internal political health of the Afghan Taliban, as well as its ability to enforce the terms of the peace settlement. 5 Some also worry about the trajectory of the Islamic State in Afghanistan and resulting security issues in the region. 6

This report decouples the questions of the U.S. policy on withdrawal from Afghanistan and the political trajectories of actors central to the terrorism and counterterrorism policy discussion on Afghanistan. Leveraging insights from academic literature on civil conflict and Afghanistan, and a survey of publicly available reporting on the conflict, the report probes the political trajectory of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the nature of the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban, the prospect of fragmentation of the Afghan Taliban, and the future of the Islamic State. Three sets of findings emerge.

First, al-Qaeda remains resilient and seeks a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Since 2015, key leaders of al-Qaeda’s central organization and much of the leadership of the South Asia faction appear to be in Afghanistan. For example, there are strong indications that al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri is in the country. After several years of political challenges, al-Qaeda seems to have rebounded and looks politically cohesive; in the last three years, there are no indicators of the group’s central organization or the South Asia affiliate fragmenting. Al-Qaeda is able to marshal meaningful organizational capital across a number of important regions in the country. It also enjoys the support of important allied groups, such as the Afghan Taliban, the TTP, and a number of Central Asian armed groups.

Second, even after years of U.S. targeting and attempts to drive internal wedges, the Afghan Taliban appears politically cohesive. Contrary to factionalized portrayals, key observable behaviors suggest resilient intra-elite cohesion and strong control of the rank-and-file across the country. While much of the Afghan Taliban leadership appears to have limited interest in transnational terrorism, parts of the group have sympathy for the political project of some transnational jihadists. Going forward, the Afghan Taliban appears unlikely to crack down against a number of foreign fighters and Islamist groups that the U.S. government is concerned about, like al-Qaeda. This may be because such groups do not challenge its ideological project; instead, they advance it — something that the Taliban values. While a crackdown is unlikely, there are some indicators that the Afghan Taliban will seek to regulate the behavior of al-Qaeda and other armed factions. However, to manage international pressure, the Afghan Taliban is likely to publicly deny the presence of and linkages with transnational terrorist groups in the country.

Third, the Islamic State in Afghanistan has considerably weakened. The group has politically fragmented, with some factions defecting toward the Afghan Taliban. Yet its residual presence in major cities continues to pose a threat to Afghan civilians. Surviving cells of the Islamic State engage in intermittent, brutal violence in urban centers. In Kabul, there is ample speculation that a number of political actors — such as the Afghan Taliban, the Afghan government, and regional countries like Pakistan and India — are keen on instrumentalizing the Islamic State’s surviving operatives for score settling and spoiler violence. However, such reporting remains difficult to verify. In contrast to domestic concerns, the threat of transnational terrorism by Islamic State leadership from Afghanistan was always limited, but over the last year, it appears to have been reduced even further.

This report proceeds in five steps. First, I provide background on terrorism threats from Afghanistan. Second, I examine al-Qaeda’s health in Afghanistan. Third, I probe the relationship between the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda. Fourth, I assess the prospects of the Afghan Taliban’s fragmentation. Fifth, I discuss the Islamic State’s current status and whether the group in Afghanistan has a future.

"Some officials, such as U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, argue that American targeting has weakened al-Qaeda to the point that it poses no meaningful threat."

Background on Terrorism Threats from Afghanistan

In February 2020, the U.S. government signed a peace deal with the Afghan Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. This landmark pact intended to end the United States’ longest war against the insurgency of the Afghan Taliban. It centered on an agreement to withdraw U.S. troops in return for guarantees by the Taliban that Afghan territory will not be used for mounting international terrorism. 7

For much of the negotiation process, American negotiators pushed the Afghan Taliban to commit that it would not adopt the same policies as before the 9/11 attacks in the United States — seeing those policies as the cause of the terrorist attacks. Back then, the Afghan Taliban provided refuge to al-Qaeda, who in turn reportedly paid up to $20 million a year for the haven to the Taliban. 8 Al-Qaeda used the sanctuary in Afghanistan to set up training camps, where it trained a large army of foreign jihadists. Within these camps, it created a dedicated covert faction to engage in international terrorism operations. 9 It also devoted some capital to a chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear operation in Afghanistan. 10

The U.S. government’s insistence on guarantees from the Taliban against al-Qaeda was not misplaced. Despite intense U.S. counterterrorism pressure in the years after 9/11, the Afghan Taliban maintained a strong alliance with al-Qaeda. 11 As per multiple accounts, al-Qaeda helped the Afghan Taliban in organizing the insurgency against U.S. forces, especially in the east of the country. 12 In this period, al-Qaeda only maintained a nominal presence of its own organization inside Afghanistan and instead supported the Taliban’s insurgency with strategic advice and material aid from bases in Pakistan’s tribal areas. 13 The most significant al-Qaeda operation inside Afghanistan was located in the eastern province of Kunar. 14 But this balance changed after 2014, when al-Qaeda shifted much of its Pakistan-based operation to Afghanistan’s eastern and southern provinces. 15

In the early years of the insurgency, Taliban leaders embraced and publicized their alliance with foreign jihadists, such as al-Qaeda. 16 Even as late as 2010, Taliban leaders espoused a commitment to the ideology of transnational jihad and sought to mobilize the support of jihadist constituencies in the Middle East. 17 At the same time, despite this, some in the Taliban ranks showed discomfort with support of al-Qaeda. 18 This view can even be traced to the pre-9/11 years. Select leaders argued that association with al-Qaeda was not worth the wrath of the U.S. government and the loss of what the Taliban had before the 9/11 — an “Islamic emirate.”

Starting in the late 2000s, possibly under internal pressure as well as U.S. battlefield pressure, the Afghan Taliban sought to conceal its ties with groups of foreign fighters in Afghanistan, including al-Qaeda. This appears to have been done in consultation with al-Qaeda, as its top central and region leadership continued to publicly pledge a religious oath of loyalty — called the Bay’ah — to the Taliban. 19 Al-Qaeda ideologue Atiyyat Allah al-Libi is reported to have informed al-Qaeda members on the Taliban’s public stance toward the group: “Of course, the Taliban’s policy is to avoid being seen with us or revealing any cooperation or agreement between us and them. That is for the purpose of averting international and regional pressure and out of consideration for regional dynamics. We defer to them in this regard.” 20 In line with expectations of a continued alliance, the U.S. government regularly found evidence of battlefield cooperation between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, including al-Qaeda camps and leadership in the security of or proximate to the Taliban’s insurgent rank-and-file.

In addition to Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda, since 2014, another armed actor grew in salience: the Islamic State. Following the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2014, the Islamic State started obtaining pledges in eastern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. 21 The group’s Iraq-based leadership appointed Hafiz Saeed, a former leader of the Pakistani insurgent group TTP, as the first leader of the movement, with a purview of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. This branch was known as the Islamic State’s “Khorasan Province.” Saeed built on Salafist enclaves in the east of Afghanistan and successfully poached fighters from various jihadist groups in the region, such as the Afghan Taliban, the TTP, and al-Qaeda.

In the initial years after its founding, the Islamic State gained in eastern and select parts of northern Afghanistan, making major inroads in the provinces of Jowzjan, Kunar, and Nangarhar. In the east, the group gained control of large swathes of territory. It also set up state-like institutions, modeling itself on the caliphate in Iraq and Syria. The group attracted a stream of foreign fighters, primarily from South and Central Asia, and regularly conducted attacks against military and civilian targets in major urban areas. 22 Among civilians, the Islamic State prioritized targeting of vulnerable religious and ethnic minorities. 23

In 2014, the U.S. government, along with Afghan security forces, launched a targeted campaign against the Islamic State in Afghanistan. This campaign was a part of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. The Taliban also mounted separate military operations to target the Islamic State.

Is Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan Still A Threat? For Whom?

In 2020, al-Qaeda’s status in Afghanistan is subject to debate. Senior leaders of the Trump administration, such as Secretary of State Pompeo, argue that al-Qaeda is a “shadow of its former self.” 24 Some scholars of al-Qaeda consider the group to be in decline. In a 2020 essay of The Washington Quarterly , al-Qaeda expert Daniel Byman suggests that the group is unlikely to “resume its role as the dominant jihadist organization.” 25 Some members of Afghan civil society make the case that al-Qaeda’s presence and interest in Afghanistan is over-stated.

However, a closer look at the discernible activities of al-Qaeda’s central organization and regional affiliates in Afghanistan suggests a different trend. Undeniably, the group is not at its peak strength of the pre-9/11 years, but it has made a concerted effort to rebuild. The group’s Afghanistan-based leaders have preserved the political focus of confronting the United States, despite some internal group and counterterrorism pressure to shift directions. The leadership remains intent on securing a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, describing it as the “enemy acknowledging its defeat.” 26  

Key members of al-Qaeda’s central leadership continue to see Afghanistan as a strategically important base, despite the availability of more permissive potential bases and the considerable threat of U.S. counterterrorism activity. This is most obvious in the case of al-Qaeda chief al-Zawahiri. According to the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) Chief Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, the U.S. military assesses that al-Zawahiri is in Afghanistan. 27 Al-Qaeda’s once heir apparent Hamza bin Ladin, the son of the movement founder Osama bin Ladin, also appears to have remained in Afghanistan before being killed in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. 28 While much of al-Qaeda’s central leadership appears to be outside Afghanistan, perhaps in Iran or Syria’s Idlib Province, some al-Qaeda central leaders remain in Afghanistan. 29

Al-Qaeda has also improved its political cohesion and alliances in Afghanistan. After decentralizing control and creating a South Asia franchise, al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), in 2014, analysts predicted that this move would erode al-Qaeda’s cohesion and leadership authority in Afghanistan. This largely proved the case from 2014 to 2016, when AQIS and al-Qaeda’s allies, like the TTP, experienced major challenges to their cohesion through extensive fratricide and defections to the Islamic State’s Afghanistan chapter. 30 There was also friction in its relationship with the Haqqani Network, in part due to the pressure of the U.S. drone war in Pakistan. This conflict was perceived to have been facilitated by an ally of the Haqqani Network, the Pakistani intelligence service ISI. 31 Al-Qaeda also lost control over the TTP, whose targeting of civilians hurt al-Qaeda’s standing in the perception of AQIS leadership among key Hanafi, Ahl-e-Hadith, and Deobandi Sunni constituencies in South Asia.

But since 2017, while international attention was focused on ISIS, al-Qaeda has worked to reverse these trends in Afghanistan. The leadership, much like the broader set of affiliates, has focused on careful politics to stabilize the group. As a result, in contrast to ISIS, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan has not splintered in observable ways. Overall, the group affirms its loyalty to the leadership of al-Zawahiri, who pledges loyalty to the leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada. AQIS has engaged in a separate political consolidation effort to bring back estranged and inactive factions into its fold.

Al-Qaeda has strengthened its political relationships with other groups in Afghanistan. Under Asim Umar and Usama Mahmood, AQIS has aligned its operational tempo with the Afghan Taliban’s strategy toward securing a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Over the last two years, al-Qaeda appears to have helped guide the political recovery of the TTP, evidenced more recently in the merging of important splinters and some al-Qaeda-aligned Punjabi factions into the central TTP. 32 Al-Qaeda also seems to have reined in the TTP’s targeting of civilians.

Al-Qaeda has maintained relations with the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM). 33 In addition, after losing its alliance with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), al-Qaeda has improved its ties with a number of other Central Asian groups in the country, such as Khatiba Imam al-Bukhari, Katibat al Tawhid wal Jihad, and Islamic Jihad Group, which remain based in parts of northern Afghanistan. 34 Through its propaganda outputs, AQIS has made a concerted effort to poach control of or induce defections from Pakistan-backed jihadi groups, like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. Usama Mahmood, who appears to have been in-charge of al-Qaeda’s Kashmir strategy for the last few years, has emphasized the importance of al-Qaeda’s Kashmir affiliate Ansar Ghazwa-tul Hind to the group’s regional strategy.

In addition to an improved political profile, al-Qaeda has regenerated its capabilities in Afghanistan. Important indicators of al-Qaeda’s capabilities suggest a gradual build up. According to the U.N., al-Qaeda is active in 12 Afghan provinces, potentially inhabiting the country’s eastern and southern borders. 35 While the number of fighters is an imperfect measure, the U.N. estimates that the total number of al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan is between 400 and 600, which is up from the estimate of nearly 200 fighters in 2017. 36 The strength of al-Qaeda-aligned fighters, including foreign fighters, is potentially in the thousands; as per a July 2020 estimate, there are more than 6,000 TTP fighters in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is also reportedly building new training camps in eastern Afghanistan and funding a joint unit with the 2,000-strong Haqqani Network of fighters. 37

Beyond manpower, al-Qaeda retains key weapons capabilities. Under Luqman Khubab, son of former al-Qaeda chemical, radiological, biological, and nuclear cell chief Abu Khabab al-Masri, al-Qaeda appears to have sustained such a cell in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, perhaps technically unsophisticated but cash-rich, which attempts to trade in the black market of loose nuclear materials. 38 Al-Qaeda also maintains cells to mobilize material aid via geographic routes through Iranian territory and into Afghanistan and Pakistan. 39

What strategy might al-Qaeda use the available political and organizational capital for? One possibility is that it will undertake a terrorism campaign directed toward the West, including the United States. In the last two years, however, there is no information on major plots inspired or directed by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the public domain. In a recent assessment, the Defense Intelligence Agency stated that AQIS is unlikely to pose a major international terrorism threat to the West, even without U.S. counterterrorism pressure for the near future. 40 The strength of Western foreign fighters in al-Qaeda’s ranks in Afghanistan also remains unclear. Combined, these indicators suggest that al-Qaeda’s transnational terrorism capabilities in Afghanistan are either constrained or well-concealed.

At the same time, recent Pentagon South Asia official Colin Jackson argues that al-Qaeda’s Afghanistan-based “…leadership remains focused on external attacks on the U.S. and its allies.” 41 He also adds that “...the removal of U.S. focused counterterrorism surveillance and direct action in Afghanistan would most likely lead to the rapid expansion of ISIS-K[horasan] and Al Qaeda capabilities and an increasing likelihood of directed or inspired attacks against U.S. and allied homelands.” Jackson’s view on the continued intent and likely expansion of transnational terrorism capabilities aligns with themes in AQIS propaganda; many releases calling for attacks continue to advocate for those both against and inside the United States. 42

Beyond a strategy of conducting attacks in the West, al-Qaeda might use its growing capability for regional operations against or inside three countries: Pakistan, India, and China. 43 AQIS’s charter emphasizes targeting of U.S. interests and citizens in South Asia as a key objective. 44 In line with that, the group may consider targeting U.S. interests in Pakistan or India. In 2014, AQIS attempted to hijack Pakistani naval frigates from the port city of Karachi with the goal of targeting U.S. naval assets in the Arabia Sea. Significantly, the U.N.’s July 2020 reporting warns that AQIS is planning operations in the region to avenge the 2019 U.S. targeting of its chief, Asim Umar. 45

AQIS also works closely with the TTP in Afghanistan. If the TTP ramps up targeting of Pakistani forces, al-Qaeda may support its campaign from Afghanistan. 46 In addition, al-Qaeda in general and AQIS in particular devotes substantial energy to highlighting the Indian state’s excesses in the disputed territory of Indian-controlled Kashmir, where unrest has increased after New Delhi revoked the region’s semi-autonomous status in August 2019. Al-Qaeda may consider using Afghanistan for its Kashmir plans, most likely independently but maybe in tandem with Pakistan-aligned jihadist groups, like Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba. 47 Al-Qaeda’s affiliates and allies in Afghanistan also show interest in targeting China’s Belt and Road Initiative projects in Pakistan and Central Asian states. 48

"For now, the evidence points to no significant break in the relationship between the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda."

Afghan Taliban’s Relationship with Al-Qaeda: The Ties That Bind

A second key question concerns the likely future relationship between the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda. As part of the agreement with the U.S. government, the Afghan Taliban has pledged to break from al-Qaeda and ban the use of Afghan territory for terrorism against other countries. 49 But important senior U.S. officials continue to be skeptical. For example, CENTCOM chief McKenzie recently stated: “…we believe the Taliban actually are no friends of ISIS and work against them. It is less clear to me that they will take the same action against al-Qaeda.” 50

For now, the evidence points to no significant break in the relationship between the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda. The U.N. recently reported that al-Zawahiri personally negotiated with senior Afghan Taliban leadership to obtain assurances of continued support. 51 To the extent this information is correct, these talks appear to have been successful; the Afghan Taliban has neither publicly renounced al-Qaeda nor taken any discernible action to crack down against it. Representatives of the Afghan Taliban who interact with the press also remain evasive when asked to clarify their position on al-Qaeda. In select instances, the Taliban insist that there are no foreign fighters in Afghanistan. 52

Why does the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban endure? Scholars of al-Qaeda have pointed to the history between the two groups, which can be traced back to the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. 53 Some argue that al-Qaeda and an important sub-group of the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, are bound by ties of marriage among families of key leaders. 54 Al-Qaeda also remains popular among the rank-and-file of the Taliban. 55 Per some accounts, the experience of fighting together against a common foe, like the United States, has brought them closer.

While all these factors are important, there appears to be a firm political basis for the relationship. Both groups fit into each other’s ideology-based political projects. 56 Al-Qaeda sees the Afghan Taliban as an able ideological partner in its stewardship of global jihad — a group whose virtues al-Qaeda can extol before the Muslim world. 57 It also potentially sees the Taliban as a powerful ally, whose resurgence in Afghanistan offers major political and material advantages. Among political gains, the Taliban’s continued rise validates that jihadist victories against powerful states like the U.S. are realistic and viable. Among material gains, the relationship provides the opportunity to move leadership and personnel from Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and Jordan to Afghanistan. In the medium term, al-Qaeda may look to establish a base in Afghanistan for a global jihadist movement.

The Afghan Taliban’s perception of al-Qaeda is more complex but, on balance, favorable. 58 The Afghan Taliban likely views the group through the lens of its ideological vision — drawing on the Hanafi school of Sunni Islamic theology, the centrality of jihad in its interpretation of Islamic theology, and its role and status as guardians of Islam in Afghan society. 59 Despite some tensions and theological differences, al-Qaeda aligns with key parts of the Taliban’s project. One major source of alignment is al-Qaeda’s jihadist project, which fulfills a major perceived religious obligation. 60 Significantly, al-Qaeda pursues its jihadist project by subordinating its Salafist ideology, at least in rhetoric, to the Taliban’s status as the final arbiter on matters of theology. 61 This contrasts with the Taliban’s opposite perception of the ISIS’s ideological project, which is dismissive of both the Taliban’s Hanafi precepts and its status as guardians of Islam in Afghanistan.

Consequently, even in the face of major costs, important Afghan Taliban leaders, such as deputy leader Siraj Haqqani and senior military chief Ibrahim Sadr, remain sympathetic to al-Qaeda. 62 Based on propaganda releases and the rhetoric of Taliban leaders, there may also be some sympathy for al-Qaeda’s grand strategy of bringing about an American downfall. However, it remains unclear which of the Afghan Taliban leaders who sympathize with al-Qaeda are supportive of direct attacks against the United States. For example, staunch former supporters and sympathizers of al-Qaeda in the Taliban, like the leader of the Haqqani Network Jalaluddin Haqqani, did not appear to approve terrorism against the U.S. before 9/11, even if they did little to stop it. 63

At the same time, it is important to note that parts of the Afghan Taliban are wary of a relationship with al-Qaeda. Some have lobbied against the relationship altogether, both before and after 9/11. 64 Others have come to oppose al-Qaeda due to the costs of the U.S. government’s coercive policies since the American invasion. 65 It appears that the size of the constituency opposed to al-Qaeda inside the Taliban has grown, but its political status within the group is uncertain.

For now, given the Taliban’s public evasiveness on al-Qaeda and reluctance to denounce it, the balance of internal elite opinion seems to be in favor of the group. Thus, the Taliban is unlikely to carry out a major crackdown or expel it from Afghanistan. Looking ahead, the Taliban is likely to institute formal mechanisms to manage groups of foreign fighters, including al-Qaeda and its allied organizations. 66 The Taliban may provide guidelines, perhaps non-binding, to regulate the behavior of the groups; such demarches may include provisions on activities against the U.S. and its allies. Nevertheless, if the past is a guide, the Taliban will be unlikely to admit to its relationships with such groups. It may also take steps to mitigate the impression of being a counterterrorism partner to the United States or doing America’s bidding, especially against groups like al-Qaeda.

The Afghan Taliban’s Cohesion and Prospects of Fragmentation

The political cohesion of the Afghan Taliban remains a major counterterrorism concern. Many analysts worry that the Afghan Taliban is likely to fragment during the course of the peace process with the Afghan government, especially given that the U.S. government’s counterinsurgency strategy sought to drive wedges among its leadership for much of the war. 67 Some also speculate that the influence of state supporters like Pakistan has hurt the Taliban’s cohesion. The influence of Iran and Russia on the Taliban also add to such concerns.

One strand of this argument sees the Taliban as divided into a hardline faction pushing for a maximalist takeover of Afghanistan — maybe even the continued patronage of al-Qaeda — and a more moderate faction amenable to power-sharing concessions. The implication of this view is that if the Afghan Taliban’s political officials make any meaningful concessions under international pressure, especially during the intra-Afghan talks, the group will not stay unified and make enforcement of any peace deal untenable. The worst-case scenario parallels the fragmentation of al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq and the subsequent rise of the territorial state of the Islamic State. 68

For now, assessments of calcified political cleavages and factionalism in the Afghan Taliban appear overstated. The Taliban’s conduct during the negotiation process with the United States from 2018 suggests substantial internal political strength. On major decisions, the Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Akhundzada remained firmly in charge and obtained support of a loyal political structure spawned by his three deputies: Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Siraj Haqqani, and Mullah Yaqoob. Through the course of the negotiations, the Taliban leadership appears to have successfully forged consensus among major political and military elites on key issues such as the timing of the cease-fire, terms of the withdrawal of U.S. forces, sequencing of the peace process, and language of the February pact with the U.S. government — and there have been no visible signs of major dissent.

In addition, the Afghan Taliban’s leadership has demonstrated its ability to control the rank-and-file of the nation-wide movement in recent years. Two indicators are key. First, the Afghan Taliban announced two country-wide cease fires — one in 2018 and the other before the signing of the February accord with the U.S. government — when violence in the country dropped dramatically. 69 Second, following the signing of the peace accord with the U.S., the Taliban has delivered on its commitment to hold fire against American targets; since February 2020, attacks on U.S. and coalition personnel largely ceased. 70 Combined, these indicators suggest that the Taliban leadership is able to control both the scale and targets of violence.

What might be the source of this cohesion? As the Taliban become less opaque, analysts and scholars are likely to better understand its internal politics. For now, three factors seem important. First, the Afghan Taliban appears to have repurposed and reinforced a strong pre-war organization, a combination of the Taliban’s government institutions, tribal networks, and religious sites in the country’s rural and urban areas. 71 Through these institutional mechanisms, the Taliban leadership has solidified vertical ties to manage the delivery of political, military, and public goods. 72 Second, since the onset of the insurgency, the leadership has socialized its rank-and-file in the importance of cohesion. In internal messaging, the group has consistently emphasized unity and obedience to leadership in battles against the U.S. and Kabul-based political establishment. 73 Third, in recent years, the ongoing peace process has boosted cohesion. The U.S. agreeing to the demand for direct negotiations and withdrawal of foreign forces has earned the leadership strong praise from both within and outside the movement. 74

Proponents of the fragmentation view underestimate the effect of the Afghan Taliban leadership’s careful management of intra-elite politics on cohesion. Since the era of Taliban leader Mansoor Akhtar, one strategy has been to appoint powerful deputies, who may have the potential to become challengers. 75 The group also appears to have regulated membership of the top-decision making body, the Rahbari Shura , through managing internal power dynamics and regional power-projection considerations. 76 When trying to forge consensus on divisive issues, the leadership has appointed czars with more political heft. This was evident when Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Akhundzada appointed Mullah Baradar, one of the co-founders of the Taliban movement, to lead the peace talks with the U.S. government in 2018. The recent appointment of the chief justice of the Taliban’s judiciary, Maulvi Abdul Hakim, to lead the negotiations with the Afghan government appears to be in line with that strategy.

The fragmentation perspective also does not account for the group’s strategies to counter differences and dissent. When confronted with a powerful dissenting senior leader, top Taliban leadership has isolated that leader and balanced the sacking by appointing someone of a similar or greater political profile as a replacement. 77 When need be, the Taliban leadership is also not shy about using intense violence to put away challengers with forces from other parts of the country. 78 It has also called upon both non-state and state supporters, such as Pakistan, to counter internal dissidents. 79 After the death of Taliban founder Mullah Omar in 2014, these methods appear to have become stronger in response to the internal challenges and internecine feuding.

For now, the overall risk of Taliban fragmentation remains low. However, it can become more probable in specific contingencies. The most probable scenario is one in which a senior leader of the Taliban, such as Mullah Akhundzada, is either killed or dies of natural causes. Then, the question of succession could create major intra-elite differences.

"The Islamic State is reported to command around 2,200 fighters, but its overall trajectory is marred by defections of leaders and rank-and-file, loss of territory, and fragmentation of battlefield allies."

The Future of the Islamic State in Afghanistan

A final major question for counterterrorism is if the Islamic State in Afghanistan has a future. After a dramatic rise in Afghanistan from 2014 to 2016 with membership running into the thousands, it has been in steady decline. Over the last two years, the group has suffered back-to-back losses against U.S. and Afghan military operations in the eastern provinces of Kunar and Nangarhar. These losses have been compounded by the Afghan Taliban’s separate military campaign against the Islamic State. The Islamic State is reported to command around 2,200 fighters, but its overall trajectory is marred by defections of leaders and rank-and-file, loss of territory, and fragmentation of battlefield allies, such as the IMU. 80

In recent months, the Islamic State has also suffered leadership losses, which have complicated efforts to recover politically and on the battlefield. In April 2020, top leader Aslam Farooqi was arrested by Afghan security forces. His arrest was followed by the targeting of other top leaders, including the group’s intelligence chief Asadullah Orakzai and top judge Abdullah Orakzai, by the U.S. and Afghanistan. 81 In addition, while the threat of transnational terrorist activity by Islamic State was always limited, the sustained targeting of its infrastructure in Kunar and Nangarhar appears to have reduced its organizational strength further. 82

The Islamic State’s decline seems to be directly benefitting the Afghan Taliban. In Kunar and Nangarhar provinces, previously with significant influence of the Islamic State, the Afghan Taliban’s forces have gained a foothold. Some important factions of the Islamic State have also defected and joined the Afghan Taliban over the last year. 83 There are reports that Islamic State factions are also defecting to al-Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Yet, the group’s residual presence in major Afghan cities continues to pose a threat to civilians. Some surviving cells are engaging in large attacks. For example, the Islamic State conducted a coordinated assault targeting the central prison of Nangarhar Province in August. There are reports that a variety of actors, such as the Afghan Taliban, the Afghan government, and regional countries like Pakistan and India, are instrumentalizing the Islamic State’s surviving operatives for score settling and spoiler violence. 84

Select analysts worry about a potential resurgence of the Islamic State. Within this camp, some see it resurging as a result of organic factors, such as the history and appeal of Salafism in Kunar and Nangarhar provinces. They also warn that Afghan state practices of repression, exclusion, and bribery predispose some youth, specifically those sympathetic to Salafist ideological precepts, toward the Islamic State. 85 Another camp speculates that the Islamic State has positioned itself to absorb fragmenting factions of the Taliban in the event of a peace deal. 86 Some analysts sees the Islamic State’s purported new leader Abu Muhajir leveraging his Arab ethnicity to settle disputes within the group and mobilize fighters and resources from ISIS’s central organization in Iraq and Syria. 87

Another view, expounded by members of the Afghan security forces, suggests that the Afghan Taliban, and specifically the Haqqani Network, may support the Islamic State by carrying out plausibly deniable violence. 88 They also imply that the Islamic State might receive material support from regional countries to conduct spoiler violence to derail the peace process. These views are significant and deserve more scrutiny, but publicly available information on them is limited.

It is decidedly premature to write off the Islamic State, but for now, there are no clear signs that the group is implementing a concerted strategy to stall ongoing political and organizational fragmentation, and in turn regain its status in eastern Afghanistan.

This report has examined major issues and questions related to the terrorism and counterterrorism discussion surrounding Afghanistan. It offers analytic guidance on where key actors stand and their plausible trajectory in light of the U.S. posture of withdrawal and the gradual rise of the Afghan Taliban.

While the findings of this report are important in their own right, they should also be considered in the broader political context of Afghanistan. For one, with the intra-Afghan negotiation process underway, Afghanistan appears to be at a crossroads. There is reason to believe that Afghanistan is looking at a difficult but realistic path toward peace. The ongoing process is especially significant as major warring parties have struggled to meaningfully engage in peace talks over four decades of conflict. Given the enormous generational suffering of Afghan civilians, this pathway deserves sustained support of and prioritization by the U.S. government and the international community. If the intra-Afghan talks are not given a chance, the country can descend into another long cycle of violence.

At the same time, the terrorism challenge remains multifaceted and likely to endure. This requires new frameworks of management by the U.S. government, its allies, and other key regional countries. The precise makeup of the country’s armed landscape and the role of terrorist groups of international concern in that context remains challenging to predict. However, it is realistic to assume that a number of groups with varied local, regional, and transnational aims will find ways to persist. In turn, their presence will generate regular risks for Afghan civilians, the region surrounding Afghanistan, and Western countries.

Going forward, as the U.S. government further reduces its military forces in Afghanistan, the Afghan Taliban’s power to shape facts on the ground is inevitably going to increase. And as the Taliban rises, it will put further stress on the Ashraf Ghani-led Afghan government, at least until the intra-Afghan talks see a resolution. In the interim, the U.S. relationship with the Taliban is likely to be highly consequential and complex. Looking ahead, analysts need to carefully watch for signs of shifts in the group’s political calculus. Much of the analysis in the report hinges on the assumption that the Taliban’s core preferences will stay similar to the last decade of the war.

Finally, from the perspective of the U.S. government, crafting a new counterterrorism policy will be shaped by biting resource constraints and complicated Afghan domestic and international politics, involving Pakistan, Iran, China, and Russia. Nevertheless, policymakers need to be clear-eyed about the major counterterrorism challenge from Afghanistan that lies ahead, and the likelihood that this challenge will not relent anytime soon. While the nature of U.S. involvement in the country may be changing, the political reality of Afghanistan that enables terrorism is likely to remain.

For example, U.S. ambassador-nominate for Afghanistan William Ruger argues: “... We actually accomplished the goals [in Afghanistan] we needed to. And I think sometimes we forget that in the midst of this discussion about us withdrawing. United States needed to do three things after 9/11. We needed to attrite al-Qaeda, really decimate it, as a terrorist organization that had the capability to harm us. Second, we needed to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden and we did that. Third we needed to punish the Taliban severely enough that they wouldn’t want to support terrorist organizations that had the intent and capability to hit us. And I think the United States accomplished all three of those goals, so that is one of the reasons it is in our interest to withdraw.” “William Ruger discusses the signed U.S.-Taliban agreement to withdraw troops from Afghanistan on WTIC’s Mornings with Ray Dunaway,” Ray Dunaway and William Ruger, Mornings , CATO Institute, Mar 2, 2020, https://www.cato.org/multimedia/media-highlights-radio/william-ruger-di… .

A prominent voice in this camp is former National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who argues: “[The Afghan Taliban are] trying to establish these emirates. … And then stitch these emirates together into a caliphate in which they force people to live under their brutal regime and then export terror to attack their near enemies, Arab states, Israel, and the far enemies, Europe and the United States.” See: Kyler Rempfer, “H.R. McMaster Says the Public is Fed a ‘War-weariness’ Narrative That Hurts US Strategy,” Military Times, May 8, 2019, https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/05/08/hr-mcmaster-say… .

Julia Musto, “Pompeo: Al Qaeda a ‘Shadow’ of Its Former Self, Time to ‘Turn the Corner’ in Afghanistan,” Fox News, Mar 6, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/media/sec-pompeo-al-qaeda-a-shell-of-its-former… .

On the relationship breaking, Analyst Borhan Osman argues: “After hundreds of conversations with Taliban figures, I concluded that both the pragmatists and the former champions of Osama bin Laden within the Taliban have grown weary of Al Qaeda and its ideology.” See: Borhan Osmani, “Why a Deal With the Taliban Will Prevent Attacks on America,” the New York Times, Feb 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/afghanistan-peace-talks-tali… ; on the relationship enduring, Carter Malkasian, former senior advisor to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford, argues: “Over the years, former and current Taliban members have admitted to me that they think of al Qaeda as a friend and feel they should not be asked to turn on it.” See: Carter Malkasian, “What a Withdrawal From Afghanistan Would Look Like,” Foreign Affairs, Oct 21, 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/afghanistan/2019-10-21/what-wit… .

For a review of this concern, see Andrew Watkins, “Taliban Fragmentation: Fact, Fiction, and Future,” United States Institute of Peace, https://www.usip.org/publications/2020/03/taliban-fragmentation-fact-fi… .

See, for example, Amir Jadoon and Andrew Mines, “Broken, but Not Defeated: An Examination of State-Led Operations Against Islamic State Khorasan in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2015-2018).” CTC West Point, 2020, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1100984.pdf .

Elizabeth Threlkeld, “Reading Between the Lines of Afghan Agreements,” Lawfare, Mar 8, 2020, https://www.lawfareblog.com/reading-between-lines-afghan-agreements .

Anne Stenersen, Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 126-128. On al-Qaeda’s payment to the Taliban, see declassified U.S. government report: “Terrorism: Amount of Money It Takes to Keep al-Qa’ida Functioning,” August 7, 2002, Central Intelligence Agency Analytic Report, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/368986-2002-08-07-terrorism-amo… .

Anne Stenersen, “Thirty Years After Its Foundation – Where is al-Qaeda Going?,” Perspectives on Terrorism, Terrorism Research Initiative, 2017, http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/view/653/html .

Aimen Dean, Paul Cruickshank, and Tim Lister. Nine Lives: My Time As MI6’s Top Spy Inside Al-Qaeda (New York City, Simon and Schuster, 2018), 2013. On Abu Khabab al-Masri, who operated the cell, see: Souad Mekhennet and Greg Miller, “Bloodline,” Washington Post, August 5, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/08/05/bombmaker .

For a cost-benefit analysis of al-Qaeda’s ties for the Taliban, see: Tricia Bacon, “Deadly Cooperation: The Shifting Ties Between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban,” War on The Rocks, September 11, 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/09/deadly-cooperation-the-shifting-ties-… .

See: Syed Saleem Shehzad, “Osama Adds Weight to Afghan Resistance,” Asia Times Online, September 11, 2004; Syed Saleem Shehzad, “Taliban Lay Plans for Islamic Intifada,” Asia Times Online, Oct 5, 2006. Also see un-dated letter in the ODNI’s Bin Ladin bookshelf titled “Situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan”: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ubl/english/Summary%20on%20situatio… .

On al-Qaeda’s base in Waziristan, see: Asfandyar Mir, “What Explains Counterterrorism Effectiveness? Evidence from the U.S. Drone War in Pakistan,” International Security 43, no. 2 (Fall 2018), pp. 45–83, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00331.

On the Kunar-based al-Qaeda organization, see: Wesley Morgan, “Al-Qaeda Leader U.S. Targeted in Afghanistan Kept a Low Profile but Worried Top Spies,” the Washington Post, October 28, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/10/28/al-qaeda-l… .

For example, see: Seventeenth Report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team Submitted Pursuant to Resolution 2161 (2014) Concerning Al-Qaeda and Associated Individuals and Entities , United Nations Security Council, June 16, 2015. https://www.undocs.org/S/2015/441 .

“Video Interview with Commander Mujahid Mullah Dadullah,” As Sahab Media , December 27, 2006, https://ent.siteintelgroup.com/Jihadist-News/site-institute-12-27-06-sa… .

“Sirajuddin Haqqani Interviewed on Jihad in Afghanistan, Palestinian Cause,” Ansar al-Mujahidin Network, April 27, 2010.

See, for example, the interview of Mullah Abdul Jalil in which he distances the Taliban from transnational operations; see: Syed Saleem Shehzad, “Secrets of the Taliban’s Success,” Asia Times Online, September 10, 2008.

On Bay’ah , see: “Al-Qaeda’s Zawahiri pledges allegiance to Taliban head,” Al Jazeera, August 13, 2015, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/08/13/al-qaedas-zawahiri-pledges-al… .

Cole Bunzel, “Jihadi Reactions to the U.S.-Taliban Deal and Afghan Peace Talks,” Jihadica, September 23, 2020, https://www.jihadica.com/jihadi-reactions-to-the-u-s-taliban-deal-and-a… .

Seventeenth Report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team Submitted Pursuant to Resolution 2161 (2014) Concerning Al-Qaeda and Associated Individuals and Entities .

Jadoon and Mines. “Broken, but Not Defeated.”

Musto, “Pompeo: Al Qaeda a ‘shadow’ of its former self, time to ‘turn the corner’ in Afghanistan.”

Daniel Byman, “Does Al Qaeda Have a Future?,” The Washington Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2020), pp. 65-75, doi:10.1080/0163660X.2019.1663117.

“Al-Qaeda Central Celebrates Taliban-U.S. Agreement as Enemy Acknowledging its Defeat,” SITE Intelligence Group, March 12, 2020, https://news.siteintelgroup.com/Jihadist-News/al-qaeda-central-celebrat… .

“CENTCOM and the Shifting Sands of the Middle East: A Conversation with CENTCOM Commander Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr,” Middle East Institute, June 10, 2020, https://www.mei.edu/events/centcom-and-shifting-sands-middle-east-conve… ; There are indications that the U.S. government has been soliciting tips on Zawahiri’s location in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Paktika. See: Asfandyar Mir, “Where is Ayman al-Zawahiri?,” Medium, June 2020, https://medium.com/@asfandyarmir/where-is-ayman-al-zawahiri-fb37e459c6a9 .

Eleventh Report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team Submitted Pursuant to Resolution 2501 (2019) Concerning the Taliban and Other Associated Individuals and Entities Constituting a Threat to the Peace, Stability and Security of Afghanistan , New York City: United Nations Security Council, May 27, 2020, https://www.undocs.org/S/2020/415 .

According to the U.N., major Al-Qaeda leaders who remain in Afghanistan and interact with the Taliban include Ahmad al-Qatari, Sheikh Abdul Rahman, Hassan Mesri aka Abdul Rauf, and Abu Osman. See: Eleventh Report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team Submitted Pursuant to Resolution 2501 (2019) Concerning the Taliban and Other Associated Individuals and Entities Constituting a Threat to the Peace, Stability and Security of Afghanistan . Abdul Rauf maybe a reference to senior al-Qaeda leader Husam Abd-al-Rauf. For details, see: “Husam Abd-al-Ra’uf,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists/husam-abd-al-rauf .

Mir, “What Explains Counterterrorism Effectiveness?”; also see: Asfandyar Mir and Dylan Moore, “Drones, Surveillance, and Violence: Theory and Evidence from a US Drone Program,” International Studies Quarterly , 63, no. 4 (December 2019), pp. 846–862, doi:10.1093/isq/sqz040.

On TTP’s reunification and the al-Qaeda units which have joined TTP, see Daud Khattak, “Whither the Pakistani Taliban: An Assessment of Recent Trends,” New America, Aug 31, 2020, https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/blog/whither-pakistan… .

According to the U.S. Treasury, ETIM chief Abdul Haq is on al-Qaeda’s Shura Council. See: “Treasury Targets Leader of Group Tied to Al Qaeda,” U.S. Department of Treasury, April 20, 2009. https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/tg92.aspx ; On ETIM’s alignment with al-Qaeda, see: Thomas Joscelyn and Caleb Weiss, “Turkistan Islamic Party Head Decries Chinese Occupation,” Long War Journal, March 18, 2019, https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2019/03/turkistan-islamic-party… .

Oran Botobekov, “Why Central Asian Jihadists are Inspired by the US-Taliban Agreement?,” Modern Diplomacy, April 8, 2020, https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/04/08/why-central-asian-jihadists-are-i… .

Given the opaqueness of sourcing, some analysts point to inherent limits to the U.N. monitoring teams’ claims. See, for example, Borhan Osman, Twitter post, July 29, 2020, https://twitter.com/Borhan/status/1288372532136087552?s=20 . The U.N.’s claims remain challenging to independently verify but despite limitations the U.N.’s reporting on al-Qaeda is useful for two reasons. One, it reports on the same topic twice a year through one committee (ISIL (Da’esh) & Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee) and once a year through another committee (1988 Afghanistan sanctions committee), which allows for over time comparisons and identifications of discrepancies with public record. Second, the reporting appears to collate information on major analytic points from more than one U.N. member state; major deviations between member state reporting are likely to be reflected. Thus the reporting needs to be taken seriously but also appropriately caveated.

Twenty-sixth Report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team Submitted Pursuant to Resolution 2368 (2017) Concerning ISIL (Da’esh), Al-Qaeda and Associated Individuals and Entities , New York City: United Nations Security Council, July 23, 2020, https://undocs.org/S/2020/717 .

See: Eleventh Report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team Submitted Pursuant to Resolution 2501 (2019) Concerning the Taliban and Other Associated Individuals and Entities Constituting a Threat to the Peace, Stability and Security of Afghanistan .

Asfandyar Mir, “Al-Qaeda’s Continuing Challenge to the United States,” Lawfare, September 8, 2019, https://www.lawfareblog.com/al-qaedas-continuing-challenge-united-states ; On Abu Khabab al-Masri’s other son, see: Mekhennet and Miller, “Bloodline.” Until 2017, this cell was being reportedly run by Luqman Khubab, AQIS leader Omar bin Khatab, and had assistance of some personnel of the TTP. On U.S. government concerns regarding CRBN materials and dirty-bomb in Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, see Joby Warrick, The Triple Agent: The Al-Qaeda Mole Who Infiltrated the CIA , (New York City, Anchor, 2012), 64.

Country Reports on Terrorism 2017 , Washington D.C.: United States Department of State, September 2018, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/crt_2017.pdf .

Operation Freedom’s Sentinel Lead Inspector General Report to the United States Congress, Arlington: United States Department for Defense Inspector General , July 1, 2019‒September 30, 2019, https://media.defense.gov/2019/Nov/20/2002214020/-1/-1/1/Q4FY2019_LEADI… .

Colin F Jackson, Written Testimony of Dr. Colin F. Jackson to the Senate Armed Services Committee , Washington D.C.: United States Senate, February 11, 2020, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Jackson_02-11-20.pdf .

According to the author’s calculation with analyst Abdul Sayed, in 2019, AQIS released around 21 media products which contain calls for attacks against the United States; this was up from 5 such media products in 2018 and only 1 product in 2017.

India remains concerned about a number of terrorist groups who operate in Kashmir using Afghan soil. They include and are not limited to AQIS, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

On the importance of the code of conduct, see: Tore Refslund Hamming, Jihadists’ Code of Conduct In The Era Of ISIS , Washington D.C.: Middle East Institute, April 2019, https://www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/2019-04/Tore_Jihadi_Code_of_Con… .

Twenty-sixth Report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team Submitted Pursuant to Resolution 2368 (2017) Concerning ISIL (Da’esh), Al-Qaeda and Associated Individuals and Entities .

On al-Qaeda’s earlier doctrine and strategic plan for a jihadist takeover of Pakistan through support of groups like the TTP, see un-dated letter in the ODNI’s Bin Ladin bookshelf titled “Jihad in Pakistan”: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ubl2016/english/Jihad%20in%20Pakist… .

Despite historical ties between al-Qaeda and Pakistan-backed Kashmiri jihadists, a broad-reaching political alliance maybe challenging as al-Qaeda has repeatedly condemned these groups for their subordination to Pakistani military and suspects them of providing targeting information on al-Qaeda leaders to Pakistan. Al-Qaeda’s senior Pakistani leadership also wrote to Bin Ladin about plans to take control of the “jihad” in Kashmir and away from Pakistan-backed jihadists. See untitled letter in the ODNI Bin Ladin bookshelf dated May 31, 2010: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ubl2017/english/Letter%20to%20Usama… . At the same time, operational considerations could shape such an arrangement, which is reported to have existed between parts of al-Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba for the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. Thomas Joscelyn, “Report: Osama bin Laden Helped Plan Mumbai Attacks,” Long War Journal, April 5, 2012, https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2012/04/report_osama_bin_lad_2… .

For example, in 2019, senior al-Qaeda leader and chief of AQIS (according to the U.N.) Usama Mehmood published an essay in al-Qaeda’s magazine Hitteen calling for attacks against the Chinese assets and infrastructure in Pakistan.

Threlkeld, “Reading Between the Lines of Afghan Agreements.”

“CENTCOM and the Shifting Sands of the Middle East: A Conversation with CENTCOM Commander Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr.”

Some analysts are skeptical of the United Nations sourcing on this information. See: Anne Stenersen, Twitter post, September 11, 2020, 2:42 a.m., https://twitter.com/annestenersen/status/1304324386699259904?s=20 .

Franz Marty, “The Taliban Say They Have No Foreign Fighters. Is That True?,” The Diplomat, Aug 10, 2020, https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/the-taliban-say-they-have-no-foreign-fi… .

Stenerson, Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan , 52.

Bruce Riedel, “The U.N. exposes the limits of the Trump peace plan with the Taliban,” Brookings Institution, June 8, 2020. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/06/08/the-u-n-expo… .

Stefanie Glinski, “Resurgent Taliban Bode Ill for Afghan Peace,” Foreign Policy, July 7, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/07/taliban-al-qaeda-afghanistan-unite… .

For an example of how some political actors sort who to align and who to repress based on ideology, see: Paul Staniland, Asfandyar Mir, and Sameer Lalwani, “Politics and Threat Perception: Explaining Pakistani Military Strategy on the North West Frontier,” Security Studies 27, no. 4 (2018), pp. 535-574, DOI: 10.1080/09636412.2018.1483160/.

Thomas Joscelyn, “Analysis: AQAP’s New Emir Reaffirms Allegiance to Zawahiri, Praises Taliban,” Long War Journal, Mar 23, 2020, https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2020/03/analysis-aqaps-new-emir… ; Thomas Joscelyn and Bill Roggio, “Taliban rejects peace talks, emphasizes alliance with al Qaeda in new video,” Long War Journal, Dec 9, 2016, https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2016/12/taliban-rejects-peace-t… .

“Taking Stock of the Taliban’s Perspectives on Peace,” International Crisis Group, Aug 11, 2020, https://d2071andvip0wj.cloudfront.net/311-taking-stock-of-taliban-persp… .

Borhan Osman, “AAN Q&A: Taleban Leader Hebatullah’s New Treatise on Jihad,” Afghanistan Analysis Network, July 15, 2017, https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/en/reports/war-and-peace/aan-qa-ta… .

Jack Moore, “Al-Qaeda’s Zawahiri Calls on Supporters to Reject ISIS and Support Taliban,” Newsweek, August 22, 2016, https://www.newsweek.com/al-qaedas-zawahiri-calls-supporters-reject-isi… .

For a profile of Sadr Ibrahim which situates his status in al-Qaeda, see: Fazelminallah Qazizai, “The Man Who Drove the US Out of Afghanistan,” Asia Times Online, July 26, 2020, https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/the-man-who-drove-the-us-out-of-afghanist… .

“The Haqqani History: Bin Ladin’s Advocate Inside the Taliban,” The National Security Archive, September 11, 2012, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB389 .

On pre-9/11 opposition to al-Qaeda, see Stenerson, Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan , 84.

Osmani, “Why a Deal With the Taliban Will Prevent Attacks on America.”

There are reports that the Afghan Taliban have started a process of registering armed groups with foreign fighters in Afghanistan; as part of this process, they have also provided them with a code of conduct for continued presence inside Afghanistan. See: Paktﻯawal, Twitter post, September 14, 2020, 12:40 a.m., https://twitter.com/Paktyaw4l/status/1305380955197247488?s=20 .

Antonio Giustozzi, “Do the Taliban Have Any Appetite for Reconciliation with Kabul?,” Center for Research and Policy Analysis, Mar 19, 2018, www.crpaweb.org/single-post/2018/03/20/Do-the-Taliban-Have-any-Appetite… .; Farzad Ramezani Bonesh, “Factors Affecting Divisions Among Afghan Taliban,” Asia Times Online, May 22, 2020, https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/factors-affecting-divisions-among-afghan-… .

Some speculate that the Islamic State has positioned itself to absorb fragmenting factions of the Taliban in the event the terms of a peace deal are not acceptable to a major faction. See: Mujib Mashal, “As Taliban Talk Peace, ISIS is Ready to Play the Spoiler in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, Aug 20, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/world/asia/isis-afghanistan-peace.ht… .

On the 2018 cease-fire, see: Pamela Constable, “Afghanistan Extends Cease-fire With Taliban as Fighters Celebrate Eid with Civilians,” Washington Post, June 16, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/afghan-government-ext… ; on the 2020 ceasefire, see: “Afghanistan Truce Successful So Far, US Ready to Sign Peace Deal With Taliban,” Los Angeles Times, Feb 28, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-02-28/la-fg-afghanistan… .

According to CENTCOM chief Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, “They have scrupulously avoided attacking U.S. and coalition forces, but the attacks continue against the Afghan government forces and at a far too high level.” See: “General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr. Interview With NPR During a Recent Tour of The Region,” July 16, 2020, https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/Transcripts/Article/2280303/general-kenne… .

Paul Staniland, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse , (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2014).

For a comprehensive overview of Taliban’s internal structure, see: Ashley Jackson and Rahmatullah Amiri, “Insurgent Bureaucracy: How the Taliban Makes Policy,” United States Institute of Peace, November 2019, https://www.usip.org/index.php/publications/2019/11/insurgent-bureaucra… .

On centrality of socialization to maintain internal order, see: Jackson and Amiri, “Insurgent Bureaucracy”; on socialization instruments, see: Kate Clark, “The Layha: Calling the Taleban to Account,” Afghanistan Analysts Network, July 4, 2011, www.afghanistan-analysts.org/en/special-reports/the-layha-calling-the-t… .

“Taking Stock of the Taliban’s Perspectives on Peace.”

On politics of the appointment of the deputies, see: Borhan Osman, “Taleban in Transition 2: Who Is in Charge Now?,” Afghanistan Analysts Network, June 22, 2016, https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/en/reports/war-and-peace/taleban-i… .

For example, Taliban chief Mullah Mansoor Akhtar sidelined Abdul Qayum Zakir and elevated Mullah Omar’s son Mullah Yaqoob, who enjoyed standing for being the son of Omar, to the Rahbari Shura. On the politics surrounding sidelining of Zakir and elevation of Yaqoob, see: Hekmatullah Azamy and Abubakar Siddique, “Taliban Reach Out to Iran,” Terrorism Monitor 13, no. 12 (June 12, 2015), https://jamestown.org/program/taliban-reach-out-to-iran .

On Taliban’s willingness to use violence, see: Matthew Dupée, “Red on Red: Analyzing Afghanistan’s Intra-Insurgency Violence,” Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel 11, no. 1 (January 2018), https://ctc.usma.edu/red-red-analyzing-afghanistans-intra-insurgency-vi… .

For example, Pakistan arrested dissident commander Mullah Rasool in 2016: Ahmad Shah Ghani Zada, “Mysterious Arrest of Taliban Supreme Leader’s Arch Rival in Pakistan,” Khaama, Mar 22, 2016, https://www.khaama.com/tag/pakistan-arrests-mullah-rasool .

Jadoon and Mines, “Broken, but Not Defeated.” On strength of fighters and pressures leading to decline, see: Twenty-sixth Report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team Submitted Pursuant to Resolution 2368 (2017) Concerning ISIL (Da’esh), Al-Qaeda and Associated Individuals and Entities .

“Key Daesh Member Abdullah Orakzai Killed in Govt Forces Operation,” Tolo News, Aug 18, 2020, https://tolonews.com/afghanistan/key-daesh-member-abdullah-orakzai-kill… .

Borhan Osman, “Bourgeois Jihad: Why Young, Middle-Class Afghans Join the Islamic State,” United States Institute of Peace, June 1, 2020, https://www.usip.org/publications/2020/06/bourgeois-jihad-why-young-mid… .

For example, famous Hizb-e-Islami commander Amanullah joined ISKP but recently defected and joined the Taliban. See: Takal, “(له اسلامي امارت سره پيوستون (۲)) ویډيويي راپور نشر شو,” Alemarah, June 22, 2020, http://www.alemarahvideo.org/?p=6200 .

For example, after the August attack on Nangarhar prison, Afghanistan’s Minister for Interior said: “Haqqani and the Taliban carry out their terrorism on a daily basis across Afghanistan, and when their terrorist activities do not suit them politically, they rebrand it under I.S.K.P.” Zabihullah Ghazi and Mujib Mashal, “29 Dead After ISIS Attack on Afghan Prison,” the New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/world/asia/afghanistan-prison-isis-t… .

Osman, “Bourgeois Jihad.” Also see: Sands and Qazizai, Night Letters .

Mashal, “As Taliban Talk Peace, ISIS Is Ready to Play the Spoiler in Afghanistan.”

Abdul Sayed, “Who Is the New Leader of Islamic State-Khorasan Province?,” Lawfare, September 2, 2020, https://www.lawfareblog.com/who-new-leader-islamic-state-khorasan-provi… .

Ghazi and Mujib Mashal, “29 Dead After ISIS Attack on Afghan Prison.”

Photographs

Cover photo: Smoke rises from the site of an attack after a massive explosion the night before near the Green Village in Kabul on September 3, 2019. ( Photo by WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images )

Contents photo: Afghan security forces inspect the scene after gunmen attack the Medicins Sans Frontieres clinic in Dasht-e-Barchi region of Kabul, Afghanistan, on May 12, 2020. ( Photo by Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images )

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaks during a news conference at the State Department, on July 1, 2020, in Washington, DC. ( Photo by MANNY CENETA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images )

Afghan Taliban fighters and villagers attend a gathering as they celebrate the peace deal signed between the U.S. and Taliban in Laghman Province, Alingar district on March 2, 2020. ( Photo by Wali Sabawoon/NurPhoto via Getty Images )

Members of Islamic State stand alongside their weapons, following their surrender to the Afghan government in Jalalabad, Nangarhar Province, on November 17, 2019. ( Photo by NOORULLAH SHIRZADA/AFP via Getty Images )

Acknowledgements

I am thankful to Charles Lister, Abdul Sayed, Alistair Taylor, and Andrew Watkins for their assistance with this report.

About the Author

Dr. Asfandyar Mir is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. His research focuses on international security issues, U.S. counterterrorism policy, al-Qaeda, and South Asian security affairs, with a focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. His research has been published in International Security , International Studies Quarterly , and Security Studies . His commentary has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Lawfare, H-Diplo, and the Washington Post.

Twenty years of war: America magazine’s coverage of Afghanistan

The dramatic scenes unfolding in Kabul as Taliban forces overrun the last remaining government-held positions in Afghanistan’s capital have come as a shock to many American observers both on the ground and from afar. For those who remember the fall of Saigon in 1975, it has been a bitter repeat of history . A war that seemed eminently winnable—and justifiable—at its outset instead became a two-decade quagmire, and one that has left innocent noncombatants facing profound danger.

This is an occasion for all Americans to look back at our justifications for invading Afghanistan, our reasons for staying and our rationale for withdrawal. Where did it all go wrong? Or was the venture ill-fated from the start? Too many are dead for glib analyses to be appropriate, but a reckoning remains necessary. We at America have looked back over our coverage of Afghanistan since 2001, with some of the most pertinent accounts excerpted below.

The editors of America first weighed in on the situation in Afghanistan just a few short weeks after the United States began combat actions in that country following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 1, 2001. In the months and years that followed, the editors and other contributors weighed in with their reflections on and analyses of an increasingly fraught situation.

2001: "By their actions, the terrorists have declared war on the United States, and we certainly have the right under the just war theory to defend ourselves with military force."

A Just War? (the Editors, Oct. 8, 2001)

The United States is going to wage a war against terrorists, says President George W. Bush. Is this a just war according to the principles of the Catholic just war theory? For this issue we asked experts in the just war theory to examine this question and present their views.

Before looking at the U.S. response, it is important to make clear that the terrorists’ attacks violated almost every principle of the just war theory. First, wars can be waged only by legitimate authorities of a state. They cannot be declared by anyone who feels he has a just cause. The terrorists are not government officials. Second, the attack on the World Trade Center was directed at civilians who, according to the principle of civilian immunity, should not be targeted. And even if the Pentagon could be considered a military target, using a plane loaded with innocent civilians as a bomb is unacceptable.

By their actions, the terrorists have declared war on the United States, and we certainly have the right under the just war theory to defend ourselves with military force. But before we go too far down this path, we should ask if the use of the word war is apt. The use of the word by the president is rhetorically satisfying. It makes clear that this is a serious endeavor that will take great effort and sacrifice. But calling our response war gives the terrorists a stature that they do not deserve. It treats them like a government, when in fact they are more like organized criminals: mass murderers, not soldiers. Treating terrorists as criminals does not mean that the use of deadly force is ruled out. Police have the right to use deadly force to protect themselves and others from harm.

The rhetoric of war also makes it easier for the president to argue that we will treat nations that support terrorism in the same way that we deal with terrorists. This is easy to say, but difficult to carry out. If we discover that a foreign intelligence service gave money, arms or forged documents to Osama bin Laden, do we bomb the country? Do we bomb the offices of the intelligence service? What if the government did not know the resources were going to be used in the attack on the United States? Since the U.S. government has stated that a number of countries support terrorist groups, we could quickly be at war on many fronts.

But granting that the rhetoric of war has captured the day, it is appropriate to use the just war theory to guide us in our response. Read more...

War in Afghanistan (the Editors, Oct. 29, 2001)

The aerial attack by the United States on terrorist and Taliban targets in Afghanistan has been declared a just war by a number of Catholic leaders, including some bishops and cardinals. While we hope that the war is brought to a swift and just conclusion, such certitude, at this point, is hard to echo. There is no question that stopping terrorism is a just cause. But waging war under the just war doctrine must be the last resort, after diplomatic, economic and other means have failed. Was a month enough time to exhaust these options? This is unclear.

….Once the obvious military targets are destroyed, what do we bomb next? From the beginning, the administration has thought of this struggle primarily in military terms, but the war on terrorism cannot be won simply with bullets. The United States needs the support not only of the elites governing Muslim countries, but also of Muslim public opinion. That is why it was foolish for the administration to wait a month before accepting invitations to appear on Al Jazeera, an independent all-news satellite channel based in Qatar, which could be used to send our message to the Muslim world. This war will not be won in the mountains of Afghanistan. It will be won when Muslims are convinced that the United States acts justly. Read more...

How Goes the Coalition? (the Editors, Nov. 26, 2001)

….The Taliban retreat from Kabul will both strengthen and challenge the coalition. On the one hand, nothing strengthens a coalition like victories. On the other hand, the international coalition must now quickly find an Afghan coalition that can govern without intertribal bloodshed.

For the ultimate success of the campaign, international cooperation is indispensable, because the terrorist networks are spread across 60 nations. The coalition is not an association as formal as an alliance, but it must be held together. In an age of global interconnectedness, even a superpower cannot behave like some sheriff at high noon. If the coalition is sluggish, that’s bad luck. If the United States tries to go it alone in the campaign against terrorism, that will be more than a misfortune. It will be a perilous mistake. Read more...

2001: "In an age of global interconnectedness, even a superpower cannot behave like some sheriff at high noon."

Afghanistan Part II (the Editors, March 4, 2002)

The Bush administration has waged an effective war in Afghanistan, and, for the most part, has waged it in a just manner. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we wrote that the terrorists should be brought to justice because of their crimes and because of the danger they pose to life in this country and elsewhere. If this cannot be done peacefully, then they are legitimate targets of military action.

….While the Bush administration deserves praise, its policies have not been without defects. Many Al Qaeda and Taliban troops escaped into the mountains or Pakistan. In addition, the administration lost the moral high ground by arguing that the captives taken during the war were not covered by the Geneva conventions governing prisoners, a position it was ultimately forced to reverse. Now it is trying to convince a skeptical world that there is a difference between the Taliban soldiers and the Al Qaeda terrorists, a distinction that it could have made more successfully if it had not earlier tried to ignore the Geneva conventions. In addition, allegations that U.S. soldiers have beaten captives are alarming. The facilities holding prisoners should be immediately opened to international inspection by the Red Cross and Red Crescent.

The first casualty of war, the saying goes, is the truth. While secrecy is vital to protect military plans, post-battle secrecy breeds suspicion and prevents us from learning from our mistakes. The military would have more credibility if it acknowledged quickly and forthrightly civilian casualties and other military mistakes. To assert, for example, against all evidence that those killed at the village of Chowkar-Karez, outside Kandahar, were enemy soldiers, renders suspect all information given out by the military. Better to admit the mistake, apologize, make reparations and strive to do better.

Apologies and reparations would do much to show the Afghan people that we, unlike so many previous foreign powers, are different: we care about their welfare. Estimates of civilian casualties from the war range from 1,000 to 4,000. Justice demands that we spend at least part of our military budget to help those innocent civilians who were wounded, widowed or orphaned by U.S. weapons. We also have an obligation to retrieve and destroy unexploded ordnance, lest more innocents suffer from the war.

Rebuilding Afghanistan politically and economically will not be easy. Read more...

2002: "The Bush administration has waged an effective war in Afghanistan, and, for the most part, has waged it in a just manner."

The First Anniversary of 9/11 (the Editors, Sept. 9, 2002)

….In December, Washington was congratulating itself on defeating the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and expelling the Al Qaeda terrorists from that country—although, tragically, a significant number of noncombatant civilians were killed in the process.

But on the anniversary of 9/11, the new Afghan government remains highly unstable; the partners in the anti-terrorist coalition are growing ever more critical of U.S. leadership; the Al Qaeda leaders have not been found, much less immobilized; there is frightening talk within Congress and the administration of war with Iraq; and all the while Americans are continually assured by experts that new and more dreadful terrorist attacks are a certainty.

It is often said that 9/11 marked the beginning of a new age. It should also be said that if this age is to eliminate terrorism, it must be guided by the truth that Pope John Paul II repeated over and over in his message for the 2002 World Day of Peace: “No peace without justice; no justice without forgiveness.” Read more...

The True Costs of War (May 16, 2006)

….The campaign against international terrorism confronts a new kind of challenge. Unlike conventional wars between nation-states or the decades-long confrontation of the cold war, this campaign will not conclude with a surrender or a treaty. When the two global superpowers confronted each other in a climate of mutual assured destruction, the danger was all too real, but the competing interests of the adversaries were clear. Such clarity is not present in the campaign against international terrorism. Suicide bombers will not be defeated by missiles and tanks but by the promise of a life of opportunity with hope for future generations. While military responses to clearly defined targets must be part of our response to terrorist attacks, the fundamental and continuing conflict will be one of ideals and values. If American citizens accept the diminishment of constitutional safeguards and American values without protest, we will slowly surrender our most valuable resource in the continuing campaign against terrorism. By failing to understand our adversaries, we run the risk of becoming their mirror images. Read more...

Up or Out (Dec. 7, 2009)

Afghanistan, we are told, is the “graveyard of empires.” Visitors to the recent roving exhibit “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul” will know that description is an exaggeration. For Alexander the Great and his followers, it turns out, established colonial cities across northern and western Afghanistan. So not every foreign expedition has stumbled into disaster, like the ill-fated British and Indian troops annihilated in 1842 in the First Afghan War. Nonetheless, today Afghanistan does represent an extraordinary military and diplomatic challenge for the United States. The terrain is rugged, the climate inhospitable to invading armies. Its population consists of at least nine ethnic groups who speak more than 30 languages. Its tribal culture is, to put it kindly, highly defensive and its people skilled in irregular warfare. When the illegitimacy and corruption of the government in Kabul and the weakness of its police and military are added in, waging a counter-insurgency/counter-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan is a test of extraordinary complexity.

President Obama’s long, drawn-out deliberation on Afghan strategy is not just due to his rational temperament, as his kinder critics have suggested. It is demanded by the multiple challenges Afghanistan presents any outside power seeking to shape events in what Maryann Cusimano Love aptly called “a fictional state.” In this context, deliberation is an asset, but it cannot assure a happy outcome. Whatever the strategy, however focused the goals, war and nation-building are both chancy undertakings. The principal issue that we believe should be weighed as the nation moves ahead is the human capacity of the U.S. military to wage this war. Read more...

2006: "By failing to understand our adversaries, we run the risk of becoming their mirror images."

Hold to the Deadline (Sept. 13, 2010)

The Taliban, according to a cover story in Time on July 29, ordered the nose of 19-year-old Bibi Aisha cut off to punish her for fleeing her husband’s family, where she was being abused. Later they shot 10 aid workers and stoned to death a young couple who had eloped. If NATO leaves Afghanistan, many tell us, such atrocities will continue. But Aisha’s husband, not the Taliban, cut off her nose; and the almost 100,000 foreign troops have failed to reform brutal tribal customs during the nine years they have fought there.

Meanwhile, civilian casualties rise. The U.S. policy is to avoid killing civilians, even at risk to our troops; but recent reports of 52 people, mainly women and children, killed in the Helmand province—condemned as “morally and humanly unacceptable” by President Hamid Karzai—and another 32 a week later, demonstrate that drones and rockets fail to distinguish sufficiently between the enemy and the innocent. According to U.N. reports, in 2009 the great majority of the 2,412 civilian victims were killed by insurgents; 596 were killed by the United States, mostly by air strikes. Nevertheless, local polls show that Afghans, particularly in the villages, blame the foreigners for civilian deaths.

Each week the parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam become more vivid: the corrupt America-sponsored government; our troops bogged down in a hostile culture and terrain; our military leadership plugged into its “can do” philosophy; our domestic economy stretched to the breaking point; a public uninformed and unconvinced of the war’s necessity; and a president stuck with a premature decision to fight and determined not to become, in Richard Nixon’s words, “the first president to lose a war.”

Americans must face the fact that we cannot control the world. Given the current burdens on our military and our economic problems, we cannot remake a nation in our image. Read this...

Out of Afghanistan (Aug. 15, 2011)

Congressman Walter Jones Jr., of North Carolina, has undergone a thorough conversion. A Democrat, he became a conservative Republican; a Baptist, he became a Catholic. He supported the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; now he sends hand-written letters of condolence to the American families who have lost a son or daughter. He told George C. Wilson in The Nation (6/13) that he deals with the guilt over having voted for both wars because he was “not strong enough to vote my conscience as a man of faith.” Mr. Jones and his 13-member Out-of-Afghanistan caucus plan to push the war to the forefront in the presidential primaries. Public support for the war has fallen. Only 43 percent of Americans feel it is worth fighting, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll (6/7). A Pew survey on June 21 found that 56 percent wanted troops out as soon as possible and only 39 percent supported staying until the situation stabilized.

In June, 40 religious leaders from all faiths wrote to President Obama that it is time to bring the war in Afghanistan to an end. What began as a response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they contended, has become an open-ended war against a Taliban insurgency. Read this...

2013: "Killing civilians is not only immoral but also strategically counterproductive."

Our Sacred Dead (Oct. 23, 2013)

….As the war in Afghanistan intensified in 2008, the effort to keep count of civilian deaths increased, though many agreed the data gathered from Western media reports represented only the tip of the iceberg. The tension between the United Nations and United States increased. The coalition would claim they had killed insurgents, but the local population would tell the United Nations that the victims were farmers. A U.S. bombing in September 2008 killed 92 civilians in one village, and in May 2009 another airstrike killed 140. WikiLeaks revealed in July 2010 that the U.S. military secretly maintained files concerning 4,024 Afghan civilian war deaths between 2004 and 2009.

Killing civilians is not only immoral but also strategically counterproductive. Whether an attack using drones, or night raids on the ground, these actions lead only to new recruits for the Taliban. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal often called this “insurgent math,” and his aide said every additional civilian casualty generates 20 more insurgents, an increase in road bombs and an additional violent clash between insurgents and U.S. troops in the following six weeks.

In U.S. culture, respect for human life is narrow, sometimes to the point of indifference to the fate of innocent persons who are not military enemies, but whom we kill. We are slow to see those designated “terrorists” as our brothers and sisters. There is a need for a truly independent agency, akin to the Government Accountability Office, to record and publish the names and number of civilians killed on all sides of a conflict. The nightly news should acknowledge both American and foreign dead. Memorials and liturgies that demonstrate respect for all the victims of war would give life to the most challenging words in the Sermon on the Mount. Read more...

As a soldier I was loved for my sins. Now I must repent for them (Peter Lucier, May 17, 2019)

….The Catholic faith tells us that we are sinners loved by God. I am a sinner who is loved. I struggle with both halves. I don’t always want to admit I am a sinner. What I went over there to do felt righteous. I believed in the cause, and even if I didn’t, I believed in my brothers. I believed in America, and even if I didn’t or didn’t know what America was, I believed in the Marine Corps. I believed in violence, in purpose, in our community, our brotherhood. I wanted to receive the sacrament of confirmation in the military service. I prayed for the opportunity to kill.

I believed in the redemptive power of violence. I was young and golden and fit, on fire with the zeal of a convert. On the firing ranges at the school of infantry, in the mountains of Camp Pendleton, I fell in love with the rhythms of squad fire and maneuver—the geometries of fire, crisp left and right lateral limits, the steady drumming of an M249 machine gun zipping rounds into targets. I was born again. I felt clean and right. I slept peacefully at night, tired from an honest day’s work of training to visit violence upon the others. Some days, it is hard to admit I am a sinner.

Other days, it is hard to accept that I am loved. I have not earned it. We went out all those nights and never came back with anything to show for it. The war I fought, I didn’t win. What have I done to deserve love? I have certainly done enough to deserve contempt, to deserve condescension, to deserve belittlement, to deserve hate, even. Pick your sin: pride, anger, despair, selfishness. I am guilty. I went to war feeling entitled. To what exactly? To save. To kill. It didn’t occur to me how arrogant that was until I came home. I carried that self-centeredness into a marriage after I got home and wrecked it. The uniform I wore reminds others of service. It reminds me of all the wrongs I’ve done and continue to do. Some days it is hard to accept love.

As a Marine veteran of Afghanistan, I am a sinner who is loved—and loved in a way I am not always comfortable with. Being a veteran means being venerated here at home. Before every college basketball game I go to, we take a moment to be grateful for our nation “and those who keep it safe.” I am loved with every flyover at a football game, every Fourth of July, every Veterans Day. I feel America’s love for me and for veterans in every “Thank you for your service” and in every “Support the Troops” bumper sticker.

The oftentimes adoring American public does not talk much about my sins, but I feel them acutely. St. Augustine talked about animi dolor , “anguish of the soul.” Animi dolor is the soul’s natural response to war, to killing. I feel viscerally the stains that entering into the morally complex arena of war has left upon my soul. In the American culture, I am loved for my sins. I am loved for being a Marine who went to war.

When I returned from Afghanistan, I needed to find a way to go from being a Marine who is loved for his sins to being a believer who is a sinner but who is loved. I needed to find a way to come home. The church has always offered a path for soldiers coming home from war: the path of penance. It is a hard path, both for veterans and for the families and communities to which they are trying to return. But if we really believe in the message and truth of the cross, and if veterans are to truly become again members of the community, we are compelled to take this route. Read more...

The Afghanistan Papers make clear that America has a repentance problem (Drew Christiansen, S.J., Dec. 17, 2019)

We have been here before. In 1964 there was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution , and in 1971 came the publication of the Pentagon Papers . In 1979, David Halberstam laid the blame for the Vietnam War at the feet of “ the best and the brightest .” Not until four decades later in 2004, in the film “ The Fog of War ,” did Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, own his culpability in that conflict.

In 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney and the hawkish neo-cons of the Bush administration led the United States to war under false pretenses once again, this time in Iraq. In 2006, the Iraq Study Group , headed by James A. Baker and Lee Hamilton, issued a report listing 79 recommendations to correct and prevent the mistakes and abuses of that war.

The same year, the journalists Seymour Hersh and Mark Danner began extended coverage of the torture committed at Abu Ghraib . We later learned that the C.I.A. had filmed the “enhanced interrogations,” destroyed the tapes so they could not be turned over to investigators and continued applying these grossly immoral techniques even after they had proven ineffective at producing actionable intelligence. The new film “ The Report ” dramatizes an investigation into the torture program by the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California.

Now comes The Washington Post’s release, on Dec. 9, of the so-called Afghanistan Papers —more than 2,000 pages from the Lessons Learned Program at the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, along with other documents. They reveal that, as The Post summarizes, “Year after year, U.S. officials failed to tell the public the truth about the war in Afghanistan.” Once again there was failure at the top, by both civilian and military leaders, in the Bush and Obama administrations and right up to the present.

“The interviews make clear,” the Post reporters write, “that officials issued rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hid unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” They go on to say, “Several of those interviewed described explicit efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public and a culture of willful ignorance, where bad news and critiques were unwelcome.” Americans, it appears, have not learned the lessons of our own past failures. Rather, we seem ensnared in a tragedy of biblical dimensions from which we cannot flee.

The first lesson I draw from the Afghanistan Papers is that U.S. civic culture has lost the capacity for repentance. Read more...

What America needs to know about the Afghanistan Papers (Ryan Di Corpo, Dec. 17, 2019)

The Washington Post released previously unpublished reports and memos related to the ongoing war in Afghanistan on Dec. 9. These 428 interview transcripts and over 2,000 pages of notes , called the Afghanistan Papers, reveal a striking contrast between the private doubts and concerns of numerous ambassadors, military leaders and U.S. government officials and what they told the American public about the war.

More than 600 people sat for interviews with the Office of the Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) as part of its $11 million “ Lessons Learned ” program, which, according to The Post, “was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan.”

The documents are a sobering record of intelligence errors, strategic blunders and sustained, widespread uncertainty regarding the purpose of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan—a nearly $1 trillion endeavor . Since 2001, the war has taken the lives of 2,300 American military personnel and an estimated 43,074 Afghan civilians.

On Oct. 7, 2001, President George W. Bush announced strikes against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. He stated that the purpose of these “carefully targeted actions” was to “disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.” However, as revealed in the newly released Lessons Learned report, former Afghan war czar Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in 2015, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan— we didn’t know what we were doing .”

To help make sense of the Afghanistan Papers, America spoke by phone with Karen J. Greenberg, who has written on matters of terrorism and national security for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. A permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Ms. Greenberg is currently director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What intelligence did the U.S. lack when beginning military operations in Afghanistan? Was the war strategically misguided from the start?

Much of the criticism about the war in Afghanistan was understated, but there are many things we didn’t know. Among them was how exactly this tribal country functions, what role the warlords and others were playing vis-a-vis the United States and other countries. In other words, who to trust, what their actual goals were, how they viewed the Americans.

On Dec. 1, 2009, at West Point, President Obama announced a surge of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and his plan to end U.S. involvement by July 2011. At the time, was it possible for U.S. forces to complete a successful transfer of power to Afghan troops?

Why was the drawdown so hard? In part because there was such opposition to it by officials who wondered, “If we draw down in Afghanistan, then what will happen?” Will Al Qaeda be on the rise again? Will other Islamist terrorist groups will be able to take root? For the most part, Obama’s decision was to draw down, but among many military experts and national security figures, that was a problem. It takes time.

The question was, “How are they going to do it?” Read more...

2020: "An emboldened and patient Taliban appears content to simply wait out the Americans."

As tensions rise with Iran, Afghanistan becomes the longest war in U.S. history (Kevin Clarke, Feb. 5, 2020)

The Afghanistan papers offer a litany of intelligence errors, strategic blunders and expressions of sustained, widespread uncertainty regarding the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. During his interview for Lessons Learned, former Afghan war czar Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in 2015, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan— we didn’t know what we were doing ”—a fitting summary of the sentiment expressed by scores of other combat officers, diplomats and Pentagon strategists who participated in the policy postmortem. According to The Post, those documents reveal “there was no consensus on the war’s objectives, let alone how to end the conflict.”

The same day The Post released its grim exposé, The New York Times published a summary of a report from Brown University’s Cost of War project. According to those researchers, the United States has spent $2.15 trillion so far in efforts to contain the Taliban, Al Qaeda and now ISIS militants and to stabilize Afghanistan’s government and civil society.

During that time, the war has cost the lives of 2,351 American military personnel and an estimated 43,000 Afghan civilians . Yet more than 18 years after U.S. and NATO troops first arrived to begin the longest war in U.S. history, the stable, democratic Afghanistan the United States struggled to establish remains acutely vulnerable to collapse, and an emboldened and patient Taliban appears content to simply wait out the Americans. Read more...

What we owe U.S. veterans who fought in Afghanistan (Matt Malone, S.J., Feb. 18, 2020)

On Feb. 8, 2020, Sgt. First Class Javier Gutierrez, of San Antonio, Tex., and Sgt. First Class Antonio Rodriguez, of Las Cruces, N.M., became the latest U.S. soldiers to die in Afghanistan. They were both 28 years old. Six other American personnel were wounded in the attack, which reportedly came as they were waiting for a helicopter transport in Nangarhar Province. Since the start of the war in 2001, more than 2,300 U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan and more than 20,000 have been wounded.

The war has been far costlier, of course, for Afghan civilians. According to Amnesty International , “in the first nine months of 2019 alone, more than 2,400 children were killed or injured in Afghanistan, making it the deadliest conflict in the world for children.”

You would think that these sobering statistics would keep the war at the forefront of our national consciousness. Instead, most of us hardly think about it. Philip Klay, a former U.S. Marine, described in these pages in 2018 how our mass indifference affected him when he came home from the war in Iraq: “To walk through a city like New York upon return from war, then, felt like witnessing a moral crime.... I was frustrated, coming home, that the American people did not embrace my vision of war.” Mr. Klay went on to explain how his “vision” of the war changed, but I think one could forgive any veteran for feeling what he felt. Read more…

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Crime and terrorism thriving again in Afghanistan amid economic ruin, warns Kőrösi

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Two-thirds of Afghans are going hungry, with girls' education subject to “random edicts” of the Taliban, while crime and terrorism are thriving once more buoyed by a large spike in opium production, warned the President of the UN General Assembly on Thursday.

Csaba Kőrösi painted a near apocalyptic picture of ordinary life in the Taliban-ruled nation that has endured almost five decades of “relentless conflict”, urging the international community to make up the $2.3 billion shortfall in  the UN humanitarian appeal  for $4.4 billion.

The UN humanitarian appeal for Afghanistan which requires $4.4 billion USD is only half funded. With winter weather just weeks away, I encourage Member States to provide urgent support to help reduce the $2.3 billion dollar shortfall. Full remarks🔗 https://t.co/Go1J3igWyN https://t.co/PTGnrqryUM https://t.co/F1bvgcAoT5 UN GA President UN_PGA November 10, 2022

‘Moral imperative’

In a powerful speech to ambassadors in New York, during a full session of the UN’s most representative body, he said that there was “a moral and also a practical imperative for the international community to support an inclusive and sustainable peace in Afghanistan.”

The resolution expressed deep concern over Afghanistan’s current trajectory and the volatility there since the Taliban takeover.

It urges Afghanistan to honour and fully respect and implement all treaties, covenants or conventions, bilateral or multilateral, which is has signed up to.

Drugs and terror

Beyond the disastrous humanitarian and human rights situation, he said the country was now “ awash with heroin and opium .”

“Organized crime and terrorist organizations are thriving once again.  Afghanistan is facing complex and interlinked challenges that the Taliban have shown they cannot – or would not – solve .”

Now is the time to come up with some concrete solutions that put the Afghan people first, he said, suggesting one concrete way the General Assembly could help right away:

“I encourage the country’s reengagement with the international science community. And to allow women who used to be respected members of the country’s science community, to resume their research and their studies.

Alone in denial

Afghanistan is now the only State in the world, denying girls the right to a full education, he added, noting that their prospects are totally uncertain, “amid seemingly random edicts from the Taliban .”

For even the most powerful women in the country, “ dreams of becoming President have been replaced by the reality of child marriage . Arrests if women and girls leave their home without a male chaperone.

Protect all Afghans

“I reiterate my call for the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms of all Afghans, especially women and girls .”

Mr. Kőrösi urged the Taliban to ensure the safety of all Afghans - regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion or politics - protection for journalists and civil society members, and the unhindered delivery of aid.

Amid the economic meltdown, he pointed out the shocking fact that narcotics constitute the biggest sector in the country, with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, revealing a 32 per cent growth in illegal opium cultivation. 

“We know where these drugs are sent. And we know who profits from these drugs. The threat from drug trafficking is linked with the threat of terrorism, regional and global security.”

Get serious

He said Taliban leaders needed to engage in serious dialogue about counter-terrorism to reverse the flow of foreign extremists into the country – and prevent their own from becoming foreign terrorist fighters elsewhere.

“ Afghanistan must never again become a breeding ground and  safe haven  for terrorists.  I call on the Taliban, other Afghans and members of the international community to cooperate with the Special Representative (for UN Assistance Mission, UNAMA ) as she implements the Mission’s mandate.

After debating the resolution, it was adopted by the General Assembly with 116 votes for, and 10 abstentions - Belarus, Burundi, China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia and Zimbabwe.

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Introduction

Existing explanations for why the u.s. war in afghanistan ended, trauma, narratives, and war, the narrative emerges and settles in, the narrative peaks, the narrative declines, narratives and war: explaining the length and end of u.s. military operations in afghanistan.

Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs and the Shively Family Faculty Fellow at Wake Forest University.

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C. William Walldorf; Narratives and War: Explaining the Length and End of U.S. Military Operations in Afghanistan. International Security 2022; 47 (1): 93–138. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00439

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Why did the U.S. war in Afghanistan last so long, and why did it end? In contrast to conventional arguments about partisanship, geopolitics, and elite pressures, a new theory of war duration suggests that strategic narratives best answer these questions. The severity and frequency of attacks by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State across most of the 2000s and 2010s generated and sustained a robust collective narrative across the United States focused on combatting terrorism abroad. Audience costs of inaction generated by this narrative pushed President Barack Obama (2009) and President Donald Trump (2017) to not only sustain but increase troops in Afghanistan, against their better judgement. Strategic narratives also explain the end to the war. The defeat of the ISIS caliphate and a significant reduction in the number of attacks on liberal democratic states in the late 2010s caused the severity and frequency of traumatic events to fall below the threshold necessary to sustain a robust anti-terrorism narrative. As the narrative weakened, advocates for war in Afghanistan lost political salience, while those pressing retrenchment gained leverage over policy. Audience costs for inaction declined and President Joe Biden ended the war (2021). As President Biden seeks to rebalance U.S. commitments for an era of new strategic challenges, an active offshore counterterrorism program will be necessary to maintain this balance.

In May 2017, amid yet another intense national debate about increasing troops in Afghanistan, President Donald Trump asked Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), “How does this end?” Graham answered, “It never ends.” Soon after, Vice President Mike Pence implored Graham to give Trump an off-ramp, some kind of exit strategy. According to Bob Woodward, Graham responded, “It would never end.” 1

Until Trump's 2020 troop reduction and, especially, President Joe Biden's 2021 decision to end combat operations entirely, Graham's counsel seemed almost prophetic. Despite long-standing countervailing pressures at home (e.g., lobbying by advocates of restraint, public disdain for the war, as well as the pro-withdrawal sentiments of Biden and his two immediate predecessors), the United States stayed in Afghanistan for two decades. 2 What sustained this war for so long, and what allowed Trump to begin and Biden to complete the drawdown?

Conventional arguments in international relations about geopolitics, elites (e.g., “the Blob”), 3 and partisanship struggle to answer these questions. Given these shortcomings, this article turns to a new theory of war duration to explain the length and end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The approach centers, at the broadest level, on collective national will or purpose. It does so, more specifically, by focusing primary causal attention on a largely underappreciated yet historically important factor in U.S. foreign policy: strategic narratives. 4

I define strategic narratives as collective national or public-level stories that form out of and center around traumatic events for a group. These events come to be viewed in existential terms as a danger to the national way of life. By collective, I mean that narratives are properties of groups or social facts, like culture. For a nation-state, a narrative becomes collectively salient because it restores order by explaining the pain, assigning blame, and, most importantly, setting lessons going forward to avoid a return to the pain of the past. These lessons are often reflected in a simple mantra—such as “No More Vietnams” or “Stop Terrorism”—that takes on a life of its own in ways that determine national interests to pursue abroad and shape policy debates over time. 5

This article focuses on one especially important type of strategic narrative—the liberal narrative—in the history of U.S. foreign policy. A robust liberal narrative is distinguished by its lesson, notably the need to safeguard liberal political order abroad, “either by promotion (i.e., expanding democracy and liberal rights) or protection (i.e., preventing the spread of counter-ideologies to liberalism).” 6 The liberal narrative manifests in temporally unique variants such as the anti-fascist narrative of the 1930s and 1940s and the anti-communist narrative during the Cold War. With lessons to defend freedom and stop counter-ideologies from spreading, both shared a commitment to protect liberal political order, making them “liberal narratives.” 7

Historically, liberal narratives like these affect policy through the contested nature of democratic politics. At key decision points about the use of force, powerful narratives augment in predictable ways some voices over others in policy debates. Specifically, by tapping into or drawing upon the lessons of a prevailing narrative, agents gain influence by building policy discourses that increase leaders' perceived audience costs, which are defined as the “domestic political price” that leaders pay for choices that are at odds with strong public preferences. 8 Given a narrative's public salience, leaders fear potential electoral or policy losses and, in turn, tend to bring their decisions in line with these narrative-augmented discourses, sometimes against their better judgment. 9

This strategic-narrative argument helps explain the length and end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The severity of the September 11 terrorist attacks coupled with the frequency of follow-on attacks globally by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS) into the late 2010s generated and sustained a powerful collective story across the U.S. body politic of missed opportunities by U.S. leaders and a lesson to combat terrorism abroad. This anti-terrorism narrative is the most recent variant of a robust liberal narrative in the U.S. policy process. At various decision points, the narrative created space for promoters of war (especially in the U.S. military) to generate discourses that raised audience costs of inaction and politically boxed in presidents to sustain or expand the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Concerns about looking “soft” and not measuring up to narrative standards shaped the decisions of both President Barack Obama and Trump (early in his term) to stay engaged militarily. In recent years, narrative measures show that as the severity and frequency of terrorist attacks receded (i.e., collapse of the ISIS caliphate, absence of severe al-Qaeda attacks), the anti-terrorism narrative also lost policy salience. Moderators (in this case, civilian leaders and policy experts) gained leverage, audience costs of inaction declined, and restraint gained traction in policy debates. Like event-driven narrative dynamics (i.e., following the killing of Osama bin Laden) that allowed Obama to withdraw from Iraq in 2011, the national sense of purpose in Afghanistan waned, creating political space for Trump to decrease troops and for Biden to end the war entirely.

The strategic-narrative argument builds upon and fills important gaps in existing scholarship. In contrast to standard rationalist accounts, it explores the social construction of audience costs and offers new insights into how narratives shape policy outcomes. The argument also turns to the framework of cultural trauma to explain strategic narratives more systematically. 10 In contrast to some accounts that focus primarily on influential agents to explain how narratives form and endure, trauma theory draws primary attention to the importance of events (e.g., September 11). When collectively viewed as existentially dangerous, these events spark new narratives such as the anti-terrorism narrative. Similar follow-on events over time re-traumatize the nation, helping maintain the salience of the narrative as a lodestar for foreign policy for years or even decades on end. Among other things, this trauma framework best accounts for the long-standing vitality of the anti-terrorism narrative in U.S. politics that other arguments about narratives struggle to explain.

This article turns first to conventional explanations, specifically arguments centered on potential changes in Afghanistan's geostrategic value to the United States, the shifting partisan preferences of different presidential administrations, variation in elite ideological or consensus-based pressures, and shifts in civil-military relations. The second and third sections detail the strategic-narrative argument and methods. Sections four through six present the Afghanistan case studies. The article concludes with policy implications.

The war in Afghanistan was the centerpiece of U.S. forever wars across the first two decades of the 2000s. Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden conducted major policy reviews early in their administrations. The first two opted against withdrawal and increased troops instead—Obama by 30,000 in 2009 and Trump by 4,000 in 2017. Three years later, Trump began—and Biden completed—the withdrawal. What explains this change?

Standard explanations struggle to answer this question. Realists see no geostrategic value in nation-building wars like Afghanistan. Although the end of the war makes sense to realists, its duration does not. 11 Partisan arguments offer no clear explanation either—Obama (D) continued President George W. Bush's (R) policy that Trump (R) also initially followed before shifting to withdrawal, which Biden (D) elected to continue. 12 Elite-based arguments fare poorly, too. For those who focus on elite ideology, reduced elite ideological concerns about Afghanistan over the past decade (e.g., Obama on the overreaction to September 11 and talks of terrorism as nonexistential) should have meant that the United States ended the war years ago. Therefore, why the United States stayed so long and what changed to allow Biden to leave when others could not is puzzling. 13 This is not to say that ideology is irrelevant; it affects how narratives form, but in ways that the narrow focus in extant work on elites alone does not capture well. 14 Alternatively, some scholars argue that a powerful establishment consensus aimed at sustaining U.S. “liberal hegemony” explains U.S. wars in the Middle East. In short, elites want forever wars and get what they want. 15 But if this theory is correct, then how did Biden end the war? As a constant, establishment consensus cannot explain this, nor can it explain many other decisions for retrenchment, such as Obama's choice in 2011 to withdraw all troops from Iraq and his refusal to enforce the Syrian “red line” in 2014.

Finally, I suggest that the strongest conventional argument comes from the civil-military relations literature. When the military enters the political fray with dire public warnings of danger ahead for the nation, some scholars argue that civil-military relations tilt toward the military in ways that often lead to strategically suboptimal outcomes, such as continuing stalemated forever wars. In contrast, these kinds of wars result in retrenchment only when civilians regain the upper hand, especially by muzzling the military in public. 16

The problem with this argument is not that it is wrong. In fact, the strategic-narrative argument I develop here agrees that the balance between military leaders as powerful promoters of war and civilian leaders as moderators of war is important. Not surprisingly, then, when military leaders went public (or threatened to do so) in the Obama and Trump periods, civilian leaders capitulated, troops increased, and war continued. In the Biden period, however, civilians carried the upper hand, the military chose not to go public with its preferences to continue the fight, and the president ended the war. In a broad sense, the cases match civil-military expectations.

This argument's greatest shortcoming comes with explaining change, which is the main puzzle of this article. If the civil-military relations balance is critical to both the continuation of and the end to forever wars, such as the war in Afghanistan, why does that balance tilt one way or the other at different times? More specifically, why does the military go public sometimes and not others, why and how do the public appeals of the military generate pressure on civilian leaders, and under what conditions are civilians able to muzzle the military and, in so doing, gain more leverage over policy?

The politics of strategic narratives help answer questions like these. The civil-military balance generally favors the military when there is a robust liberal narrative—such as the anti-terrorism narrative from 2001 to 2018. The narrative gives military promoters (and their civilian supporters in government) an important political tool to build public pressure on civilian leaders in order to continue/expand war. Military leaders are most likely to go public (or threaten to do so) under such narrative conditions. Civilian leaders—fearful of the political costs of not measuring up to narrative standards (i.e., looking “weak” or “losing”)—capitulate to military pressure. But when a liberal narrative weakens, the civil-military balance often tilts toward the former. Military promoters find themselves on more tenuous ground in policy debates. In the absence of nationwide, narrative-driven fervor to intervene militarily in conflicts abroad, the military tends to hesitate about going public with its preferences for more force. As the public costs of looking weak recede with the weakened liberal narrative, civilians/moderators find more political space to assert themselves, both in internal debates and in public. Long wars such as the U.S. war in Afghanistan often come to an end.

In sum, the nexus between civil-military relations and strategic narratives provides deeper insights into why long wars endure and ultimately end. International relations scholars have shed a great deal of light on the former but not on the latter. For that reason, I now turn greater attention to the narrative side of this equation.

Narratives are not new to the field of international relations. The existing literature on narratives faces two primary shortcomings, though. 17 First, scholars offer no clear explanation for why and when narratives shape policy outcomes, like decisions to continue or end forever wars. My attention to audience costs corrects for this. Second, in explaining how narratives strengthen and weaken over time, existing scholarship gives primary attention to narrators—especially the president in the U.S. context. 18 Although narrators (and sometimes presidents, as such) are important, these arguments tend to overlook how events shape strategic narratives' content and strength across time. In the mid-2010s, President Obama tried to re-narrate and dampen terrorism worries in the United States, for instance. He largely failed because most U.S. citizens viewed Obama's new story as being out of touch amid a surge in ISIS terrorist attacks. The president told the wrong story at the wrong time. Events matter.

I start with scholarship on collective trauma, which draws attention to two particularly important concepts: the severity and the frequency of events. Neil Smelser defines cultural trauma as “a memory accepted and given public credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event(s) or situation(s) which is a) laden with … affect, b) represented as indelible, and c) regarded as threatening a society's existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions.” 19 Building off this definition, trauma involves three stages that leave behind marks on society, essentially new prevailing narratives. The strategic-narrative argument starts with identity, which determines what a community values most. Stage one involves severe events that are perceived as an attack on these values, an existential challenge making them traumatic. 20 This severity produces deep emotional reactions—“disgust, shame, guilt … or anxiety”—for a community, which leads quickly to stage two of trauma, notably a collective search for new “routines” and ways to “get by in the world.” 21 Above all else, the affected community looks to presumed wise figures in society for explanation and ways forward. 22

Stage three of trauma—the formation of new collective narratives—emerges from these explanations. Many enter the fray amid severity, often telling competing stories. Specific kinds of severity resonate with the injured group in ways that privilege some stories over others. 23 As a result of the disquiet generated by certain events, some stories become affirmed, validated, and collectively labeled as “good.” Storytellers gain a hearing, according to Jeffrey Alexander, when they “represent social pain as a fundamental threat to … [a group's] sense of who they are.” 24 If severe events repeat frequently, privileged stories resonate deeper and longer. High frequency re-traumatizes the collective, which makes the story indelible (i.e., “see, I told you so”) and helps sustain it over time as the new collective wisdom—or prevailing narrative—with new ways of being going forward. 25

This latter element—new directions toward repair—is a natural part of trauma-generated narratives. Effective storytellers repeatedly narrate ways for “defense and coping,” drawing attention to “mistakes and how they may be avoided in the future” (i.e., blame and lesson). 26 These lessons are often encapsulated in slogans such as “no more Vietnams,” “no more 9/11s,” or “who lost China?” (which helped propel intervention in Korea and Vietnam). Lessons and severe event(s) are intrinsically connected in narratives—the latter gives meaning to the former. 27

This trauma framework—centered on the severity and frequency of events—helps explain the emergence and cross-temporal strength of strategic narratives in U.S. foreign policy. 28 For this article, I grant special attention to one kind of trauma—external trauma—and the type of narrative that it tends to generate. Trauma theorists find that severe event(s) from some force outside a community leads to group unity around a story centered on protecting the ideals of the community—that is, “who we are”—as a means of defense or repair. 29 This external trauma helps explain the emergence and strength of liberal narratives (such as the anti-terrorism narrative) that centers on activism abroad to defend or promote liberal political order.

Liberal states (including the public in these states) view other states and developments in the international system through the ideological lens of their own regime type (i.e., identity)—they notice and worry about the plight of liberal order abroad because it threatens their own security. 30 The severe events most likely to spark stage one of trauma emerge when ideologically distant—in this case illiberal—rival(s) make strategic gains, especially through either a direct attack on the United States or a series of attacks on other kindred liberal or liberalizing states. Like the ideology literature in international relations, I argue that these kinds of strategic shifts are not objective, as realists expect. Instead, their impact on a polity is conditioned by state identity. 31 When these attacks produce civilian casualties and/or lead to the expansion of illiberal governments abroad, collective anxiety around existential danger to the national way of life rises exponentially. This sense of existential panic around high-severity events comes almost immediately after direct attacks (e.g., Pearl Harbor or September 11). 32 With indirect attacks on ideological kin, geographic distance from the target often means that it takes several accumulated attacks to generate the same collective sense of severity and, with that, collective trauma. 33

Whether their pathway is direct or indirect, high-severity attacks lead to stages two and three of trauma. Many of society's “wise figures” will engage in storytelling in stage two. External trauma privileges stories from agents who I call “promoters,” those who validate public fears of existential danger and the need to defend liberal order abroad. 34 If rival gains come via direct attack, promoter stories immediately prevail and the liberal narrative strengthens quickly. 35 If attacks are indirect, the slower growth of severity means that promoter stories gain acceptance more slowly, too. In stage three, repeated rival attacks/gains validate the promoter story, giving it collective strength. Finally, the frequency of events sustains narrative strength and salience over time. In a path-dependent way, the liberal narrative remains robust if an ideological rival regularly continues (i.e., at least every two or three years) to make gains, especially if it either directly or indirectly attacks other ideologically kindred (in this case, liberal or liberalizing) states. 36 In essence, frequent and severe challenges abroad perpetually re-traumatize the nation, giving a robust liberal narrative ongoing strength and vitality. 37

The dominant variant of the liberal narrative during the Cold War—the anti-communist narrative—offers a good example of the theory. In the 1940s, the U.S. public was traumatized by a cascade of Soviet ideological gains: communist advances in East-Central Europe, atomic bomb tests, an alliance with newly communist China, and support of the Korean War. This development shut out moderate voices, such as progressive Vice President Henry A. Wallace, and allowed promoters to establish a robust liberal narrative around stopping communism. For much of the forty years that followed, frequent demonstrations of communist-bloc strength (i.e., Sputnik, gains in Africa and Asia, the Cuban Revolution, and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) re-traumatized the United States, keeping the anti-communist narrative robust. 38

There are two potential pathways by which severity and frequency can weaken the liberal narrative. First, the narrative will weaken most profoundly and substantially when an ideological rival experiences a debilitating defeat or changes its ideology altogether. These kinds of positive events generate what Emile Durkheim calls “success anomie,” or a collective sense of lost purpose for the nation that makes the old narrative appear antiquated as a guide for policy. 39 Positive events profoundly weaken a temporal variant of the liberal narrative for years to follow—this becomes permanent if a rival fails to rebuild.

Second, narrative weakening could also occur when either trauma-generating strategic gains by an ideological rival cease for at least four years, or when a rival takes accommodating steps to reduce tension. This absence of negative events can also produce success anomie. When either scenario happens, the frequency and severity of traumatic events fall below the threshold necessary to sustain a robust liberal narrative. In these conditions, especially when marked by the positive event of a rival's debilitating defeat, a political opportunity space emerges for certain agents who I call “moderators” to engage in storytelling about reduced ideological danger and restraint abroad. U.S. presidents sometimes become moderators, but as Obama found out the hard way, their success as storytellers depends on the event-driven context. That is, they must tell the right story at the right time. 40 The liberal narrative weakens under these conditions of rival decline or absence of negative events; retrenchment settles in as the new lodestar for the polity. For example, the liberalization and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 initiated a major re-narration by moderators. As a result, the anti-communist narrative disappeared from discussions of U.S. foreign policy.

narrative discourses and war

Narratives shape policy outcomes—such as decisions to sustain or end wars—by raising audience costs. Standard accounts demonstrate that audience costs emerge when heads of state bind themselves by making a public commitment to action abroad. 41 Audience costs from strategic narratives form in a different way, however, notably through social construction. 42 At key decision points, agents (promoters or moderators) use strategic narratives to build discourses for or against war. These discourses generate different domestic political cost-benefit scenarios: high audience costs of action, or high audience costs of inaction. 43 While not required for these kinds of discourses to form, appeals by leaders with robust narratives as a justification for policy may help fuel these narrative-driven discourses and elevate audience costs. Leader pledges (i.e., the conventional audience-cost argument) can matter, then, but only if they are linked to prevailing narratives. Regardless of their contributions to the process, democratic leaders worry about future elections or their broader policy agendas (i.e., the potential political consequences of elevated audience costs) when facing robust, narrative-based discourses. Consequently, leaders usually bring policy in line with the narrative discourses that agents build around them.

For starters, I assume that at any major policy decision point, both promoters and moderators will be present to advocate their different positions. Liberal war continuation (and expansion) is most likely when a strong liberal narrative develops at key decision points in a conflict. Here, a robust liberal narrative (meaning, again, an elevated national passion to protect liberal order abroad) augments promoter arguments. This gives promoters a special hearing with the public and in policy debates generally. 44 Promoters know this and use the liberal narrative to create (or policymakers fear they will create) broad public movements, which raises audience costs of inaction. In wartime, military leaders are often also promoters, and strategic narratives tip the civil-military balance in their favor. Civilian leaders who do not support continuing or expanding military action fear losing future elections or policy goals, and thus some bring their policies in line with promoters' arguments. Others get “pushed to act” against their better judgment to continue or expand liberal wars.

Sometimes, these reluctant leaders ironically help create the strong liberal discourses that later push them along. In the 1960 presidential campaign, President John F. Kennedy intentionally took a tough position against Fidel Castro's communist regime in Cuba to enhance his anti-communist credentials with voters. This stance helped Kennedy win the White House, but it also boxed him in once in office. As promoters in Congress built a robust discourse around anti-communism for a tough policy in 1961, the political costs of looking weak on communism proved too high for Kennedy to pursue his preferred course of normalizing relations with Castro's regime. The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion followed. 45

Liberal wars end as liberal discourse weakens. Because of a national sense of lost purpose, moderator appeals (which often come from civilians in wartime) resonate more in policy debates as the liberal narrative weakens. Promoter arguments tend to appear odd, by contrast, maybe even extreme. Consequently, promoters often go quiet, especially in public. 46 In this scenario, leaders face lower audience costs of inaction, and they may in fact perceive higher audience costs of action given the absence of a national passion for war. In this latter scenario, leaders worry about the domestic political dangers of carrying on or expanding the war. As a result, a weak liberal discourse allows leaders who prefer ending a liberal war to do so, and it pushes those leaders who prefer to continue fighting to instead phase down or end military action. During the 1990s, moderators inside President Bill Clinton's administration repeatedly pointed to flagging public support for things like democracy building and humanitarian intervention (i.e., a weak liberal discourse). 47 This discourse constrained military options for Clinton, especially in the Balkans, throughout his administration. 48

I combine congruence and comparative case study methods to test the strategic-narrative argument in decisions for troop increases in Afghanistan by Obama (2009) and Trump (2017) against Biden's decision to withdraw (2021). 49 For space reasons and because Biden made the final decision, I devote less attention to Trump's 2020 pledge to withdraw. The cases are good for comparison, holding several background factors constant, such as war (Afghanistan) and period (post-9/11). The Obama-Biden cases are especially good for comparison because they share a common policy approach and party affiliation, but they lead to different outcomes. Outcome variation avoids sampling on the dependent variable.

Tautology is a pitfall for any ideational argument. To avoid this, I use a method of symbolic structuring of discourse to assess narrative strength and its component parts (i.e., severity and frequency) at time t-1, meaning independent of and prior to the decision-making process. 50 Narrative strength is measured in each case study using content analysis of newspaper editorials and the Congressional Record (see the online appendix), along with secondary sources and public opinion polls. Editorials reflect the collective national discussion across the country around specific events at specific points in time. Consequently, they are a well-established tool for measuring collective ideas, like narratives. Scholars find that patterns in the Congressional Record do the same—in a mutually constitutive way, authoritative actors both reflect and help reinforce prevailing narrative trends in any given period. 51

For the Afghan cases, I first scanned the historical record for geostrategic gains that were likely to reach the threshold of severity required to spark trauma and the initial narrative-making process. Most notably, examples include any attacks by an illiberal actor on the United States or other liberal states that caused civilian casualties or threatened to spread illiberalism. Second, and most importantly for the strategic-narrative argument in this article, I then scanned the historical record beyond the initial trauma for any similar follow-on severe attacks. If the strategic-narrative argument is correct, the above measures should demonstrate that a direct attack on the United States, or a series of indirect attacks on strategic partners (i.e., severity), open(s) space for promoters and generates a new liberal narrative centered on existential danger, blame, and a lesson to get active abroad against a specific foe. Likewise, these measures should also show that a follow-on attack (i.e., frequency) reinforces and sustains the narrative. Specifically, patterns of discourse in congressional and editorial commentary will typically show extensive references to existential danger and the need to get active, and they will link present severe events to those in the past, especially at the narrative founding. Secondary sources and polls will show the same pattern. 52

On the other hand, if severity and frequency are low in a given period—owing to the defeat of an ideological rival (i.e., positive event) or scarcity of direct/indirect attacks (i.e., absence of negative events) by a rival for at least two or three years—there should be less discussion in editorials and the Congressional Record about an ideological foe compared with periods marked by narrative robustness. Likewise, talk of existential danger, blame, and the lesson to protect liberal order abroad should be substantially less than in periods of a robust liberal narrative. Polls and scholarly or pundit assessments in secondary sources will validate this outcome.

Finally, using a singular type of congruence test, I explore narrative discourses and their impact (if any) on decisions to continue, expand, or end war. If the strategic-narrative argument is correct, assessments by pundits, memoirs, and the like should show how narrative-based discourses affected policy decisions in predicted ways. When the liberal discourse is robust, various actors (especially leaders) should talk about the domestic pressure to continue military action or the domestic costs of withdrawal. But when the discourse is weak, they should talk about domestic costs to maintain military action or political space to retrench from conflicts abroad. 53

The September 11 terrorist attacks dramatically reversed the weak liberal narrative environment of the early post–Cold War period. 54 “This week's frontal assault on America is a collective trauma unlike any other in any of our lifetimes,” observed the San Francisco Chronicle . 55 “A new narrative literally fell from the sky on September 11” and “became embedded in the popular imagination,” noted a pair of scholars. 56 Almost everyone became a promoter. As anticipated when external trauma arises from a direct attack, the story immediately saturated the public discourse—print media, television, members of Congress, and eventually in statements by President George W. Bush. The story included all standard parts of a national security narrative: detailing events existentially, assigning blame, and setting a way forward to repair (i.e., lesson). Members of Congress repeatedly framed events in existential terms, as an attack on “our laws, our cherished beliefs.” 57 “This is war,” declared House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO), just after the attack. 58 Newspapers across the country echoed the same themes, as did polls in late September: 58 percent of Americans wanted “a long-term war”; 73 percent supported ground troops to “combat international terrorism.” 59

In the years that followed, the frequency of severe attacks remained high and reinforced the liberal narrative. Targets included, to name a few, Kuwait (2002), Bali (2002, 2005), Mombasa (2002), Riyadh (2003), Casablanca (2003), Istanbul (2003), Madrid (2004), London (2005), Algiers (2007), and countless bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan starting in 2004. 60 These events (especially against liberal or liberalizing allies in Europe and Iraq) sparked fervent national discussions in the United States.

Most specifically, the salience of promoter narratives about existential danger, parallels to 9/11, and the lesson to fight terrorism increased dramatically. Bush framed the 2005 London terrorist attack as an assault on “human liberty.” 61 Of Madrid, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the bombing should “redouble everyone's efforts” to go after terrorists. 62 As anticipated by trauma theory, every congressional statement in the two weeks after the Madrid and London attacks described them in existential terms, which both reflected and revalidated the robust liberal narrative. “Americans were shocked and dismayed … when terror struck the capital of the United Kingdom, the cradle of Western liberty,” one said of London. 63 “The free nations of the world will … ensure that those who hate freedom and liberty will not succeed,” said another of Madrid. 64 Likewise, no one framed these as isolated, disconnected events, but instead linked them together as “reminders” and, with that, extensions of September 11 and the anti-terrorism narrative. Many talked of how Americans did and should look “through the prism” of September 11 to make sense of Bali, Madrid, London, Istanbul, and the like. “No American will ever forget the infamous day of 9/11,” a member of Congress said of Madrid. 65 Finally, promoters stressed that these events supported the lesson to press on in the fight against terrorism. It was like a drumbeat from political leaders: “stand firm against terrorism”; “renew our determination to eradicate terrorism”; “dismantle the al Qaeda network”; “remain defiant in the face of terrorism.” 66

Like the days after 9/11, promoter appeals resonated and echoed nationally, pointing to the continued strength and vitality of the anti-terrorism narrative into the late 2000s. This was evident in two ways. First, it showed up in newspapers across the country, from big cities to small towns. Content analysis of seventy-two editorials in the ten days after the Madrid bombings found that 54 percent of the papers described the attacks in existential terms related to democracy, liberty, freedom, or civilization; 64 percent drew parallels between the bombing and other recent terrorist attacks, especially 9/11; and 70 percent referenced the central lesson of the narrative to actively stamp out terrorism abroad. The same was the case with editorials following the London bombings: 63 percent were existential; 71 percent were connected to 9/11 or other terrorist attacks; and 73 percent referenced the lesson to remain or become more active abroad to fight terrorism. 67

Take a Wall Street Journal editorial, for instance, about Madrid. “So much for the illusion that the global war on terror isn't really a war,” noted the editors, “That complacent notion which has been infiltrating its way into the American public mind, blew up along with 10 bombs on trains carrying Spanish commuters yesterday.” The editors then listed eleven other attacks—including September 11—to draw attention to the existential danger that “terrorism remains the single largest threat to Western freedom and security.” 68 Headlines around the Madrid, London, and Bali bombings were similar: “This Week, ‘Madrid Became Manhattan’”; “Ground Zero, Madrid”; “Terror in London: A Reminder to the World that War of 9/11 Is Not Over.” 69 A total of 56 percent of Americans agreed that the London attacks showed that “it is necessary to fight the war against the terrorists in Iraq and everywhere else.” 70

A second indicator of narrative strength was the extent to which both Democrats and Republicans used the narrative as a political battering ram by the late 2000s. The Bush White House had long painted political opponents as weak on terrorism to win votes. 71 By 2006, with al-Qaeda gaining new ground in Iraq (where the United States was deeply invested in trying to build a liberal democratic government), Republicans doubled down on this message, saying that Democratic proposals for withdrawal from Iraq would aid terrorists. “If we were to follow the proposals of Democratic leaders,” said one Republican (GOP) House member in a 2007 debate on a resolution opposing the Iraq troop surge, “anarchy in Iraq would give al Qaeda and other extremists a haven to train and plot attacks.” 72 Thirty-nine other Republicans (73 percent of GOP speakers) echoed the same that day. Many senior Democrats also used the anti-terrorism narrative as a counterpunch. “Fighting terrorism, fighting extremism … is weakened by our being in Iraq,” said Representative Barney Frank (D-MA); “it has emboldened radicals everywhere.” 73 Others noted similarly how Bush “distracted us from the real war on terror” and “weakened our fight against al Qaeda.” 74

Afghanistan played a big part in these Democratic counterpunches around terrorism, especially after a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate showed that the Taliban/al-Qaeda had made significant gains there. Democratic calls to “refocus” the war on terrorism invariably meant moving attention to Afghanistan. 75 Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama (D-IL) led the way. 76 “We must get off the wrong battlefield,” Obama charged in an August 2007 speech, before committing to send two additional divisions to Afghanistan. 77 The speech was intentional, meant to counter charges from Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) in a July presidential primary debate that Obama was weak on foreign policy. Cognizant of how Bush successfully painted rival presidential candidate John Kerry as “weak” on terrorism in 2004, political strategist David Axelrod hatched the idea of the August speech. 78 “Outflanking Bush-Cheney with a serious, aggressive, intelligent campaign against Islamist terror?” said a pair of observers, “It's what the country wants. And it seems to be what Obama is offering.” 79

Overall, Obama's August 2007 move reflected the strength of the liberal narrative around terrorism in the late 2000s. It also fueled a narrative-based discourse that constrained Obama throughout his presidency.

obama's first troop surge

When President Obama took office in 2009, a request for additional troops for Afghanistan was on his desk. 80 Obama initially hesitated. “I have campaigned on providing Afghanistan more troops,” he said in a January 23 National Security Council (NSC) meeting, “but I haven't made the decision yet.” Supported by Vice President Joe Biden and other civilian moderators in the White House, Obama expressed doubts about escalation, blocked a move by military leaders to add troops without his approval, and commissioned former NSC staffer Bruce Riedel to conduct a review of Afghan policy, after which Obama would decide on troops. 81

Moderators failed, however. Animated by the cascade of narrative-validating terror attacks, a surging liberal discourse prevented Obama from maintaining this wait and see approach, pushing him to approve 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan in mid-February 2009, well before the completed review. Combined with the president's campaign pledges, public support for the troop request by promoters—like Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—ignited an expansive national discussion for more action. In editorials, 70 percent supported more troops, 85 percent discussed combating terrorism (i.e., the narrative's lesson), and 40 percent mentioned Obama's campaign pledges. 82 The Washington Post criticized Obama for waffling on his campaign promises: “The war on terrorism did not end on January 20 [Obama's Inauguration Day].” 83 Polls showed that 70 percent of respondents expected Afghanistan to fall under “the control of terrorists” if the United States left; 63 percent favored more troops. 84 Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes bemoaned the “political drama” and the fact that “the media started calling Afghanistan ‘Obama's War.’” 85 The White House saw costs of inaction rising.

Promoters inside the administration elevated these costs too. In the January 23 NSC meeting, General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, said that failure was coming in Afghanistan and that al-Qaeda would gain ground: “we cannot achieve our objective without more troops.” Mullen echoed the same. 86 Obama knew the political risks. Just ten days prior, Senator Graham had warned Obama that Republicans would use failure in Afghanistan in the 2010 midterms. During a February 13 meeting, advisers gave Obama two options: wait on Riedel's report or add 17,000 troops. Promoters (including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) harped on narrative themes: a “bloodbath” for al-Qaeda without more troops. 87 The domestic fallout of that happening was simply too high. “For practical and political purposes there really was no choice [italics added],” observed Bob Woodward. 88 Four days later, Obama publicly justified more troops as being vital to counterterrorism; 63 percent of the electorate approved. 89 Like Woodward, the New York Times concluded that Obama “had no choice” given what he said “during the campaign.” In short, Obama's opportunistic use of the anti-terrorism narrative during the 2008 presidential campaign fueled a robust liberal discourse and high audience costs of inaction that forced his hand in February 2009. 90

obama and the second troop surge

In June 2009, National Security Advisor James Logan Jones Jr. told General Stanley McChrystal, the head of military operations in Afghanistan, that the president wanted to “reduce U.S. involvement” and shift to an aid-based strategy. 91 Eight weeks later, McChrystal requested an additional 40,000 troops as part of a report assessing the situation in Afghanistan. When Secretary of Defense Robert Gates informed the president, “the room exploded” in opposition. 92 Moderators in the White House warned Obama that he had pledged to end the Middle East wars. 93 “I shared Joe's [Biden] skepticism,” Obama said as he pushed back against more troops. There “are no good options,” he noted in a September 12 NSC meeting. 94

In the end, moderators lost again. As in February, the president capitulated to the anti-terrorism narrative pressure. In early September 2009, promoters generated a robust liberal discourse for more troops, arguing that failure risked another September 11. Frustrated by Obama's hesitancy, military leaders—namely, Petraeus, Mullen, and McChrystal—played a critical role by going public to use the robust anti-terrorism narrative to their advantage (which augmented their position in policy debates, as the strategic-narrative argument expects). The move was calculated. In a late August meeting on handling White House resistance to more troops, Senator Graham (while on air force reserve duty in Afghanistan) told Petraeus and McChrystal that their messaging focused too much on the Taliban. “America is worried all about al Qaeda attacking,” he counseled, “Americans understand that the Taliban are bad guys, but what drives the American psyche more than anything else is, are we about to let the country that attacked us once attack us twice?” 95 In short, Graham counseled the generals to use the anti-terrorism narrative to their political advantage.

The generals complied, now focusing their message on al-Qaeda, new attacks, and the potential for “failure” without more troops. 96 Petraeus warned publicly that the Afghan government would collapse without a fully resourced counterinsurgency. 97 On September 15 (just three days after Obama's “no good options” comment), Mullen told Congress that success in Afghanistan required more troops. A few days later, the Washington Post reported on a leaked copy of the McChrystal report in a front-page article titled “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.’” The sixty-six-page report mentioned “failure” or “defeat” fourteen times. 98 Finally, McChrystal said publicly that he rarely spoke directly with Obama and that another September 11 would come without additional resolve. 99 Obama looked weak and out of touch.

As expected, these moves fueled a powerful liberal discourse across the country for more troops in Afghanistan. From mid-September to mid-October, 71 percent of statements on Capitol Hill about Afghanistan mentioned comments by the generals, and 88 percent of supporters of more force warned of another September 11: “Afghanistan is where the attacks of 9/11 originated” and “the sacrifices we make overseas now will prevent another 9/11-style attack here at home.” 100 Promoters in Congress attacked Obama's hesitancy to uphold his March pledge to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda” following Riedel's review. 101 “Soft-peddling … in Afghanistan,” said one; Obama's “latest verbal wavering aided terrorists,” said another. 102

Editorials showed similar trends. In the two months prior to Obama's decision to send troops, 72 percent mentioned the generals, while nearly 80 percent commented on a liberal narrative of either avoiding another September 11 or fighting against terrorism in Afghanistan. “Afghanistan served as al-Qaeda's base,” noted one paper. 103 Fifty-eight percent endorsed more troops. 104 Many critiqued Obama for hesitating and accused him of “second thoughts,” “full retreat,” “Afghan rethink,” “blinking,” “appeasement,” and labeled him a “coward.” 105 Opinion polls reflected these narrative trends. In September and October 2009, 58 percent of editorials considered fighting in Afghanistan to be “necessary to protect Americans from having to fight terrorists on U.S. soil,” and 62 percent trusted the generals more than Obama. Obama's approval on Afghanistan fell to 36 percent, down from 63 percent in April. 106

For Obama, the liberal discourse elevated the costs of inaction, which drove his decision to increase troops. First, this discourse reinforced what he already knew: Politically, he could not afford to “lose” Afghanistan and risk another September 11. Promoters inside the government hammered this theme. “We were surprised once on 9/11,” Riedel told Obama, following his review (which endorsed more troops). “It's going to be pretty hard to explain what happened to the American people if we're surprised again,” he added. 107 Following a May briefing on al-Qaeda, Obama noted that even minor attacks would have “an extraordinarily traumatizing effect on the homeland.” 108

Costs of inaction were also evident in a September 12 NSC meeting, which was the first such meeting about McChrystal's report. The political implications of McChrystal's “failure” warning shaped the debate. Despite his hesitancy, Obama admitted that he could not “reject McChrystal's plan out of hand” because the “status quo was untenable” and that more time was needed to “root out al-Qaeda and its leadership.” 109 When Biden warned that Obama would politically own the war, the president snapped, “I already own it.” Thinking of his reelection timetable, Obama then asked if progress was possible within three years. 110 An aide noted that the broader narrative discourse—especially charges of waffling on terrorism—amplified political concerns like Riedel's warning that Obama alone would “take the blame for any bad outcomes.” 111 “Why is the whole thing framed around whether I have any balls?” Obama asked aides. 112 The robust liberal discourse was on his mind.

The discourse-generated costs of inaction also drastically narrowed Obama's options. Obama was keenly aware of the importance of the public discourse, saying that he wanted the decision to be made behind closed doors, away from “congressional politics and media grousing,” so that he could consider all options. He then became enraged at military leaders' public comments. Why? Because the warnings of failure and another September 11 reinforced the anti-terrorism narrative—what Obama referred to as the national “impulse after 9/11 to do whatever it took to stop terrorists”—in ways that “boxed him in.” 113 He talked about this repeatedly at the time and later admitted to feeling “jammed.” Obama told aides in early October, “They're about to ask for a game-changing number and they're going to the public and leaking it to trap us.” 114 Obama was stuck. Fearful of narrative-based pushback, he could not demote or fire the generals. In fact, just the opposite. Concerned about the political costs of doing otherwise, Obama included Petraeus in all NSC meetings on Afghanistan from late September onward. 115

Moderators knew that the liberal discourse reduced their traction. “It's going to be the lead story on the evening news … [and] double black headlines above the fold on every single newspaper,” said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel about Mullen's September 15 congressional testimony. Emanuel also complained constantly to Gates about Obama feeling boxed in. Gates agreed, calling McChrystal's leaked report “a political bombshell” that narrowed Obama's options. 116 In the end, efforts by the White House to counter the liberal discourse failed. Rhodes confessed that amid the wave of “public pressure” generated by the military promoters, “it felt as though I had little ability to control anything other than the inevitable speech that Obama would give” on increasing U.S. troops in Afghanistan. 117

In October, Obama agreed to add troops. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Leon Panetta set the course of a debate on October 9. A seasoned politician, Panetta noted the “political reality” created by the robust liberal narrative: “We can't leave, and we can't accept the status quo.” 118 He proposed increasing troops narrowly targeted at al-Qaeda, not nation-building. Gates agreed, saying that “the public and the politicians could easily understand” that mission, meaning that it fit well with the robust anti-terrorism narrative. 119 Obama capitulated. 120 His second decision to expand the U.S. war in Afghanistan was set. 121

The 2011 killing of al-Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, was viewed across the United States as a major victory in the fight against terrorism (i.e., a positive event in the trauma framework). Combined with the quelling of terrorist activity in Iraq from the so-called Sunni Awakening (i.e., decreased negative events), the frequency and severity of trauma-generating events declined into the early 2010s. As expected by the strategic-narrative argument, the anti-terrorism narrative weakened, especially around Iraq. Counter to the interests of military leaders, President Obama found political space at home to summarily withdraw all forces from Iraq (a decision that 71 percent of Americans agreed with) and worked to re-narrate the terror challenge as nonexistential, something to which Americans had overreacted. 122

This initiative to change the narrative was largely ineffective, though, especially from mid-2014 onward when the swift rise of the Islamic State re-traumatized the United States. Mirroring the first decade of the 2000s, the liberal narrative again surged. The trauma began in June when ISIS forces seized Mosul (Iraq's second largest city) and Tikrit, declared a caliphate across Syria and Iraq, and later beheaded two U.S. journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff. Obama acknowledged the need to respond but also worked to calm the nation. 123

Consequently, other leading figures (mostly Republicans) began to refer back to the prevailing anti-terrorism story that proved the right fit for the event-driven context of external trauma. “The next 9/11 is in the making as I speak,” said Senator Graham in June. 124 More than half of congressional floor statements described ISIS in existential terms. 125 Many Democrats joined the chorus. “ISIS violates everything we believe in,” noted Representative James Moran (D-VA), “They are opposed to democratic governance and, certainly, to an inclusive society.” 126 Promoters in Congress nested the 2014 events within the larger story. More than half referenced September 11 and other attacks such as those in London and Madrid. The narrative's lesson was strong too; 76 percent of congressional speakers discussed the need to confront/destroy ISIS. “We need to do everything we can together to ensure that ISIS will be stopped,” said Senator Chris Coons (D-DE). 127 Blame was also evident. More than half of all congressional statements (and approximately 80 percent of GOP statements) criticized both the Iraq troop withdrawal as well as Obama calling ISIS the “jayvee [junior varsity] team” of terrorism and admitting that he had no strategy to counter ISIS. “President Obama is going back to a pre-9/11 mentality,” one member said. 128 Some implored Obama to not repeat the mistake of withdrawing forces from Iraq with a withdrawal from Afghanistan. 129

As expected, the story also showed up in other indicators. Editorials around the events from June to September reflected a robust anti-terrorism narrative. 130 For instance, 85 percent of editorials across approximately fifty newspapers rejected Obama's cautious language, framing the threat in existential terms (e.g., “Islamic extremism,” “nihilistic ideology”). The events “horrified the civilized world,” said one, calling ISIS “beyond anything that we've seen.” 131 More than 50 percent of editorials drew parallels to terrorist attacks since September 11. Another 84 percent echoed the lesson to get active, nearly half of which discussed or endorsed criticisms of Obama's policies. Polls also reflected this trend. Over 50 percent of respondents disapproved of Obama's handling of terrorism and considered the 2011 Iraq drawdown to be a mistake. 132

In the two years that followed the ISIS rise, the frequency of ISIS-inspired attacks—Sydney, Paris, Tripoli, Tunis, Yemen, Damascus, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Bangladesh, Brussels, Kabul, and Cairo—reinforced the anti-terrorism narrative. 133 Take, for example, the November 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 people. “Everyone back home had lost their minds,” said Obama, who was abroad at the time. 134 Among the promoters in Congress, nearly 90 percent framed the Paris attacks in existential terms and advocated continued or expanded vigor to combat terrorism. Ninety editorials from sixty different U.S. newspapers found that 88 percent framed Paris in existential terms (“the urgency of defeating this nihilism,” “attack … on freedom”). 135 Fifty percent linked Paris to 9/11 or other similar events, and 83 percent called for continued vigilance (i.e., the narrative's lesson). 136

Finally, candidates for the White House in 2016 appealed to the narrative to woo voters. Trump promised more toughness: “Anyone who cannot condemn the … violence of Radical Islam lacks the moral clarity to serve as our president.” Trump blamed Obama for ISIS, pledging a quick victory if elected and a commitment to never give up “hard-fought sacrifices and gains” in places like Iraq with “a sudden withdrawal.” 137 He repeatedly linked his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, to Obama's policies. Clinton countered with her own narrative-based appeals, promising to use more force than Obama. 138 Overall, the jabbing back and forth testified again to narrative robustness. Much as the strategic narrative constrained Obama's options, it also affected Trump's policy on Afghanistan.

trump and the 2017 troop increase

As expected by the strategic-narrative argument, the mid-2010s surge in the anti-terrorism narrative shaped Obama's fall 2014 decision to recommit troops to Iraq and, fearing being blamed for “losing” Afghanistan, led him to abandon his plan for a full withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of 2016. A poll found that 61 percent of respondents supported the move to pause the drawdown. 139 These same narrative-based constraints affected Trump early in his presidency.

From the start, Trump wanted out of Afghanistan. He called the war “a total disaster,” advocated withdrawal (on at least fifteen occasions during the campaign), and he exploded when the Pentagon requested more troops in 2017. 140 In the end, however, Trump did the exact opposite of what he wanted. On August 18, he agreed to send 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Why? The politics of strategic narratives help answer this question.

Throughout 2017, promoters built a robust liberal discourse around Afghanistan. Republicans in Congress, in particular, talked about the dangers of terrorism from Afghanistan and encouraged a tougher stance than Obama's. Many praised Trump for reversing “the unwise and unsound policies by the Obama administration” with early 2017 moves that included use of high-yield bombs against ISIS in Afghanistan and air strikes to punish Syria for using chemical weapons, the latter in contrast to Obama's response in Syria. 141 The liberal discourse also showed up in a Senate debate over ending the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution passed by Congress in 2001. Critics of the measure relied on the terrorism theme: “Terrorist organizations continue to … promote a radical ideology to recruit new fighters and plot violent attacks as part of their jihad against the United States of America and all that we stand for,” said Senator John McCain (R-AZ). Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) echoed the same sentiment: “Sixteen years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, our enemies are not gone.” 142 The measure failed by a 61–36 margin. Overall, nearly 60 percent of congressional statements on Afghanistan in this period focused on the lesson to fight terrorism. 143

Other measures reveal the same strategic-narrative discourse. In summer 2017, 85 percent of newspapers supported more troops for anti-terrorism reasons. 144 More than half opposed a drawdown from Afghanistan or drew parallels to Obama's mistakes in Iraq. “He's right to broaden the U.S. role in Afghanistan,” noted a Chicago Tribune editorial, “Obama's troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 left that country in a state of chaos, and the Islamic State rose from the ashes of al-Qaida in Iraq.” 145 Polls in 2017 also captured the robust anti-terrorism discourse. While the war in Afghanistan was not generally popular, 76 percent of respondents agreed that “security here in the United States” depended upon Afghanistan, and 71 percent agreed that ISIS would strengthen if the United States were to withdraw. Consistent with the strategic-narrative argument, the public saw the war's value when it was tied to terrorism. 146

Internally, promoters pressed narrative themes, elevating costs of inaction. Though not public per se, this messaging from current and former military leaders mirrored that of the Obama period. As Afghanistan deteriorated in the spring, National Security Advisor Herbert Raymond “H.R.” McMaster and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Max Dunford repeatedly warned of another September 11. Promoters claimed that Obama's retreat was losing Afghanistan. They hammered themes such as the lost capacity to track al-Qaeda, a growing ISIS threat, and potential risks to the “civilized world” with another September 11. By early summer, McMaster proposed an additional 3,000–5,000 troops to carry out a new “counterterrorism-centric plan.” 147

As these events unfolded, promoters reminded Trump repeatedly of his narrative-based language on the campaign trail, intentionally playing on Trump's political concern to look tough. “We're losing big in Afghanistan,” Trump said, reflecting worries of looking weak, “It's a disaster.” Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis took advantage of this opportunity to challenge Trump's desire for withdrawal. “The quickest way out is to lose,” Mattis said, before pressing the need for increased troops. “I'm tired of hearing that,” Trump responded. 148

Not surprisingly, given his ties to the military, Senator Graham was aware of the debate inside the administration. He met with Trump in May and used the robust anti-terrorism narrative to reiterate costs of inaction. “Do you want on your resume that you allowed Afghanistan to go back into darkness and the second 9/11 came from the very place the first 9/11 did?” Graham said, “Listen to your generals. General Obama was terrible … General Trump is going to be no better.” 149 Graham knew that the pressure around terrorism and Obama could be effective. That spring, Trump took several steps to enhance his public image, such as striking al-Qaeda in Yemen, expanding action to “annihilate” (rather than just “contain,” in the words of Obama) ISIS, and launching “red line” strikes against Syrian chemical weapons that Obama refused to take. 150 “Obama, he's … weak,” Trump told Graham after the Syrian strike, “He would've never done that.” 151

The final decision to escalate came at a meeting with advisers on August 18, 2017, at Camp David. Costs of inaction for not falling in line with the anti-terrorism narrative played a determining role. Attorney General Jeff Sessions opened the meeting with an appeal for restraint. He proposed complete withdrawal. In a plan hatched by Sessions and former adviser Steve Bannon (a leading moderator), CIA Director Mike Pompeo detailed a strategy for increased covert operations in lieu of troops. In a move that frustrated his moderator cohorts, Pompeo ultimately and unexpectedly quashed the plan. Prior to the meeting, CIA officials told Pompeo that the covert-operations-only approach would likely fail and, more ominously, that he [Pompeo] would be held accountable. 152

Once Pompeo relented, promoters (e.g., McMaster, Dunford, and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly) began to discuss how to prevent al-Qaeda from reaching the homeland. “I'm tired of hearing that,” Trump responded, “I want to get out.” Mattis argued that to leave would result in a “vacuum for al Qaeda to create a terrorist sanctuary leading to 9/11.” Mattis then highlighted audience costs of inaction: “What happened in Iraq under Obama with the emergence of ISIS will happen under you.” In the days prior to Camp David, Graham issued a similar warning. “It becomes Iraq on steroids … The next 9/11 will come from where the first was and you own it,” Graham said, “The question is are you going to go down the Obama road, which is to end the war and put us all at risk … ?” 153 The domestic costs of looking weak on terrorism were apparent to Bannon, who told reporter Bob Woodward that the generals briefed Trump repeatedly on the dangers of another 9/11, so that “if the threat materialized, they would leak to the Washington Post and New York Times that Trump had ignored the warnings.” 154 The political implications of that would be devastating for Trump, given elevated national concerns about terrorism and his campaign promises to be “tough.” The potential of a narrative-based public backlash hung over the entire debate.

Costs of inaction ultimately proved too much for Trump. “You're telling me I have to do this, and I guess that's fine,” Trump responded to Mattis on August 18, “but I still think you're wrong.” 155 Afterward, Trump called Graham to inform him of his decision—an indication of the domestic political dynamics that mattered most to Trump. 156 Three nights later, Trump leaned on narrative themes to explain the troop increase publicly. Admitting “his original instinct was to pull out,” Trump noted, his mind changed because “a hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists … would fill, just as happened before September 11.” Trump then quickly pivoted to Obama: “And as we know, in 2011, America hastily and mistakenly withdrew from Iraq … We cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq.” 157 The speech resonated broadly: Fifty-one percent of Americans supported increased troops in Afghanistan, and 71 percent agreed that ISIS would gain if the United States withdrew. 158

An ideological rival's debilitating defeat and/or the absence of rival attacks on ideological kin for an extended period are the most likely events to cause a liberal narrative to weaken. In the late 2010s, both happened. As expected, the anti-terrorism narrative lost salience nationally, audience costs of inaction decreased, and political space opened for U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The centerpiece to narrative weakening in the late 2010s was the defeat of the ISIS caliphate in Iraq/Syria along with the continued weakening of al-Qaeda. By late 2018, the ISIS caliphate collapsed (i.e., positive event)—Raqqa and Rawa fell in 2017, ending ISIS territorial control in Iraq, and Hajin (the last ISIS-held town in Syria) fell in 2018. As of 2022, ISIS is a shell of its former self. Al-Qaeda is too, having suffered major setbacks after U.S.-led counterterrorism operations decimated its leadership. 159 The ISIS/al-Qaeda decline has also resulted in a major reduction in terrorist attacks. No ISIS-generated mass casualty events have occurred after 2016. Globally, terrorist attacks in 2019 were 59 percent lower than at their peak in 2014, and terrorism deaths fell in 2019 for the fifth consecutive year. 160

Neither terrorist organization is entirely gone, of course. Terrorist cells have migrated to other places, primarily in Yemen and parts of Africa. The focus of these groups is increasingly more regional than international, however, meaning that the United States and its Western democratic allies, in particular, have become much less of a target. 161 The theory would predict that a robust liberal narrative should have been sustained throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, which the pattern in figure 1 shows was the case (see also the online appendix). In the 2000s, frequent/severe attacks capable of sustaining a robust liberal narrative were a function of how often (at least one attack every two or three years) instead of how many attacks occurred against liberal states. Moreover, an especially traumatic direct attack like September 11 extended the narrative-supporting effects in the years that followed. 162 Regarding the 2018–2021 period, the frequency of ISIS/al-Qaeda attacks against “free” states or the citizens of free states abroad substantially declined relative to the mid-2010s. While these attacks did not completely stop (i.e., Austria 2020, with four casualties), the trend toward reduced negative events, coupled with the even more impactful positive event of the ISIS defeat, marks a distinct shift below the threshold of severe/frequent events necessary to sustain a robust liberal narrative across time. In fact, the event-context of recent years resembles the early 2010s when Obama withdrew troops from Iraq and began withdrawal from Afghanistan. This period was marked by a major positive event—the killing of Osama bin Laden (2011)—and a reduction in negative events with the absence of any attacks on Western democracies from 2008 to 2014. 163

Isis and al-Qaeda Attacks on Free Countries, 2001–2021

SOURCE: Global Terrorism Index 2022: Measuring the Impact of Terrorism (Sydney: Institute for Economics and Peace, March 2022), Vision of Humanity, https://www.visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/GTI-2022-web_110522-1.pdf ; and Cameron Glenn et al., “Timeline: The Rise.”

The decrease in severe/frequent events from the late 2010s onward affected the narrative landscape in predicted ways. As expected, it augmented moderator stories of restraint, which appeared in leading narrative indicators. From his bully pulpit as president, Trump was a leading moderator. The fall of Raqqa “represents a critical breakthrough in our worldwide campaign to defeat ISIS and its wicked ideology,” he said in 2018, “the end of the ISIS caliphate is in sight.” 164 He called for retrenchment and said it was “time to come home and rebuild.” 165 Trump repeated these themes through 2020. Democratic presidential candidates did too. In fact, during the 2020 campaign, no candidates aspired to look tough on terrorism, especially in ongoing Middle East wars. 166 Instead, both as a reflection of and a contributing factor to the weakened liberal narrative, candidates competed mostly over credit for reduced terrorist threats and the best strategy to bring troops home. “Trump's secret plan to defeat ISIS—you remember that—secret plan to defeat ISIS was just to keep doing what we [Obama-Biden administration] had put in place,” Biden claimed during an Iowa campaign stop. 167 Like others, he also repeatedly associated reduced threats and winding down U.S. wars in the Middle East. The need is to “end forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, which have cost us untold blood and treasure,” Biden said. 168

At the time of these statements, many experts debated whether terrorism remained a major threat to the United States. Those who warned about the threat of terrorism carried little weight, though, which the strategic-narrative argument would expect. In times of reduced severity/frequency, promoters lose salience and moderators gain salience.

Not surprisingly, then, broad narrative measures indicate that moderator storytelling both fueled and reflected a general decrease in the anti-terrorism narrative starting in 2018. Core elements of the anti-terrorism narrative were almost completely absent among the discussions on Capitol Hill about the following major terrorism/Afghanistan events: the ISIS defeat (March 2019), the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (October 2019), the Afghan peace deal (February 2020), and Trump's October 2020 Afghanistan withdrawal pledge. 169 Collectively, in the weeks following these events, less than 5 percent of congressional statements mentioned existential dangers of terrorism, and only 15 percent connected current developments to those like September 11, at the heart of the anti-terrorism narrative. Only 35 percent openly advocated continued aggression abroad and/or continued troop deployments to protect against renewed terrorist strikes.

By contrast, moderator discourse abounded, as nearly 60 percent of congressional statements hailed the gains against terrorists. Many talked of the benefits to democracy and civilization, whereas others advocated full withdrawal from the Middle East. Finally, to the extent that the anti-terrorism story of old was being told at all, it was not being told that often. Collectively, there were only sixty-six congressional statements in the weeks and months following these events from 2019 to 2020 compared with eighty U.S. congressional statements (with strong storytelling on all narrative elements) in just five days after the 2015 ISIS attacks in Paris. 170

The effects of decreased severity/frequency on the anti-terrorism narrative showed up on editorial pages too. In each of the three years prior to Biden's April decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, references to “terrorism” on U.S. editorial pages declined by 21 percent (2018–2019), 40 percent (2019–2020), and 66 percent (2020–2021) relative to the annual average number of references over the nine-year period between April 2009 and April 2018, when the anti-terrorism narrative was especially robust. Editorial-page references to “Afghanistan” showed a similar pattern in 2020–2021, with a 60 percent decrease from the annual average between 2008 and 2018. Finally, combining these two terms, references in U.S. editorials to “Afghanistan and terrorism” decreased by 44 percent (2018–2019), 47 percent (2019–2020), and 86 percent (2020–2021) relative to the annual average across the 2008 to 2018 period. 171 This trend is significant: By April 2021, the nationwide discussion found on editorial pages about terrorism and Afghanistan had fallen to its lowest level since 2000, the year before the September 11 terrorist attacks.

More focused editorial surveys also confirm this narrative weakening. After the collapse of the ISIS caliphate and the death of al-Baghdadi, there were only sixteen editorials from ten U.S. newspapers in the month following each event. Compare that with the number of editorials in just ten days after the 2015 Paris (90) and 2008 London (100) terrorist attacks. 172 Moreover, the old anti-terrorism story of existential danger was replaced by the moderator theme of major victory or gains against terrorism (63 percent). The Chicago Tribune called the defeat of ISIS “a milestone in the long, arduous fight against post-9/11 extremism.” 173 Papers referred to al-Baghdadi's death as a “force disrupter,” “important victory for America's antiterror strategy,” and a “victory for civilization.” 174 While many (75 percent) supported continuing the fight against terrorism, a collection of editorials that spanned a greater time period showed that talk of the lesson of the anti-terrorism narrative was weak as well. In the sixteen months prior to Biden's troop-withdrawal announcement, only 32 percent of approximately 130 U.S. editorials about al-Qaeda or ISIS echoed the anti-terrorism narrative's lesson, to keep up fighting against terrorists. Furthermore, fewer than 1 percent in this broader array of editorials talked of terrorism as a present existential danger (i.e., a challenge to freedom, democracy, or civilization) and only 11 percent (all from the Wall Street Journal ) linked current events in a foreboding way to past events at the center of the anti-terrorism story. 175 Polls show the same trends. While Americans still worry about terrorism, a 2019 survey found that, relative to other challenges, only 1 percent considered terrorism or ISIS to be the greatest future threat to the United States. 176

Finally, these same patterns of liberal narrative weakness were evident around the question of Afghanistan specifically. Only ten editorials appeared in U.S. newspapers in the two months after the 2020 announcement of a peace deal and only fourteen in the three months after Trump's 2020 announced withdrawal. 177 With ISIS defeated and the frequency of attacks declining (see figure 1 ), the story came rarely to the fore. In 2009 and 2017, talk of a military drawdown in Afghanistan would have sparked a mighty narrative-based outburst: worries about another 9/11, dangers to Western democracy, and the like. But this did not occur in 2020. After Trump's 2020 announcement of withdrawal, no editorials framed events in existential terms, and only one of the twenty-four editorials connected the present development to past narrative-based events.

Instead, moderator themes dominated. While many noted the challenges to a peaceful settlement, eighteen of twenty-four editorials welcomed the Taliban peace deal, and more than a third unequivocally supported near-term or immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan. “The Trump administration was right to open negotiations with the Taliban and … reduce the number of U.S. forces,” noted the Los Angeles Times . 178 Another called the deal “a ticket out of Afghanistan for American troops who've been there far too long,” adding that “recognizing when a fight has become useless is the right thing to do.” 179 Many criticized Trump's approach, especially his push for a hasty 2020 withdrawal (nine of fourteen editorials opposed this approach, in fact). Reflecting the narrative moment, though, the reasons given included the need for a careful policy review first, potential damage to the peace process, or the need to leave the decision to Biden rather than to fight terrorism (i.e., the liberal narrative).

Polls also showed the narrative trends around Afghanistan policy. Figure 2 tracks the annual average of public opinion support for maintaining or increasing U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2021 (see the online appendix). Changes over time reflect what the strategic-narrative argument would expect. For the 2018–2021 period, as severity/frequency of events decreased because of ISIS/al-Qaeda's decline and reduced attacks on free countries, public support for troop presence in Afghanistan dropped substantially as well. Support fell below 50 percent in 2019—the year after the ISIS defeat and the second year of reduced attacks ( figure 1 )—then plunged to around 30 percent in 2020 and 2021. “Americans are in a sour mood,” the Wall Street Journal observed in 2020, “The desire to come home is understandable.” 180 In sum, at the same time that events weakened the anti-terrorism narrative, national support for the war in Afghanistan fell as well, in line with the strategic-narrative argument.

Public Opinion Support to Maintain or Increase Troops in Afghanistan

SOURCE: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, iPoll Database (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University), https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/ . See the online appendix for a list of specific polls.

Earlier trends in figure 2 also support the strategic-narrative argument. As discussed previously, amid a robust liberal narrative sustained by severe/frequent attacks, public support for troops in Afghanistan was close to 60 percent in 2009. Support remained around 50 percent through April 2011 (see 2011a in figure 2 ), before dropping sharply, as expected, following the May death of bin Laden (i.e., positive event) and reduced frequency of attacks into the early 2010s. After bin Laden's death, 55 percent said they were “not worried” that troop withdrawals from Afghanistan would make the United States “more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.” 181 Unsurprisingly for this narrative context, Obama announced a timetable in 2012 for a complete withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016. 182 As expected, opinion shifted again with the mid-2014 resurgence of the anti-terrorism narrative amid the severe/frequent attacks by ISIS. Change actually came mid-year, tracking closely (as expected) with the surge in the anti-terrorism narrative following ISIS gains in Iraq/Syria—support for troops in Afghanistan jumped from 29 percent in early 2014 to 53 percent by December. Poll numbers remained around 50 percent until 2019.

In general, the evidence presented here offers strong support for the strategic-narrative argument. Overall, by early 2021, the anti-terrorism narrative, with its worries of another September 11 stemming from Afghanistan, was largely gone, a casualty of de-traumatizing events. In its place was “public apathy,” according to commentators, meaning that regarding Afghanistan, “many Americans … lost track of what this war … is, or was, about.” 183

biden's 2021 withdrawal

President Biden's decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan is not explained by a realpolitik calculation of the national interest. Biden's two immediate predecessors believed that the national interest dictated withdrawal. What allowed Biden to follow through in ways that Obama and Trump could not? The objective national interest argument cannot answer this puzzle. Narrative politics can, however.

When a liberal narrative weakens, the discourses that form around it tend to be weak as well. In turn, space opens up and pressure sometimes builds for greater military restraint and retrenchment—audience costs of inaction decline and costs of action rise. Such developments occurred in early 2021 around the U.S. policy in Afghanistan, helping explain Biden's decision for withdrawal.

After taking office, Biden did not face the liberal-narrative pressure that his two predecessors had experienced. There was little public discourse by promoters leading up to his decision on Afghanistan: only two statements (one prowar, one antiwar) in the Congressional Record , and just nine editorials (four from the Wall Street Journal ) on Afghan policy. 184 Talk of another September 11 or threats to democracy (i.e., narrative components) were nonexistent. Many pundits acknowledged popular sentiments to leave and, in bowing to that sentiment, endorsed doing so eventually. “Americans are understandably eager to move on,” conceded the traditionally hawkish Wall Street Journal , “The question is not whether the U.S. will leave Afghanistan but whether it will do so responsibly.” 185 In February 2021, 79 percent of Americans considered continued U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan mostly or very unfavorably. 186

In internal debates, military promoters continued to press for staying in Afghanistan. In late March meetings with the president, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and others issued a bleak post-withdrawal forecast, warning of Taliban and al-Qaeda resurgence and deriding “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism. 187 Unlike during the Obama and Trump years, military leaders did not plan to go public because they knew they had nothing to go public with. Senator Graham, the longtime promoter who worked closely with the military to orchestrate past narrative-based pressure campaigns, openly admitted in an interview that “I hate Joe Biden for this.” 188 He then added, “I think the Taliban is going to give safe haven to people that will come after us.” 189 Yet in sharp contrast to his advice to Petraeus and McChrystal in 2009, he conceded that the new political/narrative reality left him and other military promoters with no leverage. “The American people want us to come home,” Graham confessed, “People are tired.” 190

Milley admitted to the tipping effect that this narrative shift had on the civil-military balance. Biden would fire any military brass (“they're going to be gone”) 191 who went public, Milley said, which was a move that Obama was highly unlikely to have made (or threaten) in 2009, amid a different narrative context (and, thus, a different civil-military balance). 192 Milley further explained that because the military used tactics to expand what became a progressively unpopular war in Afghanistan early in the Obama administration, military leaders were subsequently excluded from major decisions (such as withdrawal from Iraq and troop reductions in Afghanistan). He wanted no repeat of that. “We don't box in a president,” he said. 193 Biden intentionally worked to avoid a repeat of this dynamic as well. He chose Austin as secretary of defense because, based on his service under Obama, Biden trusted Austin to keep promoters in the military from making public statements. Throughout the 2021 debate on Afghanistan, Austin prevented the Joint Chiefs of Staff from “going rogue,” according to one official. In the end, and in sharp contrast to 2009, no top military brass went public. 194 The weakened anti-terrorism narrative had left military promoters no other choice. In essence, a weak liberal discourse in public kept costs of inaction low, leaving Biden (and other civilian policy experts) more political space—something Obama preferred but never found—to choose a full withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Afghan debate was extensive—four NSC and ten deputy-level meetings—with much attention centered on the terror threat from Afghanistan. 195 Biden and his closest advisers eventually concluded that the threat was “relatively small” or “manageable” (in fact, back to pre-9/11 levels) for the foreseeable future. 196 Regarding the strategic-narrative argument, Biden deemed it unlikely that severe or frequent attacks (i.e., those capable of re-traumatizing the nation and increasing politically damaging costs of inaction) would develop any time soon. According to officials, Biden talked often about the “lessons of Iraq” under Obama. Specifically, Biden concluded that the weak Afghan terror threat meant that offshore methods were sufficient to avoid a repeat of the domestic political damage that Obama faced with the rise of ISIS after the 2011 Iraq drawdown. For Biden, potential low severity and frequency moving forward meant a weak liberal discourse moving forward as well. With low future costs of inaction, Biden found, again, more space for withdrawal. In fact, as opinion crystalized around modest future threats from terrorism, Biden focused increasingly on his campaign promises, reminding his advisers that like his two predecessors, he pledged to end the war in Afghanistan. 197

As the strategic-narrative argument expects, Biden felt (again, in a way that his predecessors did not) that he would also face considerable audience costs of action if he chose not to fulfill his campaign pledge to leave Afghanistan. The Taliban curtailed all attacks on U.S. forces after the February 2020 peace deal, resulting in no U.S. casualties in Afghanistan in the year before Biden's inauguration. The administration concluded that staying in Afghanistan after May 1, with no plan to leave, would inevitably mean a resumption of fighting and increased casualties. A senior official noted that “if we break the May 1st deadline negotiated by the previous administration with no clear exit plan, we will be back at the war with the Taliban.” 198 If so, Biden would then need to go one step further and increase troops because 3,000 was, according to expert opinion, insufficient to fight the Taliban. 199 For a president who not only promised to end the war but also now faced (unlike his predecessors early in their terms) narrative-driven public opposition to the war, costs of action were simply too high. “New U.S. casualties after a one-year hiatus under Trump could be a political disaster,” noted an insider, “That was the last thing Biden wanted.” 200 It would mean “staying in Afghanistan forever,” said one Biden aide, alluding to the dangers of these costs. 201

Finally, it is worth noting that, in sharp contrast to the Obama/Trump cases, moderators (all civilians) played an outsized role under Biden. According to administration sources, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan—both longtime aides of Biden and critics of the war (especially Sullivan)—were “truly running the Pentagon,” with the “Pentagon [i.e., promoters] not making these decisions.” According to a lawmaker familiar with the process, “The civilian leaders essentially overruled the generals on this.” 202 Such an outcome is to be expected in a policymaking context marked by a weak liberal discourse.

In an April 14 public statement, Biden explained his decision in narrative-based terms that the nation understood. “Our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly unclear,” Biden said, “We went to Afghanistan because of a horrific attack that happened twenty years ago. That cannot explain why we should remain there in 2021.” 203 Editors at the Washington Post called Biden's decision to leave the “easy way out of Afghanistan.” 204 They were right. When a long-standing liberal narrative collapses as a lodestar for costly endeavors like war, politicians often choose the easy way. They leave. To do otherwise simply costs too much.

For nearly two decades, U.S. foreign policy was locked in the iron cage of a robust liberal narrative, centered around anti-terrorism. Born out of the trauma of September 11 and sustained by terrorist attacks in the years after, the narrative and politics around U.S. foreign policy kept audience costs of inaction high, which prevented withdrawal from Afghanistan and brought U.S. forces back to Iraq and into Syria. Presidents Obama and Trump calculated that withdrawal was rational or strategic, but the pressure of narrative politics foreclosed that option. From 2018 to 2021, the severity/frequency of terrorist attacks declined significantly, the anti-terrorism narrative weakened, audience costs of inaction declined, and costs of action rose. Only in these narrative-driven conditions did Trump (late in his presidency) and Biden find space to draw down from Afghanistan. In sum, the strategic-narrative argument offers a strong account for both the length and end of the war in Afghanistan, especially against other leading arguments in international relations.

For the United States (and its allies) moving forward, these findings point to two important strategic implications—one in the direction of continued vigilance abroad, the other in the direction of restraint. First, as the United States shifts attention away from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and focuses more on great power competition (i.e., China and Russia), U.S. policymakers cannot turn their backs on terrorism. 205 Doing so risks a resurgence of ISIS/al-Qaeda that will re-traumatize the U.S. public, reanimate the anti-terrorism narrative, and create the kind of costs-of-inaction politics that led to the decades-long, overly expansive U.S. military engagements in the Middle East. Continued vigilance against terrorism is vital, then, to keep the home front quiet and, with that, to avoid strategic overstretch (such as the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq) and to maintain focus on the more pressing matter today of great power politics.

Second, the findings here also point to new standards that the United States should apply to counterterrorism operations going forward. When it comes to narrative-animating terrorist strikes—the kinds that are most likely to push U.S. leaders toward expansive military action—U.S. citizens do not care about any and all forms of terrorism. In fact, they are quite discriminating. As a recent example, consider the ISIS-K (Islamic State-Khorasan Province) attack at the Kabul airport during the U.S. evacuation in August 2021. The attack caused a major uproar across the United States, contributing to the negative opinion that most U.S. citizens had of Biden's handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. But, as polls demonstrated, that Kabul attack (and other developments, like the Taliban victory in Afghanistan) did not generate a resurgence in the anti-terrorism narrative and with that a reversal of Biden's drawdown decision. 206 The reason? ISIS-K is almost exclusively a local threat, focused on Afghanistan primarily. It has no capacity (or will, for that matter) to strike the United States or its liberal democratic allies, especially those in the West. U.S. citizens understand this. U.S. policymakers need to do the same, and on this basis, show greater restraint in developing counterterrorism policy.

To this end, terrorists of global reach—meaning those with both the will and the means to strike liberal states beyond the territories that they currently occupy—can and should become the central focus of U.S. counterterrorism policy. These kinds of terrorists represent the real threats to U.S. security, both materially and in their narrative-generating potential. The global-reach standard is at the center of President Biden's post-Afghan over-the-horizon counterterrorism strategy. The same standard needs to be applied more broadly.

There is much work to do. Global-reach terrorist organizations are fewer and far less potent than they were in the early 2010s. The decimation of the central leadership of al-Qaeda and ISIS has resulted in a decentralization of both organizations, which includes turning away from global objectives and targets and focusing more on “parochial grievances and the promotion of … local interests,” according to one study. In sum, “The deck is heavily stacked against transnational jihadi groups.” 207

Unfortunately, U.S. policy has not fully adjusted to this reality. Above all else, too little distinction is made today in U.S. policy circles between local and global terrorists. Consequently, the United States finds itself involved in an expansive web of relatively low-level counterterrorism operations across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia that involve everything from special forces raids to joint military exercises and air/drone strikes. 208 Some of this activity—such as repeated strikes against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the 2010s and perhaps even against ISIS in Syria in 2022—is justified by global-reach standards. Much of it is not, however. For all its brutality, Boko Haram in Nigeria, for instance, is a terror organization with local interests only. This does not mean, of course, that the United States should ignore Boko Haram and others like it—after all, local threats can sometimes become global. Surveillance, intelligence sharing, and sometimes counterterrorism training with local partners and governments are important. But the United States should pare back its direct use of force against local terrorist groups. In these instances, force contributes little to U.S. security and runs the risk of escalation in ways that (like in Afghanistan) drain valuable strategic resources. 209

The lessons learned from a deeper understanding of strategic narratives point to the need for a robust counterterrorism program today, that is, by the same token, far less expansive and militaristic than that of the past two decades. Striking this counterterrorism balance—that is, not too little, not too much—will help manage narrative politics at home and, in turn, allow the United States to not only maintain its own security but also contribute in positive ways to order and stability in a world marked by the exigencies of renewed great power competition.

The author appreciates comments from Mark Haas, John Owen, and the anonymous reviewers, as well as research support from Megan Kilduff. The online appendix for this article is available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/82RNG7 .

Cited in Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), pp. 121–122.

On restraint, see Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014); and Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).

Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions , p. 18. Walt attributes the label “the Blob” for the U.S. foreign policy establishment to former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.

On collective ideas and narratives, see Ronald R. Krebs, Narrative and the Making of U.S. National Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Andrew Yeo, Activists, Alliances, and Anti-U.S. Base Protests (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-use of Nuclear Weapons since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).

C. William Walldorf Jr., To Shape Our World for Good: Master Narratives and Regime Change in U.S. Foreign Policy, 1900–2011 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2019), pp. 5–14.

The liberal narrative and grand strategies—like liberal internationalism—are distinct social phenomena. Leaders may consider narratives in building grand strategies, but those narratives are not, in and of themselves, grand strategies. See ibid., pp. 5–13.

The absence of this narrative does not imply an “illiberal” narrative space for the United States; rather, it means that the nation values less those policies that actively advance or protect liberal order abroad, meaning that the nation is more exemplarist than vindicationist, to use Jonathan Monten's description. Jonathan Monten, “The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy,” International Security , Vol. 29, No. 4 (Spring 2005), pp. 112–156, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.2005.29.4.112 .

Michael Tomz, “Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations: An Experimental Approach,” International Organization , Vol. 61, No. 4 (2007), p. 821, https://doi.org/10.1017/S002081_8307070282 .

James D. Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,” American Political Science Review , Vol. 88, No. 3 (1994), pp. 577–592, https://doi.org/10.2307/2944796 .

Jeffrey C. Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

Stephen M. Walt, “How Not to Leave Afghanistan,” Foreign Policy , February 23, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/23/how-not-to-leave-afghanistan/ ; and Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions , pp. 255–292.

Charles A. Kupchan and Peter L. Trubowitz, “Dead Center: The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the United States,” International Security , Vol. 32, No. 2 (Fall 2007), pp. 7–44, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.2007.32.2.7 . Other counterarguments (e.g., economic strength, COVID-19, and the Iraq surge) also fare poorly.

Ronald R. Krebs, “Pity the President,” National Interest , No. 148 (March/April 2017), p. 37, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26557376 ; and Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine: A New ‘Global War on Terror,’” Atlantic , April 2016, p. 75.

For an extended discussion, see Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 17–19, 226 n. 57.

Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions ; and Patrick Porter, “Why America's Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Habit, and the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment,” International Security , Vol. 42, No.4 (Spring 2018), pp. 9–46, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00311 .

For a survey, see Peter D. Feaver, “The Right to Be Right: Civil-Military Relations and the Iraq Surge Decision,” International Security , Vol. 35, No. 4 (Spring 2011), pp. 90–97, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00033 .

For a more expanded discussion, see Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 19–24.

Krebs, Narrative and the Making of U.S. National Security , pp. 31–65, 269–274; and Stacie E. Goddard and Ronald R. Krebs, “Rhetoric, Legitimation, and Grand Strategy,” Security Studies , Vol. 24, No. 1 (2015), pp. 5–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2014.1001198 .

Neil J. Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” in Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , p. 44.

Ibid., pp. 36, 44; and Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , pp. 1, 10. These kinds of challenges to national identity, values, and events—whether big (an invasion) or small (a bombing in a café)—can traumatize a nation.

Jennifer Mitzen, “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma,” European Journal of International Relations , Vol. 12, No. 3 (2006), pp. 342, 345–346, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066106067346 .

Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” p. 10. Agents may include authoritative figures such as politicians, priests, intellectuals, policy elites, or moral activists.

Ibid., p. 10; and Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 118–123, 130.

Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” p. 11.

Ibid., p. 15; and Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” pp. 41–42, 45.

Arthur G. Neal, National Trauma and Collective Memory: Major Events in the American Century (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 5, 23, 201; and Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” pp. 38–53.

Ron Eyerman, “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity,” in Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , p. 63.

On trauma theory and nation-states, see Emma Hutchison, “Trauma and the Politics of Emotion: Constituting Identity, Security, and Community after the Bali Bombing,” International Relations , Vol. 24, No. 1 (2010), p. 66, https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117809348712 .

Neal, National Trauma and Collective Memory , pp. 17, 22, 69–71; and Neil J. Smelser, “Epilogue: September 11, 2001, as Cultural Trauma,” in Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , p. 270.

Michael W. Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review , Vol. 80, No. 4 (December 1986), p. 1161, https://doi.org/10.2307/1960861 .

John M. Owen IV, The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510–2010 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 31–52; and Mark L. Haas, The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 1789–1989 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 4–40.

See, for example, Smelser, “Epilogue: September 11, 2001.”

Social psychologists and others call this “distant survivor syndrome.” See Robert Jay Lifton, “Americans as Survivors,” New England Journal of Medicine , Vol. 352, No. 22 (2005), p. 2263, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp058048 .

Threat involves geopolitics plus identity, similar to what is found in Haas, The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics ; Owen, The Clash of Ideas ; and Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 1–50.

Liberal narratives may focus on protection against counter-ideologies or promotion of liberal order, similar to Haas, The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics .

Indirect attacks here gain immediate salience because of an already robust narrative, such as in Hutchison, “Trauma and the Politics of Emotion,” pp. 73–80.

Paul Pierson, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics,” American Political Science Review , Vol. 94, No. 2 (2000), pp. 251–267, https://doi.org/10.2307/2586011 .

Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 109–114.

Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951), p. 246.

Presidents can be important promoters, too, in the right event-driven conditions. For example, see Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 83–87.

Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 583.

On the narrowness of the executive-commitment framework, see Jack Snyder and Erica D. Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound,” American Political Science Review , Vol. 105, No. 3 (2011), pp. 437–456, https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305541100027X .

On discourses, see Stephen Ellingson, “Understanding the Dialectic of Discourse and Collective Action: Public Debate and Rioting in Antebellum Cincinnati,” American Journal of Sociology , Vol. 101, No. 1 (1995), p. 107, https://doi.org/10.1086/230700 .

On ideas augmenting agents, see Stacie E. Goddard, “The Rhetoric of Appeasement: Hitler's Legitimation and British Foreign Policy, 1938–39,” Security Studies , Vo. 24, No. 1 (2015), pp. 95–130, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2015.1001216 .

Jim Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs (New York: Scribner, 2011), p. 92. The narrative made Kennedy's campaign pledge salient—no narrative discourses, no audience costs.

For more on these choices, see Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 35–36.

Julian E. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2012), pp. 386–390, 401–405, 422–425.

Sarah E. Kreps, “The 1994 Haiti Intervention: A Unilateral Operation in Multilateral Clothes,” Journal of Strategic Studies , Vol. 30, No. 3 (2007), pp. 449–474, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390701343441 .

Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen, Causal Case Study Methods: Foundations and Guidelines for Comparing, Matching, and Tracing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), pp. 227–301.

Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 22.

For example, see Jeffrey W. Legro, “Whence American Internationalism,” International Organization , Vol. 54, No. 2 (2000), p. 256, https://doi.org/10.1162/002081800551172 ; Krebs, Narrative and the Making of U.S. National Security , pp. 195–197; and Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 48–52. Unless otherwise noted, editorial (upwards of sixty different newspapers nationwide) and Congressional Record surveys span ten days after major events. See the online appendix.

Because the point at which public opinion polls capture collective ideas such as narratives is uncertain, I follow the lead of other ideational scholars and use polls in tandem with established measures of collective ideas (e.g., editorials). See Olick, The Politics of Regret , p. 22; Legro, “Whence American Internationalism,” p. 280; Goddard, “The Rhetoric of Appeasement,” pp. 121, 125; and Krebs, Narrative and the Making of U.S. National Security , pp. 135–136.

Beach and Pedersen, Causal Case Study Methods , pp. 286–287.

Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 167–198.

“Time Out to Deal with Trauma,” San Francisco Chronicle , September 13, 2001.

Amy Zalman and Jonathan Clarke, “The Global War on Terror: A Narrative in Need of a Rewrite,” Ethics and International Affairs , Vol. 23, No. 2 (2009), p. 101, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7093.2009.00201.x .

Congresswoman Lee (D-CA), speaking on H.J. Res 64, 107th Cong., 1st sess., 2001, Vol. 147, pt. 12, p. 16774.

Representative Gephardt (D-MO), speaking on H.J. Res. 64, 107th Cong., 1st sess., 2001, Vol. 147, pt. 12, p. 16763.

“Harris Interactive Survey #07: Terrorism,” Harris Interactive, September 27–28, 2001, iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu ; and “Wirthlin Worldwide Poll: September 2001,” Wirthlin Worldwide, September 21–26, 2001, iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu .

“Timeline—Major Attacks by al Qaeda,” Reuters, May 2, 2011, https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-56711920110502 . Several bombs targeted commuters on the London transit system, killing more than 50 and injuring approximately 700. The Madrid bombings occurred on four commuter trains, killing nearly 200 and injuring approximately 1,800.

“Terrorists Win If We Give into Fear,” Cincinnati Enquirer , July 8, 2005.

“Editorial,” Journal and Courant [Indiana], March 16, 2004.

Congressman Hyde (R-IL), 109th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 151 (July 13, 2005), p. H5766.

Congressman Linder (R-GA), 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 150 (March 11, 2004), p. E354.

Congresswoman Jackson Lee (D-TX), 97th Cong, 2nd sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 150 (March 16, 2004), p. H1906.

Congressman Gingrey (R-GA), Congressman Lantos (D-CA), and Congressman Royce (R-CA), 109th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 151 (July 13, 2005), pp. H5746 and H5766; and Senator McConnell (R-KY), 109th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 151 (July 11, 2005), p. S7946.

ProQuest search, “Madrid AND bomb∗,” March 11–21, 2004, N572, 37 newspapers; and ProQuest search, “London AND bomb∗,” July 7–17, 2005, N5100, 53 newspapers. See the online appendix.

“Spain's 3/11: A Horrifying Reminder that the War on Terror Is Not Over,” Wall Street Journal , March 12, 2004.

“This Week, ‘Madrid Became Manhattan,’” San Antonio Express , March 13, 2004; “Ground Zero, Madrid,” New York Times , March 12, 2004; and “Terror in London: A Reminder to the World that War of 9/11 Is Not Over,” San Francisco Chronicle , July 8, 2005.

“Fox News Poll: July 2005,” Fox News , July 13–15, iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu .

Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (New York: Anchor, 2013), pp. 428–430.

Congressman Westmoreland (R-GA), speaking on H. Con. Res. 63, 111th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 153 (February 16, 2007), p. H1797.

Congressman Frank (D-MA), H. Con. Res. 63, 111th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 153 (February 16, 2007), pp. H1797–1798.

Congressman Waxman (D-CA) and Congresswoman Clarke (D-NY), H. Con. Res. 63, 111th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 153 (February 16, 2007), pp. H1810, H1812.

Congressman Becerra (D-CA), H. Con. Res. 63, 111th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 153 (February 16, 2007), p. H1797.

Derek Chollet, The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America's Role in the World (New York: Public Affairs, 2016), p. 68; and Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown, 2020), pp. 48, 83–89. Terrorism connected with voters, Obama said.

Dan Balz, “Obama Says He Would Take Fight to Pakistan,” Washington Post , August 2, 2007.

Ben Rhodes, The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (New York: Random, 2018), pp. 8, 12–15.

Tim O'Brien and S. Writer, “The Blog House,” Star Tribune [Minneapolis], August 4, 2007.

Bob Woodward, Obama's Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), p. 70.

Ibid., pp. 79–89.

ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” January 20–February 22, 2009, N520, 20 newspapers.

“The Afghan Challenge,” Washington Post , January 29, 2009.

Lymari Morales, “Americans See Afghanistan as Still Worth Fighting,” Gallup , February 19, 2009, https://news.gallup.com/poll/115270/Americans-Afghanistan-War-Worth-Fighting.aspx ; and “Barack Obama and Congress/Economy/War on Terrorism,” CNN , February 18–19, 2009, iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu .

Rhodes, The World as It Is , p. 62.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 80.

Ibid., pp. 96–98; and Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Vintage, 2015), pp. 337–340.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 96.

Karen DeYoung, “Obama Ok's Adding Troops in Afghanistan,” Boston Globe , February 18, 2009; and “Barack Obama and Congress/Economy/War on Terrorism,” CNN , February 18–19, 2009, iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ .

“Salvaging Afghanistan,” New York Times , February 20, 2009.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , pp. 134–135.

Gates, Duty: Memoirs , pp. 349–350.

This pledge was not linked to the robust liberal narrative; hence, there were no audience costs and little policy salience.

Obama, A Promised Land , pp. 432–433; and Woodward, Obama's Wars , pp. 167–169.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , pp. 155–156.

Ibid., p. 156.

Michael Gerson, “In Afghanistan, No Choices but to Try,” Washington Post , September 4, 2009.

Bob Woodward, “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure,’” Washington Post , September 21, 2009.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , pp. 158, 172, 180–181, 193.

Senator Lieberman (D-CT), 113th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 155 (September 6, 2009), p. S9471; and Congressman Stearns (R-FL), speaking on Cong. Res. 155, 113th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 155 (September 22, 2009), p. H9742.

“President Obama's Remarks on a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan,” New York Times , March 27, 2009.

Congressman Johnson (D-TX), speaking on Cong. Res. 155, 113th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 155 (September 23, 2009), p. H9810; and Senator Bond, 113th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 155 (September 24, 2009), p. S9766.

“Let Mission Dictate,” Orlando Sentinel , October 8, 2009.

Only 19 percent opposed additional troops. ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” August 1–October 15, 2009, N595, 55 newspapers.

“Wavering on Afghanistan?” Washington Post , September 22, 2009; “Obama and the General,” Wall Street Journal , October 7, 2009; “Not Just ‘More Troops,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch , October 7, 2009; and “Our View: Peace Laureate Must Rethink War,” Santa Fe New Mexican , October 10, 2009.

“Fox News Opinion Dynamics,” Fox News , September 15–16, 2009, https://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/092109_poll1.pdf ; “NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll,” NBC/Wall Street Journal , October 2–4, 2009, iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu ; “A Year Out, Widespread Anti-Incumbent Sentiment,” Pew Research Center, November 11, 2009, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2009/11/11/a-year-out-widespread-anti-incumbent-sentiment/ ; “4/27: Majority Approves of Obama's Job Performance,” Marist Poll , April 27, 2009, http://maristpoll.marist.edu/427-majority-approves-of-obamas-job-performance/ ; and Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 248.

Cited in Woodward, Obama's Wars , pp. 105–106.

Cited in ibid., p. 123.

Ibid., pp. 161–163; and Obama, A Promised Land , p. 433.

Cited in Woodward, Obama's Wars , pp. 161–168.

Rhodes, The World as It Is , pp. 66–67.

Ibid., p. 76.

Obama, A Promised Land , pp. 433, 436.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 195. See also Gates, Duty: Memoirs , p. 378; and Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” p. 75.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 186.

Gates, Duty: Memoirs , pp. 368–369.

Rhodes, The World as It Is , pp. 73–75.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 247; and Leon Panetta, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (New York: Penguin, 2015), pp. 253–255.

Cited in Gates, Duty: Memoirs , p. 375.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 224.

Ibid., pp. 224–420.

“Gingrich Is New Fave, Voters Approve of Iraq Withdrawal, President Beats All Comers,” PublicMind Poll , Fairleigh Dickinson University, December 7, 2011, http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/newfave/ ; and Krebs, “Pity the President,” p. 37.

Barack Obama, “Statement by the President on ISIL,” statement on the state floor in Washington, D.C., September 10, 2014, White House, Office of the Press Secretary, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/10/Statement-president-isil-1 ; and Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” p. 75.

Senator Graham (R-SC), 115th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 160 (June 12, 2014), p. S3630.

ProQuest search, “Islamic State,” “ISIS,” “ISIL,” June 11–22, 2014 (rise of ISIS) and September 1–October 1, 2014 (journalist beheadings), N5199.

Congressman Moran (D-VA), 115th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 160 (September 10, 2014), p. H7550.

Senator Coons (D-DE), 115th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 160 (September 10, 2014), p. S5534.

Senator Graham (R-SC), 115th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 160 (June 17, 2014), p. S3692.

Ibid. Many argued that Obama's decision to completely withdraw troops from Iraq in 2011 opened the door for instability and the rise of ISIS, which put the United States and its allies at risk. They claimed that the lesson of Iraq, then, was to leave troops in Afghanistan.

ProQuest search, “Islamic State,” “ISIS,” “ISIL,” June 11–22, 2014, and August 20–September 12, 2014, N591, 37 newspapers.

“The Time for Action Is Now,” Daily Press [Newport News], August 21, 2014; and “A Necessary Response to ISIS,” New York Times , August 25, 2014.

“June Poll—Bowe Bergdahl/Benghazi Attack/Healthcare Services for Veterans,” June 25–27, 2014, Gallup , iRoper, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ .

Cameron Glenn et al., “Timeline: The Rise, Spread, and Fall of the Islamic State” (Washington, D.C.: Wilson Center, 2019), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/timeline-the-rise-spread-and-fall-the-islamic-state .

Cited in Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” p. 82.

“The Price of Fear,” New York Times , November 21, 2015; and “Our View: West Needs Unity to Fight Terrorists,” Santa Fe New Mexican , November 18, 2015.

ProQuest search, “Paris” and “terror,” November 14–24, 2015; and ProQuest search, “Brussels” and “terror,” March 22–April 1, 2016, N549. After Brussels, thirty newspapers demonstrated the same pattern: 69 percent existential, 73 percent post-9/11 narrative events, and 65 percent lesson.

Donald Trump, “Full Text: Donald Trump's Speech on Fighting Terrorism,” Politico , August 16, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-terrorism-speech-227025 .

“Comparing Hillary Clinton's and Donald Trump's Different Approaches to ISIS,” PBS News Hour , August 16, 2016, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/comparing-hillary-clintons-donald-trumps-approaches-isis .

Rhodes, The World as It Is , pp. 296–313; Carter Malkasian, The American War in Afghanistan: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 395–396; and “Fox News Poll: March 2015,” Fox News , iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ .

Anonymous, A Warning (New York: Twelve, 2019), pp. 46–47; Senator Paul (R-KY), speaking on H.R. 2810, 117th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 163 (September 12, 2017), p. S5199; Peter Bergen, Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos (New York: Penguin, 2019), pp. 128, 132, 147–148, 150; and Woodward, Fear: Trump and the White House , pp. 115–125, 221–222.

Senator Barrasso (R-WY), 117th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 163 (April 27, 2017), p. S2572.

Senator McCain (R-AZ), speaking on H.R. 2810, 117th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 163 (September 13, 2017), p. S5263; and Senator McConnell (R-KY), speaking on H.R. 2810, 117th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 163 (September 13, 2017), p. S5244.

ProQuest Congressional, “Afghanistan,” January 20 and September 15, 2017, N531.

ProQuest search, “Trump AND Afghanistan AND troop∗,” June 1–August 31, 2017, N541, 29 newspapers.

“Why Afghanistan Matters,” Chicago Tribune , August 22, 2017.

Dana Blanton, “Fox News Poll: 27 Percent Favor Senate GOP Health Care Plan, as Vote Gets Delayed,” Fox News , June 28, 2017, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-27-percent-favor-senate-gop-health-care-plan-as-vote-gets-delayed ; Dana Blanton, “Fox News Poll: Candid? Yes. Presidential? Not So Much. Voters Describe Trump,” Fox News , September 19, 2017, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-candid-yes-presidential-not-so-much-voters-describe-trump ; and Dana Blanton, “Fox News Poll: Tax Reform Important to Voters, but Most Doubt It Will Happen,” Fox News , September 25, 2017, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-tax-reform-important-to-voters-but-most-doubt-it-will-happen .

Bergen, Trump and His Generals , pp. 133–140; and Woodward, Fear: Trump and the White House , pp. 115–121.

Woodward, Fear: Trump and the White House , pp. 124–126.

Ibid., p. 122.

Bergen, Trump and His Generals , pp. 111–115, 118; and Woodward, Fear: Trump and the White House , pp. 51–73, 146–150. With each of these policy steps, Trump wanted to appear tougher than Obama.

Cited in Woodward, Fear: Trump and the White House , p. 151.

Ibid., pp. 256–258; and Bergen, Trump and His Generals , p. 157. Steve Bannon left the White House in mid-August.

All cited in Woodward, Fear: Trump and the White House , pp. 255–256.

Ibid., p. 254.

Cited in ibid., pp. 256–257.

Ibid., p. 259.

Donald Trump, “Full Transcript: Trump's Speech on Afghanistan,” speech at Fort Myer military base in Arlington, Virginia, New York Times , August 21, 2017.

John Merline, “Trump's Approval Rating Climbs after ‘Terrible’ August; Most Say Confederate Statues Should Stay: IBD/TIPP Poll,” Investor's Business Daily , September 5, 2017, https://www.investors.com/politics/trump-approval-rebounds-from-lows-after-charlottesville-harvey-confederate-statues-ibdtipp-poll/ .

Glenn et al., “Timeline: The Rise.”

Global Terrorism Index 2020: Measuring the Impact of Terrorism (Sydney: Institute for Economics and Peace, November 2020), Vision of Humanity, https://visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/GTI-2020-web-1.pdf .

Al-Qaeda attacks in Iraq (not in figure 1 because Freedom House does not code Iraq as “free”) mattered, too, given the heavy U.S. investment in a liberalizing mission there. These attacks in Iraq totaled fifteen (2005), twenty-two (2007), and twenty-one (2008).

The three attacks in 2010 and 2011 occurred in Mali, a non-Western democracy, which coupled with the Osama bin Laden killing made them less impactful on the anti-terrorism narrative. Unlike Iraq, the United States was not actively engaged in a democracy-building mission in Mali, and thus those attacks garnered almost no U.S. news coverage.

Gordon Lubold and Jessica Donati, “Trump Orders Big Troops Reduction in Afghanistan,” Wall Street Journal , December 20, 2018.

Michael Crowley, “Trump's Campaign Talk of Troop Withdrawals Does Not Match Military Reality,” New York Times , October 11, 2020. Reflecting the weakened narrative, this public posturing about terrorism was intentional and meant to appeal to voters.

Stephen Gruber-Miller, “‘Trump Sold Them Out’: Joe Biden Hits the President over Syria Troop Withdrawal in Iowa Speech,” Des Moines Register , October 16, 2019.

Crowley, “Trump's Campaign.”

ProQuest search, “ISIS,” “Islamic State,” or “ISIL,” March 23–April 30, 2019; ProQuest search, “Al-Baghdadi,” or “Al Baghdadi,” October 27–November 30, 2019; ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” February 28–April 30, 2020; and ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” October 7, 2020–January 19, 2021. See the online appendix for search details.

ProQuest search, “ISIS,” “Islamic State,” or “ISIL,” March 23–May 15, 2019, and October 27–November 30, 2019; and ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” February 28–May 31, 2020, and October 7, 20202–January 19, 2021. See the online appendix for search details.

ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” annually from April 13, 2009, through April 13, 2021; ProQuest search, “terrorism,” annually from April 13, 2009, through April 13, 2021; and ProQuest search, “Afghanistan and terrorism,” annually from April 13, 2009, through April 13, 2021.

ProQuest search, “Islamic State,” “ISIS,” or “ISIL,” March 23–April 30, 2019; and ProQuest search, “Al Baghdadi,” October 27–November 27, 2019. See the online appendix for search details.

“Islamic State's Caliphate Is Dead. The Threat Endures,” Chicago Tribune , March 29, 2019.

“The U.S. Delivers Justice to al-Baghdadi,” Chicago Tribune , October 28, 2019; “The Lessons of Baghdadi,” Wall Street Journal , October 28, 2019; and “The Death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” USA Today , October 29, 2019.

ProQuest search, “Al-Qaeda,” “Islamic State,” “ISIS,” or “ISIL,” December 1–April 13, 2021, N5132, 25 newspapers.

Laura Silver, Kat Devlin, and Christine Huang, “U.S. Views of China Turn Sharply Negative Amid Trade Tensions,” Pew Research Center, August 13, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/08/13/u-s-views-of-china-turn-sharply-negative-amid-trade-tensions/ . Twenty-four percent of respondents cited China or Russia.

ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” February 28–April 30, 2020, N510, 8 newspapers and October 7, 2020–January 19, 2021, N514, 10 newspapers.

“Deal with the Taliban the Price to Pay,” Los Angeles Times , February 29, 2020.

“A War Without Winners Winds Down,” New York Times , March 2, 2020.

“The Afghan Withdrawal Deal,” Wall Street Journal , March 1, 2020.

Jeffrey M. Jones, “In U.S., Fears of Terrorism after Afghanistan Pullout Subside,” Gallup , June 29, 2011, https://news.gallup.com/poll/148331/Fear-Terrorism-Afghanistan-Pullout-Subside.aspx .

Malkasian, The American War , pp. 395–396. Again, as expected, Obama reversed this with the rise of ISIS.

Sarah Kreps and Douglas Kriner, “In or Out of Afghanistan Is Not a Political Choice,” Foreign Affairs , March 22, 2001, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/afghanistan/2021-03-22/or-out-afghanistan-not-political-choice ; and Charles Lane, “An Afghan Exit with Shades of Vietnam,” Washington Post , December 3, 2020.

ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” January 20–April 13, 2021, N59, 6 newspapers.

“Leaving Afghanistan the Right Way,” Wall Street Journal , February 10, 2021.

Mohamed Younis, “China, Russia Images in U.S. Hit Historic Lows,” Gallup , March 1, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/331082/china-russia-images-hit-historic-lows.aspx .

Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Peril (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021), pp. 377–379.

Cited in ibid., p. 389.

Ibid. Going back to at least the Obama administration, Lindsey Graham was always in close contact with military leaders, especially the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Woodward and Costa, Peril , p. 335.

Ibid., pp. 386–387.

Ibid., p. 387.

Lara Seligman et al., “How Biden's Team Overrode the Brass on Afghanistan,” Politico , April 15, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/14/pentagon-biden-team-overrode-afghanistan-481556 .

Karen DeYoung and Missy Ryan, “With Afghanistan, Biden Restores Foreign Policymaking Process that Trump Abandoned,” Washington Post , April 18, 2021; David Ignatius, “History Will Cast a Shadow over Biden's Decision to Withdraw from Afghanistan,” Washington Post , April 13, 2021; and Jennifer Rubin, “Afghanistan Requires More Humility—from Everyone,” Washington Post , April 14, 2021.

Rubin, “Afghanistan Requires More Humility”; Seligman et al., “How Biden's Team Overrode”; and Missy Ryan and Karen DeYoung, “Biden Will Withdraw All U.S. Forces from Afghanistan by September 11, 2001,” Washington Post , April 13, 2021.

Stephen Collinson and Maeve Reston, “Biden Starts to Execute on Policies Trump Abandoned by Crossing off Another Campaign Promise,” CNN , April 15, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/15/politics/joe-biden-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal/index.html .

Ryan and DeYoung, “Biden Will Withdraw All.”

“The Way Forward in Afghanistan,” Wall Street Journal , March 15, 2021. The Afghan Study Group recommended an increase of troops.

Woodward and Costa, Peril , p. 384.

Ignatius, “History Will Cast a Shadow.”

All cited in Seligman et al., “How Biden's Team Overrode.”

Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden on the Way Forward in Afghanistan,” remarks from the Treaty Room, White House, April 14, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/04/14/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-way-forward-in-afghanistan/ .

“Biden Takes the Easy Way Out of Afghanistan. The Likely Result Is Disaster,” Washington Post , April 13, 2021.

Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper, “How the U.S. Plans to Fight from Afar after Troops Exit Afghanistan,” New York Times , September 28, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/us/politics/united-states-al-qaeda-afghanistan.html . Biden appears keen to the fact that vigilance against terrorism is important.

Ted Van Green and Carroll Doherty, “Majority of U.S. Public Favors Afghanistan Troop Withdrawal; Biden Criticized for His Handling of Situation,” Pew Research Center, August 31, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/31/majority-of-u-s-public-favors-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal-biden-criticized-for-his-handling-of-situation/ .

Barak Mendelsohn and Colin Clarke, “Al-Qaeda Is Being Hollowed to Its Core,” War on the Rocks , February 24, 2021, https://warontherocks.com/2021/02/al-qaeda-is-being-hollowed-to-its-core/ .

Stephanie Savell, United States Counterterrorism Operations, 2018–2020 (Providence, R.I.: Watson Institute, Brown University, 2021), https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2021/US%20Counterterrorism%20Operations%202018-2020%2C%20Costs%20of%20War.pdf .

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Does Counter-Terrorism Work?: a masterful and concise analysis

Richard english’s case studies yield deep insights into the flawed tactics of states in their efforts to eradicate terrorism.

The Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm in the occupied West Bank last September: Pushing for total strategic victory over terrorism is a fool’s errand. Photograph: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP

In the wake of the West’s frantic, humiliating exit from Afghanistan in August 2021, the defence and security community lost interest in terrorism. The exhausting and costly War on Terror could finally be drawn to a close.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine six months later deepened the sense that the international environment was turning in a different direction, where large-scale, state-on-state conflict would become the norm. The shocking events on October 7th last year and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza serve as a reminder that terrorism’s place in world politics is not over yet. As Gerry Adams said of the Irish Republican Army in 1995, “They haven’t gone away, you know.”

Terrorism intends to produce a visceral reaction to violence, to achieve political goals through feelings of horror, fear and resignation. Calmly evaluating the effectiveness of terrorism and governmental responses to it is thus a demanding task, one which Richard English has set himself over several decades.

This new book is a counterpart to his earlier study, Does Terrorism Work? (2016), and provides a masterful, concise analysis of counter-terrorism by comparing the post-9/11 War on Terror, the modern Northern Ireland Troubles and Israeli practice towards Palestine. For those familiar with one of these cases, the contrasts with less-known events elsewhere will prove deeply instructive.

A Very Hard Struggle. Lives in the Military Service Pensions Collection – a window on the harshness of Irish life

Edel Coffey: ‘We live in a very voyeuristic world … I wonder what that might be doing to our sense of contentment’

‘He turned out to be a psychopath’: My ex-boyfriend and the women he cheated on

An evening at Dublin’s new Silent Book Club: ‘It’s free, it’s chill’

The relative ease with which enemies can be damaged by arrests, assassinations and other means has frequently deluded policymakers about the chances of these small gains adding up to a meaningful political endpoint

While English presents a balanced assessment without resorting to frequent moralising, he is not afraid to describe terrorist atrocities as atrocious nor state security forces as brutal, mendacious or incompetent. Indeed, a stand-out feature of the book is the decision to home in on what counter-terrorists might consider the “inherent rewards” in their work, whether satisfaction from a job well done, or bitter vengeance wrought on an enemy without consideration for the long-term consequences.

Beyond the emotional rewards sometimes derived by those who fight terrorism, English deploys a three-part framework to assess whether counter-terrorism might be said to work in any given setting.

[  Israel accused of ‘provoking famine’ as UN report warns 1.1m at risk of ‘catastrophic hunger’ in Gaza  ]

Strategic victory is assured when a state achieves their primary goal against terrorists. Partial strategic victory means that central goal is reached to a certain extent, that secondary objectives are met instead or that the opponent is prevented from triumphing. Tactical success can involve undermining the enemy’s capabilities, gaining control over a population, achieving favourable publicity, securing temporary concessions from the opponent or strengthening one’s own organs of state. In practice, these forms of success can often be in tension with one another.

English addresses these different outcomes in a more historically minded way than is often the case in a field dominated by political science and psychology, disciplines concerned more with universal generalisations than context-specific nuance. Historians look at longer trajectories than time-pressed government employees can usually manage – one reason among many why this book is essential reading for those charged with safeguarding the state against terrorist threats.

The historical sensibility also draws out contingency over inevitability in ways which strengthen political accountability (who authorised what) and suggest alternative futures (past patterns need not determine the future).

After the September 11th attacks, no US president could have pursued a purely diplomatic path to neutralising al-Qaeda. America’s unmatched military power made that response as unlikely as did public outrage at the atrocities. George W Bush chose expansive aims for his war: “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

In the view of South Africa, the punishment has reached the level of genocide and the International Court of Justice is investigating whether such a characterisation is accurate

English reminds us that the immediate measures taken to intervene in Afghanistan and overthrow al-Qaeda’s hosts, the Taliban, were remarkably successful. The real trouble came as the counter-terrorism mission morphed into something more ambitious, complex and contradictory: counter-insurgency, nation-building, a campaign against the opium trade, not to mention regional entanglements with Pakistan, India, Iran and other interested parties.

[  Seven years after liberation, Mosul in Iraq is bustling but struggles to move on from wounds of the past  ]

Only after protracted suffering did American leaders seriously ponder whether a Taliban regime might be persuaded to refrain from hosting international terrorists again. English suggests this realisation might have come sooner with a deeper understanding of Afghanistan’s culture and history.

A short chapter on Iraq shows the interconnections between the two theatres in the War on Terror, notoriously during the 2003 run-up to the invasion in an imaginary rather than real sense. The Iraq War clearly made the terrorist threat to western interests worse while unleashing catastrophic civil war dynamics within the country. Success in degrading Islamic State (Isis) from 2017 might be considered a rather limited consolation for the damage wrought by those who chose to topple Saddam Hussein.

Why did western intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq endure for so long when the limited gains being made were evident at the time? Here English rightly links these far-flung missions to politics back home, where normal life went on. In the United States, jihadist terrorist violence killed 19 people between 9/11 and 2015. Those who sacrificed themselves overseas did so as volunteers in professional armed forces, not as conscripts. Consequently there would be no meaningful public backlash against the “forever wars” remotely akin to the protests against Vietnam.

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Domestic counter-terrorism most often worked. Major attacks like those in Madrid in 2004, London in 2005 and Paris in 2015 were fortunately rare. In the longer term though, the War on Terror came back to bite apathetic citizens. Armoured vehicles and other War on Terror relics sold by the Pentagon to police forces featured prominently in the policing of protests across the US after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020. Counter-terrorism can affect societies for far longer than expected.

Unlike these wars of choice, in Northern Ireland the British state had far less discretion over whether to give up and leave entirely. A persuasive case is made for the UK achieving partial strategic victory by reducing terrorist capacity, protecting the population to a substantial degree and maintaining order. There is no question that counter-terrorism tactics could be radically self-defeating – internment without trial, torture and the “shoot-to-kill” controversy over security forces shootings being only the most obvious examples.

English is firm, however, in his argument that over the longer term more refined, discriminating tactics played a part in undermining and containing the IRA, not defeating them – an important distinction. If both the British and republicans eventually recognised that the conflict was stuck in a stalemate position where only negotiation offered a way out, then informers, surveillance, arrests and the like contributed to that outcome.

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Northern Ireland conformed to the broader pattern whereby the state becomes better at containing and enduring terrorism over a long time. But the trend cannot obscure the lingering failures, as the revelations about state complicity in murders surrounding agent Stakeknife attest.

The book’s final case study, Israel-Palestine, raises the question of when counter-terrorism ceases to explain what states are doing in international conflicts. Is Israel trying to deal with terrorist organisations in the occupied Palestinian territories? The Israeli Defence Forces might instead be applying collective punishment against the Palestinian people as a whole, with little or no regard for individual participation in terrorism.

In the view of South Africa, the punishment has reached the level of genocide and the International Court of Justice is investigating whether such a characterisation is accurate. Even if South Africa’s position about Israel’s current conduct is accepted, there is value in finding out how decades of counter-terrorism brought us to this point. The historian’s longer perspective pays dividends here. The 1930s Arab Revolt, Jewish desperation for a safe national home after the Holocaust, and Israel’s founding amid mass Palestinian displacement (of more than 700,000 people) form the essential context for today’s events.

Both the terrorist threat and Israel’s counter-measures changed over the years. Though efficiently executed and certainly terrorising, airliner hijackings and other operations outside Israel were abandoned by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation after 1974, recognising the harm done to Palestine’s cause in international opinion.

Historians look at longer trajectories than time-pressed government employees can usually manage – one reason why this book is essential reading for those charged with safeguarding the state against terrorist threats

Israel’s slow progress in bringing the PLO into political dialogue bred complacency about the impacts of occupation and settler expansion in Palestinian lands, contributing to the emergence from 1987 of Hamas, a skilful social provider as much as a terrorist group. The 1993 Oslo Accords on the two-state solution came into play alongside continuing repression, such as mass incarceration and assassinations (159 of the latter between 2000 and 2004, for example). Hamas’s suicide bombings proved much harder to prevent than its missile strikes. On the whole, the Israeli approach has resulted in tactical effectiveness coupled with strategic self-harm, a judgment likely to be vindicated by the current offensive in Gaza, and only possible with US support.

Together, the three conflicts suggest pushing for total strategic victory over terrorism is a fool’s errand. Even partial strategic success, as in Northern Ireland and to a lesser degree the War on Terror, can come at a heavy price after many long, miserable years. Tactical success is much more common. The relative ease with which enemies can be damaged by arrests, assassinations and other means has frequently deluded policymakers about the chances of these small gains adding up to a meaningful political endpoint.

[  Sinn Féin’s Troubles apology may be flawed, but silence from London has been deafening  ]

English is therefore rightly cautious in offering lessons for the future, stressing the need for realistic goals, containment over eradication and constant vigilance about terrorists’ desire to provoke governments into over-reactions. In the end, terrorists often do go away, when the state proves resilient enough to carry on, when the underlying social problems are addressed and when enough people sicken of violence. Does Counter-Terrorism Work? is an acute guide for all who want to understand why the misery inherent in terrorism often cannot be expunged as quickly as we should like.

Huw Bennett is author of Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966–1975 (Cambridge University Press)

Further reading

Terrorist minds: the psychology of violent extremism from al-qaeda to the far right by john horgan (columbia university press, 2024).

We might want to believe anyone who engages in terrorism is simply deranged. Unfortunately, the truth is more complicated. John Horgan has spent decades studying terrorism and interviewing terrorists. This book gives an accessible entry into the terrorist mindset, bringing in examples as diverse as West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof group of radical leftists, far-right conspiracy theorists and Isis.

Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 by Beatrice de Graaf (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

Terrorism is frequently treated as a contemporary problem and a very specific one. Delving back into the 19th century, de Graaf dissects the nature of political violence after the Napoleonic Wars and shows how European states co-operated to create a security order to stabilise the continent against major conflicts and violence from revolutionary movements.

A Woman’s Place: US Counterterrorism Since 9/11 by Joana Cook (Hurst, 2021)

How did women participate in and shape the War on Terror? Joana Cook provides the answers in a path-breaking book that smashes assumptions about militaries and terrorist groups as places where men always dominate. Both sides weaponised gender to gain tactical advantage, and women had to navigate and exploit the roles assigned to them.

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Moscow attack fuels concern over global ISIS-K threat growing under the Taliban in Afghanistan

By Ahmad Mukhtar

Updated on: March 28, 2024 / 12:47 PM EDT / CBS News

The devastating March 22 terrorist attack on a packed concert hall in the Moscow suburbs brought Afghanistan abruptly back into the spotlight, as suspicions quickly fell on the ISIS branch in the country. While ISIS attributed the carnage to a never-before-mentioned Russian wing, the U.S. had warned about two weeks earlier of intelligence suggesting the Afghan affiliate, ISIS-Khorasan or ISIS-K , was planning attacks in Russia.

Russian officials also said , at about the same time, that they'd thwarted another ISIS-K plot  targeting a synagogue in Moscow. 

Four men identified by Russia as suspects in the concert hall attack, dragged before a judge bearing signs of significant beatings this week, were all said to be nationals of Tajikistan. That country sits right on Afghanistan's northern border, and many of ISIS-K's fighters are believed to be Tajik nationals. 

So while Moscow hurls accusations at Ukraine that both Kyiv and Washington say are baseless , and no positive link has been established between the concert hall attack and ISIS' Afghan franchise, it has renewed concern about the promise made by Afghanistan's Taliban rulers to prevent the country from once again becoming a haven for terrorist groups to plot attacks around the world.

What are the Taliban's relations with ISIS-K?

An array of terrorist groups operated in Afghanistan before and throughout the decades-long U.S. and allied military presence in the country. Since the Taliban regained power nearly three years ago, however, many of those militant groups have ceased operations in the country.

But not ISIS-K. It has continued not only operating, but working hard, through indiscriminate bloodshed, to challenge and erode the Taliban's authority .

Both are Islamic fundamentalist groups, and both are designated terrorist organizations by the U.S. government, but the Taliban and ISIS-K have different ideologies and goals, and they are at war with each other.

The Taliban's goal had, for more than two decades, been to topple Afghanistan's U.S.-backed government and to reimpose its harsh interpretation of what a "pure Islamic" country should be. It has done that .

ISIS-K, in contrast, is considered one of the more outwardly threatening affiliates of the now-global network born out of the wars in Iraq and Syria. The Afghan branch was formed in 2015 along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Its aim is to establish an Islamic caliphate in the region (as it did for several years in parts of Iraq and Syria) and to expand its terror activities around the world.

Over the past couple years, ISIS-K has conducted high-profile attacks against Taliban officials in Afghanistan, killing some important figures along with civilians. Just last week the group conducted a suicide attack in Kandahar province targeting Taliban workers who had gathered outside a bank to withdraw their salaries.

United Nations data reported last year shows that, since 2022 alone, ISIS-K had claimed responsibility for more than 190 suicide bombings in major cities, resulting in some 1,300 casualties.

Can the Taliban stop ISIS-K? Would it?

The Taliban, having returned as Afghanistan's governing power, is a formidable military force, bolstered by equipment left behind by U.S. and allied forces as they withdrew hastily in 2021 . Analysts say the Taliban has demonstrated some determination in combating ISIS-K, and has managed to reduce the threat from its rival within the country.

But analysts and United Nations envoys say a series of ISIS-K-attributed attacks and foiled plots in Iran, Russia and Europe cast serious doubt on the Taliban's willingness, or ability, to curb the group's operations outside of Afghanistan.

"The Taliban have been fighting ISIS-K inside Afghanistan, undoubtedly, because ISIS-K is the main armed opposition to their rule," Asfandyar Mir, a South Asia security expert with the United States Institute of Peace, told CBS News. 

But he added that the ISIS affiliate's "plotting in Europe, the attack in Kerman, Iran , and now the Moscow attack, raise serious questions over the efficacy of the Taliban's ability to degrade ISIS-K's external attack capability."

In January, the United Nations Security Council monitoring team said the Taliban's efforts to combat ISIS-K "appear to be more focused on the internal threat posed to them than the external operations of the group."

Has the Taliban's return handed ISIS a victory, too?

Just a year after the Taliban reassumed power in Afghanistan, the group's promise to the U.S. — written into the withdrawal agreement brokered by the Trump administration in 2020 — to prevent terror groups from using the country as a base, was pointedly challenged. 

Al Qaeda's top leader, Ayman Al Zawahiri, was killed by a U.S. drone strike in the diplomatic district of Kabul at the end of July 2022. 

• Al Qaeda appears to be growing in Afghanistan under the Taliban

During the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from the country the previous year, Taliban forces freed thousands of prisoners, including many ISIS-K fighters. In the mayhem, and without any military air power, those militants found ready access to weapons, and freedom of movement.  

"We have seen, in recent months, indications of a growing ISIS-K capacity to project threats far beyond its bastions in Afghanistan," Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, told CBS News. "ISIS-K, like the parent Islamic State and other regional affiliates, is ideologically committed to global activities. It was just a matter of getting the capacity to match the will, and it looks like ISIS-K has now reached that point."

France raised its national security threat level to its highest point Monday after the country's Interior Ministry said two attempted attacks by ISIS-K, targeting an LGBTQ nightclub and Jewish or Christian religious sites, had been thwarted.

The group "clearly has the capacity to threaten countries in many parts of the world," Kugelman told CBS News. "How much more it can develop an external targeting capacity will depend on various factors: The level of assistance it gets from the parent Islamic State; its ability to secure financing; the number of foreign fighters it's able to recruit and also the extent to which the international community works to counter this growing, global ISIS-K threat."

Samantha Vinograd, a CBS News contributor and former counterterrorism official for the Department of Homeland Security in the Biden and Obama administrations, told "Face the Nation" after the Moscow attack that ISIS, "despite territorial and leadership losses, has retained its ability to conduct operations, largely through regional affiliates like ISIS-K."

"We've seen ISIS-K attack American interests outside the Kabul airport during the evacuation, attack the Russian Embassy in Kabul in 2022 and, increasingly, increase the geographic scope of their operations," she said. "We also know that ISIS is relying on its regional affiliates to attack its interests in the West. And from my time advising the Secretary of Homeland Security, I will tell you that we were concerned about the threat that ISIS-K posed to American interests and to the homeland, and we took certain steps to mitigate that." 

Vinograd stressed the importance of intelligence-based screening of people trying to enter the United States as one of the best countermeasures against the ongoing ISIS-K threat, and said that's where she was concerned that "we're under-resourced in terms of having the information available to make really informed vetting decisions. With our withdrawals in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have lost certain intelligence capabilities."

ISIS-K's training camps and strongholds are located largely across Afghanistan's north, northeast and eastern provinces, the U.N.'s monitoring team said in 2023, "with at least five new ones built in 2022."

The Taliban claims, bluntly, to have neutralized the threat from ISIS-K, and it says forces conduct regular operations targeting the group's hideouts and leaders.

"We have eliminated the threat of ISIS-K in Afghanistan. In the past, during occupation of Afghanistan by U.S. and other allied forces, ISIS-K was holding some areas in their control in Afghanistan, and they had physical presence there, but it is not the case now," Suhail Shaheen, the head of the Taliban's political office in Qatar, told CBS News.

CBS News' Tucker Reals contributed to this report.

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Analysis: After Hamas Attacks, Terror Threats Are on the Rise

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After Hamas Attacks, Terror Threats Are on the Rise

Terror groups compete for funds and thrive on attention. that makes the world a much more dangerous place after oct. 7..

• Afghanistan
• Lynne O’Donnell

Israel-Hamas War

News, analysis, and background on the ongoing conflict .

More on this topic

In the weeks since the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel on Oct. 7, there’s been an alarming uptick in terrorist activity in Europe, with Western intelligence chiefs warning that Islamist extremists, jihadis, and antisemites, inspired by Hamas’s bold attack, could be looking for new ways to attack Western targets. Groups affiliated with al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Taliban, and based across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, will likely try to demonstrate their own capabilities to secure attention in a crowded field. After all, terror groups need the publicity of high-profile attacks to attract recruits, cash, weapons, and protection.

The intelligence chiefs of the Five Eyes partners—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States—met last week at a conference in California organized by the FBI , and they issued a joint warning that the threat of domestic attacks has risen as a direct result of the unfolding crisis in the Middle East.

“We have seen an increase in reported threats, but vigilance is heightened right now just because of the fluid and volatile environment in the Middle East and the way in which that could spin out in the U.S.,” Christopher Wray, the FBI chief, told 60 Minutes . The spy chiefs said that lone actors radicalized online, organized terrorist groups, state actors such as Iran, and far-right and neo-Nazi groups could become more active. “Make no mistake, this is a dangerous time,” Wray said.

The intelligence chiefs’ warning coincided with tightened security in Europe and elsewhere following a series of incidents linked to Islamist extremism. The Islamic State claimed responsibility after two Swedish football fans were killed in Brussels by a man, later shot dead by police, who was allegedly enraged by Quran burnings in Sweden. Italian authorities arrested two men accused of recruiting for the Islamic State. Gunmen with alleged links to the organization attacked and killed two tourists and their safari guide in Uganda . France deployed the military and raised the terrorist threat level to “urgent” after a teacher was stabbed to death and three others were injured by a Chechen man believed to be a radical Islamist. In Berlin , petrol bombs were thrown at a synagogue. The U.S. State Department issued a worldwide travel warning.

Hamas, after its surprisingly successful and deadly attack on Israeli villages, is for now on top of the terrorism tree. It adheres to an extreme ideology that blends Islamism with Palestinian nationalism, dedicated to the destruction of Israel; its “preferred methods include suicide bombings, rocket and mortar attacks, shootings, and kidnappings,” according to the the New York- and Berlin-based Counter Extremism Project.

The militant group has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan; however, the United Nations has refrained from classifying it as such. Hamas receives ample funding from Iran, which also provides military support, and has used its substantial financial resources to build grassroots support, winning the first (and so far last) elections in Gaza in 2006. In addition, Qatar provides money to Gaza for energy and humanitarian aid, which some analysts allege helps Hamas maintain its support among Palestinians in Gaza.

But the influence of the Taliban is never far away. Analysts said it was their victory in Afghanistan in 2021 that has emboldened extremists across the globe, and the group has restored Afghanistan to the terror-safe haven it was before the 2001 U.S. invasion. Mohammad Moheq, an Islamic studies scholar and the editor in chief of the daily newspaper Hasht-e-Subh (known in English as 8AM) ,  said that Afghanistan is an integral part of the radical Islamist narrative. The ultimate goal, he said, is “fighting in Palestine and removing Israel.”

Since retaking control, the Taliban have overhauled the education system, transforming schools into religious madrassas where boys are drilled in extremist ideology that includes anti-Israel rhetoric taught by radical mullahs , Moheq said. Al Qaeda figures from Arab states are deployed to training camps to drill recruits in military and ideological instruction. “The result of the Taliban controlling Afghanistan is providing the best opportunity to produce a new generation, and train and educate a new generation of extremist fighters,” said Moheq, who was an ambassador to Egypt and a presidential advisor before the Afghan republic collapsed.

The U.N. Security Council’s Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team has identified a large number of extremist groups that fought alongside the Taliban and now enjoy their protection in Afghanistan, including old al Qaeda, which is again active, running ministries, safe houses, and training camps.

Al Qaeda and Hamas leaders were among the first to congratulate the Taliban on their victory in 2021 and pledge allegiance to the Taliban’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh telephoned Abdul Ghani Baradar, a senior Taliban leader and now Afghanistan’s acting deputy prime minister, to tell him that the end of the U.S. “occupation” was “a prelude to the demise of all occupation forces, foremost of which is the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”

Afghan Peace Watch, an independent research organization, reported that U.S. arms arms left behind in the 2021 retreat have turned up in the Gaza Strip, India’s Kashmir region, and Pakistan. The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Mike McCaul, told CNN he’d “seen indications that the Taliban wants to come to liberate Jerusalem, in their words, to fight the Zionists.” Moheq said that he believes more than 100 Taliban gunmen have already been dispatched to Gaza.

The broader impact of the Hamas attacks—even before a potentially escalating regional war—is the possibility that terrorist groups around the world will try to match the spectacular carnage that Hamas pulled off earlier this month, which had a death toll equivalent to multiple Sept. 11 attacks on a per capita basis in a small country such as Israel. The need for terror outfits to raise their own game is what will make them even more dangerous, said Hans-Jakob Schindler, the senior director of the Counter Extremism Project.

In Europe, most eyes turn to the Islamic State, which has been the common denominator in many arrests on the continent over the past year. “It is clearly trying to show its relevance,” Schindler said. The Islamic State morphed out of Al Qaeda’s Iraqi branch in the mid-2000s, declaring a caliphate across territory in Iraq and Syria in 2014, until it was pulverized by joint U.S., Russian, and Kurdish military operations.

The South Asian franchise, called the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (IS-K), has largely been driven out of Afghanistan by the Taliban, who regard it as a strategic competitor and have cooperated with the Biden administration, security sources said, to track down and kill operatives inside Afghanistan’s borders.

But it has had a huge impact in neighboring Pakistan, where it bombed a pro-Taliban rally in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on July 31, killing at least 54 people. Schindler, of the Counter Extremism Project, said the emergence of Islamic State (IS) and IS-K operatives in Europe should sound an alarm for security and intelligence services, as the Hamas attacks could portend a rise in militant activity across the world, as the 9/11 atrocities did in the years that followed.

“Hamas dominates everything now, and that’s not good for IS,” he said. “If you’re not in the news, no one is going to give you money.”

Correction, Oct. 23, 2023: This article was updated to clarify the nature of Qatar’s financial relationship with Gaza and Hamas.

Lynne O’Donnell is a columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author. She was the Afghanistan bureau chief for Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press between 2009 and 2017.

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Pakistani Airstrikes in Afghanistan Kill at Least 8, Taliban Officials Say

The pre-dawn strikes escalated tensions between two countries that have clashed over the recent rise in militant violence on Pakistan’s soil.

By Christina Goldbaum and Zia ur-Rehman

Christina Goldbaum reported from Kabul, Afghanistan; and Zia ur-Rehman from Karachi, Pakistan.

Pakistan launched two airstrikes into Afghanistan on Monday morning that killed at least eight people, Afghan officials said, escalating simmering tensions between the two countries.

The pre-dawn strikes were carried out in the Paktika and Khost Provinces in eastern Afghanistan around 3 a.m., Afghan officials said. Three children were among those killed, according to Taliban officials, who condemned the strikes as a violation of Afghan territory.

The strikes came amid a surge of attacks by militants in Pakistan following the Taliban’s seizure of power in neighboring Afghanistan. Pakistani officials have blamed militants harbored on Afghan soil and protected by the Taliban administration for the attacks. Taliban officials have denied those claims.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban administration, said in a statement on X that his country “has a long experience of freedom struggle against the superpowers of the world” and “does not allow anyone to invade its territory.”

“Such incidents can have very bad consequences which will be out of Pakistan’s control,” he added.

The Pakistani action came two days after militants attacked a military post in northwestern Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan. In a statement released Monday evening, the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the country had carried out “intelligence-based antiterrorist operations” inside Afghanistan and accused the Taliban administration of aiding militants operating in Pakistan.

Over the past two years, the statement said, the Pakistani government has “repeatedly urged the Afghan authorities to take concrete and effective action to ensure that the Afghan soil is not used as a staging ground for terrorism against Pakistan.”

“However, certain elements among those in power in Afghanistan are actively patronizing T.T.P. and using them as a proxy against Pakistan,” it added, referring to the Pakistani Taliban, also known as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or T.T.P.

The strikes and statement appeared to signal that Pakistan’s newly elected government would take a tough stance with the Taliban administration in Afghanistan over the militant violence that has roared back in Pakistan in recent years. That violence has shattered a relatively calm period since the country’s military carried out a large-scale military operation in 2014 and forced militants across the border into Afghanistan.

After the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan collapsed in August 2021 , the pace of attacks by militants surged in Pakistan, with the assaults themselves becoming bolder. In 2023, the number of attacks by militant groups in Pakistan rose by nearly 20 percent compared with the previous year, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, which monitors extremist violence and is based in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

The violence has raised fears of a wider conflict breaking out along the historically contested border, known as the Durand Line, between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It has also fueled growing tensions between the Pakistani authorities and Taliban officials, who deny offering support to militant groups operating in Pakistan, including their ally, the Pakistani Taliban.

Pakistani officials have repeatedly asked the Taliban administration in Afghanistan to rein in the militants. In response, the Taliban authorities have suggested that Pakistan address the militants’ demands and have offered to mediate talks.

The Pakistani authorities’ frustration with the Taliban administration appeared to boil over in September, when the Pakistani government announced a policy aimed at expelling the more than half a million Afghans residing illegally in Pakistan.

The strikes on Monday appeared to send another message to the Taliban administration that Pakistan’s military and newly elected government would take a tougher stance on the militant violence.

The airstrikes sought to “dispel perceptions of a weak Pakistani state,” said Muhammad Amir Rana, head of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies. They also “reflect a unified counterterrorism policy between the new civilian government and the military,” he added.

While sporadic cross-border shelling from Pakistan frequently killed civilians in Afghanistan during the U.S.-led war, the strikes on Monday were the first that Pakistan had launched into Afghanistan in nearly two years. The last strikes, in April 2022 , killed at least 45 people in Khost and Kunar Provinces of eastern Afghanistan.

The strikes on Monday were part of the military’s response to the attack on the military post on Saturday, a suicide blast that killed seven members of the Pakistani security forces, according to the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That attack also prompted the military to carry out an operation in the area and kill eight militants, according to a statement on Monday by the Inter-Services Public Relations office, the Pakistani military’s media arm.

Pakistani government officials promised an enduring response to the militants’ attack.

“Pakistan has decided that whoever enters our borders, homes or country to commit terror, we will respond to them strongly, regardless of their identity or country of origin,” President Asif Ali Zardari said while speaking at the funeral prayers for the army officers killed in the attack.

Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting from Kabul, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan.

Christina Goldbaum is the Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief for The Times. More about Christina Goldbaum

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47 Questions and Answers on the War in Afghanistan

With kind permission the following article which appeared on ZMagazine web site (ZNet), on October 15, 2001, has been reposted here. It is a series of 47 questions and answers on various aspects of the events surrounding the September 11 atrocity. You can see the original article at http://www.zmag.org/55qaframe.htm

The War In Afghanistan 47 Questions and Answers and additional links for further Information By Michael Albert and Stephen R. Shalom Oct 14, 2001

In the course of our discussions since the bombing of Afghanistan began, we have encountered certain questions over and over. Here we assemble those questions and provide short answers to each. In some cases we also provide a link or two for additional immediately relevant information or commentary. Much more information can be found via: ZNet's Complete Terrorism & War Coverage .

Also, we have ourselves previously offered September 11 Q/A Talking Points and Five Arguments Against War which provide backdrop for this essay.

• What is Islamic fundamentalism?
• What is the attitude in the Arab and Islamic worlds to (a) the Sept. 11 attacks, and (b) the current US war in Afghanistan?
• What grievances fuel hatred for the U.S. in the Middle East?
• Does trying to understand/explain the grievances of the people of the Middle East constitute excusing bin Laden, excusing terror, softness on fascism, etc.
• What is Terrorism?
• Are Bin Laden and his network terrorists?
• Is the Taliban terrorist?
• Is Hamas a terrorist group?
• Is the U. S. government terrorist?
• Why did the World Trade Center terrorists do it?
• What is the legal way of dealing with terrorism?
• If all terrorists were pursued through legal channels, what would the international response have been to the September 11 attacks?
• If all terrorists were pursued through legal channels, what would be the international response to the embargo of Iraq, the bombing of Kosovo and Serbia, and the bombing of Afghanistan?
• Is what the U. S. is doing consistent with a legal approach?
• Which nations have been supporting the US war in Afghanistan and why?
• What has been the role of the UN in the current war in Afghanistan?
• What are the reasons to oppose U.S. bombing of Afghanistan?
• But isn't it obvious bin Laden did it?
• Is it possible that there is decisive evidence, but that its disclosure would compromise important intelligence gathering capabilities?
• But didn't Afghanistan reject out-of-hand US demand to turn over bin Laden?
• But you can't negotiate with terrorists?
• But doesn't the U.S. have the right of self-defense?
• But isn't the U. S. getting a vast coalition of support?
• What do we think about the Sept. 14th Congressional resolution (passed 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House) authorizing President Bush to use force?
• But aren't the targets being bombed in Afghanistan legitimate targets?
• But aren't civilian casualties being avoided in Afghanistan?
• But aren't U. S. food drops a sincere effort to help the people of Afghanistan?
• What about the anti-terrorism bill passed by Congress, isn't that a step in the right direction?
• How about the Bush administration's campaign to dry up terrorism's financial networks?
• How about supporting the Northern Alliance, doesn't that hold out positive promise for Afghanistan?
• How about invading Iraq, won't that be good for Iraqis?
• How about increasing U.S. defense and military spending?
• How about building a national missile defense system?
• How about repealing the executive order prohibiting assassinating foreign leaders?
• How about using racial profiling to counter terrorism in the United States?
• What is a "war on terrorism," and why is it being elevated as the capstone of U. S. foreign policy?
• But what about the role of oil in the current crisis?
• So how long will the war in Afghanistan go on?
• What dangers will we face in South Asia and the Middle East as a result of the current war?
• But won't the "war on terrorism" reduce terrorism, and isn't that worth it?
• Wouldn't changing US foreign policy under the threat of terrorism mean that we are giving in to terrorism?
• Does the US support a Palestinian state? Should it?
• What should the U.S. have done in response to September 11?
• What other policies should our government be following to reduce the likelihood of people will undertake terrorist agendas?
• The peace movement says "Justice, Not War. " But with terrorists, how can justice be achieved without war?
• In what ways if any should the peace movement adjust its positions in the light of Sept. 11?
• What should be the relation of other movements to the peace movement, and vice versa?

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1. what is islamic fundamentalism, 2. what is the attitude in the arab and islamic worlds to (a) the sept. 11 attacks, and (b) the current us war in afghanistan, 3. what grievances fuel hatred for the u.s. in the middle east, 4. does trying to understand/explain the grievances of the people of the middle east constitute excusing bin laden, excusing terror, softness on fascism, etc., 5. what is terrorism, 6. are bin laden and his network terrorists, 7. is the taliban terrorist, 8. is hamas a terrorist group, 9. is the u.s. government terrorist, 10. why did the world trade center terrorists do it, 11. what is the legal way of dealing with terrorism, 12. if all terrorists were pursued through legal channels, what would the international response have been to the september 11 attacks, 13. if all terrorists were pursued through legal channels, what would the international response have been to the embargo of iraq, the bombing of kosovo and serbia, and the bombing of afghanistan, 14. is what the u. s. is doing consistent with a legal approach , 15. which nations have been supporting the us war in afghanistan and why, 16. what has been the role of the un in the current war in afghanistan, 17. what are the reasons to oppose u.s. bombing of afghanistan, 18. but isn't it obvious bin laden did it, 19. is it possible that there is decisive evidence , but that its disclosure would compromise important intelligence gathering capabilities, 20. but didn't afghanistan reject out-of-hand us demand to turn over bin laden, 21. but can you negotiate with terrorists, 22. but doesn't the u.s. have the right of self-defense, 23. but isn't the u.s. getting a vast coalition of support, 24. what do we think about the sept. 14th congressional resolution (passed 98-0 in the senate and 420-1 in the house) authorizing president bush to use force, 25. but aren't the targets being bombed in afghanistan legitimate targets, 26. but aren't civilian casualties being avoided in afghanistan, 27. but aren't u.s. food drops a sincere effort to help the people of afghanistan, 28. what about the anti-terrorism bill passed by congress, isn't that a step in the right direction, 29. how about the bush administration's campaign to dry up terrorism's financial networks, 30. how about supporting the northern alliance, doesn't that hold out positive promise for afghanistan, 31. how about invading iraq, won't that be good for iraqis, 32. how about increasing u.s. defense and military spending, 33. how about building a national missile defense system, 34. how about repealing the executive order prohibiting the assassination of foreign leaders, 35. how about using racial profiling to counter terrorism in the united states, 36. what is a "war on terrorism," and why is it being elevated as the capstone of u. s. foreign policy, 37. but what about the role of oil in the current crisis, 38. so how long will the war in afghanistan go on, 39. what dangers will we face in south asia and the middle east as a result of the current war, 40. but won't the "war on terrorism" reduce terrorism , and isn't that worth it, 41. wouldn't changing u.s. foreign policy under the threat of terrorism mean that we are giving in to terrorism, 42. does the u.s. support a palestinian state should it, 43. what should the u.s. have done in response to september 11, 44. what other policies should our government be following to reduce the likelihood of people will undertake terrorist agendas, 45. the peace movement says "justice, not war. " but with terrorists, how can justice be achieved without war, 46. in what ways if any should the peace movement adjust its positions in the light of sept. 11, 47. what should be the relation of other movements to the peace movement, and vice versa.

The term "fundamentalist" is used in a number of different ways. One definition is someone who interprets the texts of his or her religion in a literal way or who adheres to the original, traditional practices and beliefs of the religion. Another definition is someone who is intolerant of the views of other religions or sects. These two definitions often overlap -- traditional religions tend to be authoritarian and misogynist, which lend themselves to intolerance -- but they are not the same. (For example, some pacifist religious sects might be fundamentalist in the first sense, but not the second. ) Every religion has its fundamentalists -- Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and so on -- and some of these engage in terrorism.

Fundamentalists in the second sense have been on the rise worldwide. One reason has been the absence in so much of the Third World of a meaningful Left. Without a left alternative to the oppression and alienation of modern capitalism, many have sought solace in the easy explanations and promises of intolerant religion. Left organizations in many Arab and Muslim nations have either been smashed by right-wing forces (often backed by the major Western states) or discredited by ruthless dictatorships (as in Iraq) or Soviet-style parties. In this void, fundamentalism flourished. Fundamentalism was also supported by the opportunism of various states (for example, the United States backed reactionary fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden, against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and aided mullahs against the left in Iran; Israel gave early backing to Hamas in an effort to provide a counter-weight to the secular PLO).

The Taliban, the rulers of most of Afghanistan, adhere to a particularly extreme and intolerant variant of fundamentalist Islam. They came to power out of the in-fighting among the various Mujahedeen (religious warriors) groups following the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were the principal international backers of the Taliban

Pakistani intelligence maintained extremely close ties to the Taliban and Pakistani troops assisted their rise to power. Most Taliban leaders and many of its foot-soldiers were trained in the madrassas -- religious schools -- in Pakistan set up with funding from wealthy Pakistanis, Saudis, and others in the Gulf, which taught a version of the fundamentalist Wahhabism that is the state religion of Saudi Arabia. Despite the anti-American and generally reactionary teachings of these madrassas, Pakistan has been a U.S. ally and Saudi Arabia has been one of Washington's closest allies

• Ali: Q/A About Taliban and Islam...
• Said: Clash of Ignorance

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Every government in the region other than Iraq condemned the September 11 attacks, and even Iraq sent its condolences to the victims. The enormity of the slaughter horrified many people in the region, and there were many deeply felt expressions of sympathy for those who lost their lives. But a large reservoir of anti-Americanism led many people to feel that the United States was finally getting back some of what it deserved, or to believe one of the idiotic conspiracy theories so common in the Middle East (the Israeli Mossad did it, the CIA did it). Among Palestinians, a poll in early October found that two-thirds considered the attacks to violate Islamic law, while a quarter thought them consistent with it. The poll showed Palestinians angry about U.S. foreign policy, but not at Americans.

But even among those who were horrified by the September 11 attacks, most people in the region seem to oppose the war on Afghanistan. (The same Palestinian poll found 89 percent criticizing a U.S. attack on Afghanistan, with 92 percent believing that it would lead to more attacks on the United States.) Many pro-U.S. governments were tactfully silent when the air strikes began, sensing the popular opposition. The unilateralism of the U.S. response was especially criticized; Iran -- which had indicated its willingness to support a UN action -- sharply condemned the U.S. attacks

• Fisk: Awesome Cruelty
• Roy: Algebra of Infinite Justice

Anti-American sentiment is widespread in the Middle East, not just among Islamic fundamentalists. This anti-Americanism has a variety of sources. Some comes from specific U.S. policies in the region -- backing Israeli oppression of Palestinians, enforcing devastating sanctions on the civilian population of Iraq, supporting authoritarian governments, often by deploying U.S. troops on land considered holy by Muslims. Some comes from resentment of Washington's economic and political arrogance more generally. And some comes from religious opposition to the secular world, of which the United States is the leading power, an intolerance fed by sexism, anti-Semitism, and other reactionary doctrines. One indication of the weight of all these factors is provided by the videotape Osama bin Laden released on October 7 -- not because it tells us anything about the motives of bin Laden (who is probably totally unconcerned with oppressed or suffering people, hoping only to precipitate a holy war engulfing the entire region) -- but because bin Laden is an astute judge of what issues inflame people. In that video, bin Laden referred to 80 years of Muslim humiliation, Israeli oppression of Palestinians, Iraqi starvation, and the atom bombs dropped on Japan. America, he warned, "will not live in peace before peace reigns in Palestine, and before all the army of infidels depart the land of Muhammad...." He felt these were the issues that people hearing him would be moved by, not an attack on Hollywood, much less democracy.

• Shalom: Why Do They Hate Us?
• Herman: Distaste for Civilization?

When some students killed their classmates at Columbine high school, people of good will tried to figure out the causes for such horrible events. In so doing, they were hardly justifying or excusing the heinous slaughter. The killers may have had some neo-Nazi sympathies (choosing Hitler's birthday as the day for their assault) -- but this didn't change our obligation to examine the deeper causes of adolescent alienation, to discover how schools might contribute to that alienation and what they could to do reduce it. No grievance of oppressed people can excuse or justify what happened on September 11. (As a PLO official declared: "It is true that there is injustice, terrorism, killing and crimes in Palestine, but that does not justify at all for anybody to kill civilians in New York and Washington.") But if we want to understand and reduce the widespread anti-Americanism that allows terrorism to find fertile soil, we need to attend to the grievances.

• Chomsky, Albert, et. al. Reply to Hitchens

Dictionary definitions indicate it is creating terror, employing fear for political purposes. More aptly, terrorism is attacking and terrifying civilian populations in order to force the civilians' governments to comply with demands. So Hitler's bombing of London was terror bombing, unlike his attacks on British military bases. The issue isn't what weapon is used, but who is the target and what is the motive. For terrorism the target is innocent civilians. The motive is political, impacting their government's behavior. Attacks on the public for private gain are not terrorism, but crime. Attacks on a military for political purposes are not terrorism, but acts of war.

• Herman: Anti-Terrorist Terrorism
• Shiva: Against Terrorism

Bin Laden has issued public statements calling for the killing of U. S. civilians, among others. Evidence presented at trials compellingly ties the bin Laden network to terrorist attacks (the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the U. S. embassies in Africa in 1998). So even apart from Sept. 11, there is no doubt that bin Laden and Al Qaeda are terrorists.

• Fisk: bin Laden...

In its treatment of the Afghan people -- especially women and religious minorities -- the Taliban has behaved in a terrorist manner. It has allowed bin Laden to establish training camps on its territory and prior to September 11, 2001, rejected UN demands that it turn bin Laden over to the United States. There have been no specific charges by the United States regarding any direct Afghan support for international terrorism. Prior to Sept. 11, Afghanistan was not on the U. S. State Department's (rather selective) list of nation's engaging in state terrorism.

• Richter: Z Article Nov 2000

Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine engage in bombings of Israeli civilians. Despite the fact that Palestinians are oppressed, these attacks constitute terrorism. There can be no justification for blowing up civilians in a Sbarro's pizzeria or a Tel Aviv nightclub. These organizations are not the only terrorists, however. The Israeli government has killed huge numbers of Palestinian civilians. These acts too are terrorism. One terrorism does not justify or excuse the other. The United States has been backing -- with military, economic, and diplomatic support -- Israeli terrorism.

When the U.S. government targets civilians with the intention of pressuring their governments, yes, it is engaging in terrorism. Regrettably, this is not uncommon in our history. Most recently, imposing a food and drug embargo on a country - Iraq - with the intention of making conditions so difficult for the population that they will rebel against their government, is terrorism (with food and medicine as the weapons, not bombs). Bombing civilian centers and the society's public infrastructure in Kosovo and Serbia, again with the intent of coercing political outcomes, was terrorism. And now, attacking Afghanistan (one of the world's poorest countries) and hugely aggravating starvation dangers for its population with the possible loss of tens of thousands, or more lives, is terrorism. We are attacking civilians with the aim of attaining political goals unrelated to them - in this case hounding bin Laden and toppling the Taliban.

We can't know, of course, but we can surmise. The September 11 attack was a grotesquely provocative act against a super power. No doubt many of those involved felt great anger and desperation due to U.S. policies in the region. But these attacks didn't alleviate such problems. The U.S. response is predictably violent and as any anyone would anticipate, reactionary forces have benefited in the U.S. and around the world.

But perhaps provoking the United States was precisely the intent. By provoking a massive military assault on one or more Islamic nations, the perpetrators may have sought to set off a cycle of terror and counter-terror, precipitating a holy war between the Islamic world and the West, leading, in their hopes, to the overthrow of all insufficiently Islamic regimes and the unraveling of the United States, just as the Afghan war contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union.

But if provocation rather than grievances motivated the planners of the terror strikes against the U.S., this wouldn't make grievances irrelevant. Whatever the planners' motives, they still needed to attract capable, organized, and skilled people, not only to participate, but even to give their lives to the planner's suicidal agenda. Deeply-felt grievances provide a social environment from which fanatics recruit and garner support.

In our world, the only alternative to vigilantism is that guilt should be determined by amassing of evidence that is then assessed in accordance with international law by the United Nations Security Council or other appropriate international agencies.

Punishment should be determined by the UN as well, and likewise the means of implementation. The UN may arrive at determinations that one or another party likes or not, as with any court, and may also be subject to political pressures that call into question its results or not, as with any court. But that the UN is the place for determinations about international conflict is obvious, at least according to solemn treaties signed by the nations of the world.

Thus, to pursue a legal approach means assembling evidence of culpability and presenting it to the UN or the World Court. It means those agencies undertaking to apprehend and prosecute culprits. It does not involve victims overseeing retaliation without even demonstrating guilt, much less having legal sanction, much less in a manner that increases the sum total of terrorism people are suffering and the conditions that breed potential future terrorism

• Ratner: A Legal Alternative

Presumably, if provided proof of culpability, UN agencies would seek to arrest guilty parties. They would first seek to negotiate extradition. If a host government failed to comply, as a last resort they could presumably send in a force to extract guilty parties. But these actions would be taken in accord with international law, by forces led by international agencies and courts, in a manner respecting civilian safety, and consistent with further legitimating rather than bypassing respect for law and justice.

These acts, among many others, violate international law in many respects, not least because they harm civilians. Presumably, then, were international legal channels strengthened and respected, aggrieved parties could bring these and other cases to legal attention, leading to diverse prosecutions, many of which would be aimed at officials from the U.S.

To not present evidence, to decide guilt rather than respect institutions of international law, to prosecute not only presumed culprits but a whole population suffering terror and perhaps starvation--of course, international law has been violated. Worse, the mechanism for attaining illegal vigilante prosecution has been a policy which knowingly and predictably will kill many, perhaps even huge numbers of innocent civilians. We take access to food away from millions and then give food back to tens of thousands while bombing the society into panic and dissolution.

The answer is not to reduce the prospects of terror attacks. The U.S. government and all mainstream media warn their likelihood will increase, both out of short term desire to retaliate, and, over the longer haul, due to producing new reservoirs of hate and resentment. The answer is not to get justice. Vigilantism is not justice but the opposite, undermining international norms of law. The answer is not to reduce actual terror endured by innocent people. Our actions are themselves hurting civilians, perhaps in tremendous numbers.

All rhetoric aside, the answer is that the U.S. wishes to send a message and to establish a process. The message, as usual, is don't mess with us. We have no compunction about wreaking havoc on the weak and desperate. The process, also not particularly original since Ronald Regan and George Bush senior had similar aspirations, is to legitimate a "war on terrorism" as a lynchpin rationale for both domestic and international policy-making.

This "war on terrorism" is meant to serve like the Cold War did. We fight it with few if any military losses. We use it to induce fear in our own population and via that fear to justify all kinds of elite policies from reducing civil liberties, to enlarging the profit margins of military industrial firms, to legitimating all manner of international polices aimed at enhancing U.S. power and profit, whether in the Mideast or elsewhere.

For more on U.S. Motives, see also:

• Mandel: Illegal War
• Albert: What's Going On
• Chomsky Answers Albert

The press refers to the "U.S.-led" war on Afghanistan, but in fact, except for the first day when some British Tomahawk missiles were fired, only U.S. military forces have so far been engaged in combat. Various nations -- in Europe, Canada, and so on -- have offered troops if the U.S. so requests. So far there has been no U.S. request, presumably because Washington wants to maintain total control of the operation.

No Arab nation has offered troops or even allowed its territory to be (openly) used for offensive military operations. While many regimes do not support the Taliban, they fear public reaction if they should participate in an attack on a Muslim country. Pakistan is providing bases that may in the future be used for helicopter raids. This was a reluctant response to U.S. cancellation of its debt, lifting of sanctions (for its nuclear weapons program), and an apparent U.S. guarantee that it would have a say in the future government of Afghanistan. Uzbekistan, which at first offered bases only for humanitarian operations, seems to have agreed to let the U.S. use the bases as it wishes, in return for a U.S. security guarantee.

Various other nations -- such as Russia and China -- have offered support, though non-military, to the United States, hoping thereby to have U.S. support as they battle their own domestic secessionist movements which they accuse of terrorism (in Chechnya and China's western Muslim Xinjiang province).

The Security Council passed two strong resolutions following September 11, but neither one authorized the use of military force, and especially not unilateral military force. The New York Times reported (7 Oct. 2001): "A sign of Washington's insistence that its hands not be tied was its rejection of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's entreaties that any American military action be subject to Security Council approval, administration officials said." Still less has the United States been willing to have the United Nations have control over the response to terrorism, including over any military operations.

• Guilt hasn't yet been proven.
• Bombing violates International Law.
• Bombing will be unlikely to eliminate those responsible for the September 11 attacks.
• Huge numbers of innocent people will die.
• Bombing will reduce the security of U.S. citizens.
• Albert/Shalom 5 Arguments Against War

There are many reasons to suspect bin Laden's responsibility for September 11 and his recent video gloating does not lessen these suspicions. But although Secretary of State Colin Powell initially promised that evidence of responsibility would be presented, the Bush administration "decided it was not necessary to make public its evidence against Mr. bin Laden" ( NYT , 7 Oct. 2001). The British government did prepare a document, "Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States, 11 September 2001," ( http://www.pm.gov.uk ) which summarized real evidence regarding Osama bin Laden's involvement in earlier terrorist acts and noted the similarity of the Sept. 11 acts to the earlier acts (no warning given, intent to kill maximum number of people -- true of many terrorist acts), but provided very little information specifically regarding the events of September 11. The two crucial claims are contained in these statements, presented with no supporting evidence at all:

• Since 11 September we have learned that one of Bin Laden's closest and most senior associates was responsible for the detailed planning of the attacks.
• There is evidence of a very specific nature relating to the guilt of Bin Laden and his associates that is too sensitive to release.

Our guess, having no access to intelligence sources, is that bin Laden does indeed bear responsibility for the horrible deeds of September 11. But wars should not be started on the basis of our, or anybody else's, guess. Certainly public opinion in the Arab and Islamic world is going to want more convincing evidence. "A decent respect to the opinions of mankind," said the Declaration of Independence, required a public statement of the causes which impelled the American colonists to a war of independence. Likewise, a decent respect for the opinion of the international community would require that before any action evidence of responsibility be presented. Washington might be satisfied with the evidence, but many others may not be.

We know of historical cases where U. S. officials have falsified evidence. (For example, in 1981 Washington issued a White Paper claiming to prove "Communist Interference in El Salvador"; Raymond Bonner promptly showed this to be "a textbook case of distortion, embellishments, and exaggeration.") But the issue goes beyond any deliberate manipulation of evidence. It's simply a basic principle of justice that people should not be judges in their own case. We know of other cases where U. S. officials were quick to act on totally inadequate evidence (as when they bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, alleging its involvement in producing chemical weapons, a claim that dissolved when subjected to examination).

Certainly it would be reasonable for a government to refuse to reveal intelligence sources which could help prevent future terrorist plots. No one is asking for names of informants and so on, but conceivably some evidence might point clearly to a specific informant. Consider, however, the following:

• the U. S. was able to present evidence in court regarding the 1998 attacks on the U. S. embassies in Africa;
• even if evidence could not be made fully public, could it not be shared with the Security Council for their assessment? Sharing the evidence with Britain and the rest of NATO is better than nothing, but not the same as sharing it with the body having legal authority for international peace and security;
• some evidence (its nature and extent unknown) was apparently shared with Pakistan -- before its intelligence chief was sacked for being too sympathetic to the Taliban.

If there is evidence suitable for Pakistan, it's hard to see why that couldn't be made public. Washington, however, does not want to establish the precedent that it has an obligation to present evidence.

The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan stated on October 5, "We are prepared to try him if America provides solid evidence of Osama bin Laden's involvement in the attacks on New York and Washington." Asked if bin Laden could be tried in another country, the ambassador said, "We are willing to talk about that, but ... we must be given the evidence" ( Toronto Star , 6 Oct. 2001, p. A4). One report (AP, 7 Oct. 2001) quoted the ambassador as saying that legal proceedings could begin even before the United States offered any evidence: "Under Islamic law, we can put him on trial according to allegations raised against him and then the evidence would be provided to the court." Washington responded that its demands were non-negotiable and initiated its bombardment of Afghanistan. Was the Taliban offer serious? Could it have been the basis for further concessions? Who knows? Washington never pursued it. But do we really want a world where countries unilaterally issue ultimatums and then unilaterally decide whether the terms of the ultimatum have been met, cut off further negotiations, and open fire?

We might note that some other countries have refused to extradite accused terrorists, even when substantial evidence is presented. For example, Haiti has convicted Emmanuel Constant in absentia for being one of the leaders of paramilitary forces that killed thousands of civilians during the junta years in the early 1990s (with no small measure of U.S. complicity). Washington has refused to turn him over.

For the most part, you can't, but that is irrelevant to the issues at hand. You can't negotiate with serial killers, either, or with people who go berserk and shoot up their workmates in a post office. We don't deduce from the intransigence of perpetrators that the victims or the victims families should therefore become vigilantes and seek to arrest the culprits. We don't deduce that they should form lynch mobs, seeking the culprits dead or alive. And most important, we don't deduce that they should go after the families of the culprits, or their neighbors families, of the restaurant where they had breakfast.

That one can't sensibly negotiate with bin Laden and Al Qaeda - which may or may not be true - would only tell us that one shouldn't negotiate with them, not that we shouldn't pursue sensible channels of legal redress and prosecution, not that we should become vigilantes, not that we should adopt a lynch mob mentality, and that we should even go beyond that to attacking innocent bystanders in huge numbers, starving and otherwise terrorizing them.

If under attack, any country has the right to repel the attack, according to international law. But the right of self-defense is not unlimited. The standard precedent is the Caroline case, which held that action in self-defense should be confined to cases in which the "necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation." Thus, self defense would permit the United States to shoot down attacking enemy planes, but not to wage a war half way around the globe a month after a terrorist attack, a war that U.S. officials say might go on for years. Instead, this is the sort of situation that should be turned over to the United Nations for action.

But let's suppose someone doesn't like the above formulation. What norm would we want instead? If a country's civilian population is attacked, then that country has the right to determine the perpetrator to its own satisfaction, issue an ultimatum, determine on its own the adequacy of the response to the ultimatum, and attack the perpetrator's host country, causing great civilian harm. Would we really want this to be a universal norm? This would mean that Cubans could attack Washington on grounds that Miami harbors support for terrorists who have attacked Cuban civilians. Likewise, Iraqis, Serbs, and now Afghans, not to mention Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Colombians, Guatemalans, and so on, could all target Washington on grounds that the U.S. government has attacked or abetted attacks on their civilian populations - and, for that matter, ironically, Washington can attack itself, on the grounds that it abetted the creation and arming of bin Laden's terror network which in turn attacked the U.S.

Prime Minister Tony Blair said that Britain was acting in self-defense because many British citizens died in the World Trade Center. But many Indian citizens also died; do we want India to issue an ultimatum to Pakistan (for its connections to bin Laden and other terror networks)? Do we want India to then decide whether Pakistan has met the terms of its ultimatum and if New Delhi decides no, then war ensues?

On October 14, the Taliban agreed to turn bin Laden over to a neutral country if the U.S. stopped the bombing. (We might note that a proposal to turn bin Laden over to a neutral country is not unreasonable, given the unlikelihood of a fair trial in a country whose president has declared that bin Laden was wanted "dead or alive.") The United States rejected the offer. Is this a decision that should be made unilaterally by Washington.

Is this the morality, legality, and practicality anyone could wish to advocate for international relations?

There was a vast outpouring of sympathy for the victims of the September 11 attacks. Many nations have indicated their willingness to participate in a campaign against terrorism. But, as indicated above (question 15), only one other nation thus far -- Britain -- has participated in the military actions against Afghanistan. More importantly, a coalition means a group of Washington's friends, which is not the same as obtaining legal international sanction for war.

No vote in a nation's legislature can permit that nation to behave contrary to international law. The Congressional resolution no more makes U.S. military action "right" than would a vote by India's legislature legitimate an attack on Pakistan or by Russia's legislature legitimate slaughter in Chechnya. Military actions that cause massive civilian harm as is now occurring in Afghanistan are wrong -- they meet our definition of terrorism -- no matter what the vote of a legislature may be.

One might also note how the members of the U.S. Congress -- with one courageous exception -- abdicated their responsibility. They are constitutionally assigned responsibility to provide a check on the arbitrary power of the executive branch. To pass a resolution authorizing the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons" is essentially saying that Congress wants no voice in assessing evidence, determining the appropriate way to respond to that evidence, or even whether we will go to war against one or several dozen countries.

First, if the agent of attack is illegitimate, no target it attacks is a legitimate one, even if the target might be proper were the agent someone else. Suppose Saddam Hussein decided to bomb Afghanistan on grounds he didn't like the role of the Taliban in abetting terror in the world and against the U.S. Even if he confined himself to targets entirely bearing upon the actions of terrorists and not significantly endangering civilians, still, we would say Hussein was acting illegally since he had no UN authorization to act, and we wouldn't temper that claim on the grounds he could be doing worse. The norm is general.

Even if the current U.S. bombings were internationally and legally sanctioned, thus not being carried out in vigilante style, not all targets are legitimate by any means. There is no justification in attacking in a manner that puts people at risk of starvation, that attacks civilian infrastructure, or that carries risk of substantial civilian deaths.

If the attacks had been initiated because bin Laden and his network were demonstrated guilty, and UN legal agencies called for their extradition, and the Taliban refused, and it became necessary to pursue the culprits in order to prosecute them, then yes, there could be a list of legitimate targets for such endeavors, but only if the seven million people at risk of starvation were not endangered, and if means of assault could be found which -- unlike those currently being utilized -- could be well controlled without causing terrible accidents.

On October 12, Mary Robinson, the UN's Commissioner for Human Rights, called on the United States to halt the bombing so that food could reach up to two million desperate Afghan civilians (Independent, 13 Oct. 2001)

• Heikal: No Targets

If the question is, could the U.S. bomb in a fashion to induce greater civilian casualties, of course the answer is yes, so that in that sense it is avoiding many possible casualties. And if the question is, is it good that the U.S. isn't causing more deaths by our actions, again the answer is yes. But the question arises, why cause as many as we are? Why aggravate the desperate food situation to the point of possible calamity? Why attack in a manner that disrupts all social life and, inevitably, hits many civilians with bomb impact? This is not going to diminish hatred of the U.S. nor the violence in the region, but increase both. There is no justification for all this other than the desires to propel a state of war as a policy that benefits U.S. elites. If the food disaster materializes at the levels feared by aid and UN agencies, the catastrophe will be without historical parallel for such a short engagement

• Chien: Civilian Toll

The first week's airdrops, we're told, averaged about 37,500 rations per day. One ration is 3 meals, or one person-day of food. There are between 3-7 million people at risk of starvation. Thus, in order to alleviate the danger, the rate of airdrops has to increase over the largest drops so far by a factor of between one and two hundred.

Bush pledged $324 million in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. Each ration costs $4.25. Let us assume that there are only 3 million at risk of starvation, that every ration will reach one of those people, and that every dollar of that $324 million is going to rations (and not to the planes, fuel, staff, medicine, or any other item associated with delivery). Under these fantastically generous assumptions, there will be enough food to feed these people for 25 days. The reality is much worse: millions are now fleeing the bombing, and will not sow their crops of winter wheat. Much of the dropped food will land in minefields and remote areas. Most of Bush's money will not be spent on food. And there are probably 7.5 million in danger of starving, not 3 million. But even in this scenario the money is insufficient to last for the winter. Also for comparison, $40 billion was appropriated for the war effort, and a single B-2 bomber costs $2.1 billion.

To first aggravate the starvation danger faced by roughly 7 million at risk people by creating internal bedlam and cutting off food transport and aid through closing borders and bombing, and to then drop food for about one out of every hundred of the at-risk people, assuming all these meals were even accessible as compared to being scattered across terrain littered with military mines, is not a serious approach to saving lives. Rather, as the U.S. policymakers and commentators have repeated ad nauseam, it is a public relations effort aimed to reduce opposition, and nothing more.

As Doctors Without Borders, one of the agencies that had been working in Afghanistan, put it, "What is needed is large scale convoys of basic foodstuffs.... Until yesterday the UN and aid agencies such as ourselves were still able to get some food convoys into Afghanistan. Due to the air strikes the UN have stopped all convoys, and we will find delivering aid also much more difficult." As for the U.S. airdrops, "Such action does not answer the needs of the Afghan people and is likely to undermine attempts to deliver substantial aid to the most vulnerable."

• Doctors Without Borders
• Buckley: Afghan Disaster
• Monbiot: Genocide or Peace?

We need to distinguish between privileges and basic rights. Being able to get to an airport just 25 minutes before your flight is a privilege, not a basic right. We should be more than willing to give up this privilege if it is necessary for security. But we should insist on an extremely high burden of proof before we're willing to scuttle fundamental rights. There are good reasons to think that the provisions of the anti-terrorism bill go far beyond what is necessary for security. For example, the definition of terrorism in the bill would cover domestic political organizations engaging in civil disobedience.

• ACLU materials
• ACLU: Surveillance Report

Terrorist organizations have been able to finance their operations by laundering their money through banks. But cracking down on money laundering requires challenging the power of the banking industry and of the wealthy who use off shore banks to hide their assets something the politicians in thrall to the rich have been loathe to do. So U.S. officials have failed to use the legal tools they had to investigate terrorism's financial trail and have failed to request the new tools they needed. In May 2001, the U.S. blocked an effort by the OECD (the main industrial nations) to crack down on bank secrecy. (See Lucy Komisar, "U.S. Bank Laws Fund Terrorists," [AlterNet], 21 Sept. 2001, http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11556 ; Tim Weiner and David Cay Johnston, "Roadblocks Cited in Efforts to Trace bin Laden Money," NYT, 20 Sept. 2001.) U.S. officials consider Saudi officials especially uncooperative in freezing bin Laden's assets (NYT, 10 Oct. 2001). Ultimatums anyone?

• Weisbrot: Financial War

The Northern Alliance have in the past demonstrated a facility for barbarism only minimally less horrible than that of the Taliban. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who have been struggling for years for democracy and against fundamentalism, have warned against allowing the Northern Alliance to come to power.

This strategy of the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" has been used before with disastrous results. This was the logic that led to U.S. and Western support for the Mujahideen, leading to the Taliban, and aid and support for Saddam Hussein, and so on. It is not hard to predict that support for the Northern Alliance will, in years ahead, lead to still more travail and horror for Afghanistan, for the region, and perhaps for the world beyond.

• Prashad: Into the Past?
• The Northern Alliance?
• Human Rights Watch report

An influential group of Pentagon officials and national security elites have been urging that the United States use this opportunity to take military action to depose Saddam Hussein. Hussein is a monster and many Iraqis would be thrilled to see him go. But going to war against him without the most compelling evidence of his responsibility for the September 11 attacks would lead to massive instability in the Muslim world -- with horrific human consequences. A recent meeting of Islamic nations did not condemn the U.S. bombing Afghanistan (thanks to the efforts of U.S. allies), but all agreed that any further military action would be utterly unacceptable. Whatever benefit the Iraqi people might obtain from the deposing of Hussein would likely be outweighed by the horrors of a war in Iraq and of holy wars from North Africa to Southeast Asia. The simplest way to help the people of Iraq would be to lift the economic sanctions that have caused such devastating hardship.

Despite their eagerness to link Saddam Hussein to September 11, Israeli, Jordanian, and U.S. intelligence have found no connection ( NYT , 11 Oct. 2001). Though both Al Qaeda and Hussein hate the United States, Hussein is not an Islamicist, and Al Qaeda considers him an infidel.

At the moment it seems as if the State Department, with its strategy of just going after Afghanistan, at least for now, will prevail over Defense Department officials who want to go after Iraq. But the United States delivered a note to the Security Council saying that its self-defense measures might require it to attack other countries. (Apparently this sentence was added by the White House to the U.S. note without informing Secretary of State Colin Powell [ NYT , 12 Oct. 2001].) Thus, we must await the result of the bureaucratic struggle within the Bush administration to see whether we'll go to war against Iraq. Is this a decision that Congress should have declined to get involved in? More crucially, is this a decision that should be up to the United States government rather than the United Nations?

Does it make sense for some effort to be made to develop means of better predicting and interdicting terrorist attacks? Yes. Can one make a cogent argument that a large country needs some military expenditure to be in position to repel attacks, and to even engage in war should that horrible eventuality come to pass? Yes, though many will reasonably disagree. But does the U.S. need to spend not only $343 billion as in the year 2000, which was 69 percent greater than that of the next five highest nations combined (with Russia spending less than one-sixth what the United States does, and Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Iran, and Syria spending in total $14.4 billion combined and Iran accounting for 52 percent of this total), but still more to accomplish such security? No, the rush to spend more on militarism has nothing whatever to do with security against terrorism and has everything to do with military profiteering.

• From Wounded Knee to Afghanistan

Such a system has nothing to do with protecting against terrorism. Such a system in fact destabilizes world prospects for peace by propelling a new arms race as well as a launch on warning mentality in other countries. The system is pursued by the U.S. government largely as a sop to high tech industry and profit making and should be opposed on those grounds, and due to the danger it places all humanity in.

• Chomsky: Hegemony or Survival -- Part 1 / 2

The U.S. government has been targeting foreign leaders for a long time, perhaps under an explicit waiver from the executive order, perhaps not. For example, the U.S. air force targeted not just Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 1986 -- on the grounds that his barracks were command and control centers -- but (according to Seymour Hersh) even his family. Today, the U.S. is hitting the homes of Taliban leaders. So it is hard to imagine that Washington needs a freer hand. In situations short of war, a basic principle of our jurisprudence is that people should be brought to trial, not subjected to extra-judicial execution.

We need to distinguish between two different kinds of situations. Consider first the sort of situation that even strong opponents of racial profiling agree would be appropriate police work: "Police receive a credible tip that a white man armed with a bomb is somewhere in an office building. They surround the building and then enter it. The police examine white men more closely than those who are non-white." (See Randall Kennedy, Race, Justice, and the Law , Vintage, 1997, pp. 141, 161.) In these kinds of emergency situations, it would be reasonable to scrutinize whites more closely (or blacks or Middle Easterners, depending on the situation). But this is very different from making the targeting of a particular ethnic group a routine part of police work. Doing so involves two real dangers: (1) It's not likely to be very effective. The suspected 20th hijacker, a native Moroccan, looks black, not Middle Eastern. And next time, Islamic terrorists might use an Asian-looking Indonesian or a white-looking Bosnian. Recall too the pregnant Irish woman in 1988 whose luggage contained a bomb, put there unbeknownst to her by her Palestinian boyfriend. (2) It's likely to undermine an important protection against terrorism, namely, the cooperation of the Arab and Muslim communities in the United States. If these people are treated abusively, they are not likely to come forward with information needed by the police.

So what happens when a Middle Eastern man gets on a plane and the flight crew doesn't feel safe? In one notorious case, a Pakistani was removed from a Delta flight after the pilot said he wouldn't fly with the man on board. We can sympathize with the pilot's concern -- reporters have shown how easy it was even after September 11 to board a plane with knives and other weapons -- but his solution was totally unacceptable and discriminatory. The proper solution was for the pilot to say to Delta that security remains inadequate and demand that an armed air marshal be put on board. People's fears are real and legitimate. But we must try to address those fears in ways that do not scapegoat and abuse Arabs or Muslims or anybody else.

A war on terrorism is a project of attacking whomsoever the U.S. proclaims to be terrorist. In that sense it has many aspects. It can be used to assault opponents who are in fact terrorist, or other opponents who are not terrorist but are labeled to be. It can be used to induce fear in the U.S. population, so as to justify huge military expenditures, violations of civil liberties, and other elite-benefiting policies - much as the Cold War served the same purpose in decades past. It doesn't risk serious conflict as the scale of the engagements and their targets are entirely up to us. It doesn't legitimate international law, and so it does nothing to risk the U.S. being held accountable for our actions.

In other words, the War on Terrorism, like the Cold War in earlier decades, for reasons having little to nothing to do with its rhetorical aims is quite serviceable to elites, supposing that they are able to convince the population of its efficacy.

Oil of course plays a greater or lesser role in everything political and economic that happens in the Mideast, sometimes forefront, sometimes background. U.S. geopolitical and economic policies have as one of their prime motives maintaining access to and virtual control over oil sources around the globe. Pursuit of profit per se, and oil profit, are at the foundation of U.S. institutional arrangements in general, and thus impact our large-scale motives, of course. But the idea that oil is the proximate reason for the attack on Afghanistan, is very far fetched, just as the notion that the U.S. engaged in the war in Vietnam to gain access to minerals within Vietnam was far fetched. What is primarily at stake, geopolitically and economically, is not access to specific resources (or pipeline routes) but the rules of global interaction, the further delegitimating of international law, the development of a replacement for the Cold War - in this case, a war on terrorism - as well as actual concerns about terrorism itself.

There is no way to say with confidence, but since Afghanistan is too poor to fight back and has so few targets of any substance or scale, serious assaults are unlikely to persist too long, one hopes. Nevertheless, Adm. Sir Michael Boyce, the chief of the British defense staff, said military operations "must expect to go through the winter and into next summer at the very least" and President Bush said that the military operation would continue for days, months or even years ( NYT, 12 Oct. 2001).

To literally rip the fabric of the society to shreds and continue to obstruct possibilities for serious food aid could yield a holocaust, and even the most callous U.S. policy makers can't possibly be so ignorant as to conclude that the hate that would arise for the U.S. around the world would be in their interests. On the other hand, the war on terrorism has utility only insofar as the U.S. population can be kept focused on it, made fearful due to it, and thus willing to abrogate democratic influence and even a limited say over policymaking, as a result. So if the U.S. government can get away with doing so, a continuing attention to terrorism is to be anticipated.

Perhaps the greatest danger is that a Taliban-like regime might come to power in Pakistan as a result of war-induced destabilization. Unlike Afghanistan, Pakistan is no minor player: it has nuclear weapons. Even with sober leaders, Pakistan has pursued highly reckless policies with regard to Kashmir, bringing it close to conflict with its nuclear armed neighbor, India.

More generally, there is the danger that the calls for holy war, largely ignored in the Muslim world in recent years, will now gain a wider following.

First, the attacks on civilians in Afghanistan, and the aggravation of the starvation conditions, is itself terrorist, greatly increasing the terrorism at play in the world.

Second, killing innocent civilians, as has already occurred and will increasingly occur, will likely create more terrorists in Afghanistan and more widely throughout the region. The New York Times reported (10/13/01) of an Afghan village struck by U.S. bombs, with many civilian casualties. "Maulvi Abdullah Haijazi, an elder from a nearby village, had come to assist. 'These people don't support the Taliban,' he said. 'They always say the Taliban are doing this or that and they don't like it. But now they will all fight the Americans. We pray to Allah that we have American soldiers to kill. These bombs from the sky we cannot fight.'" And when they can't kill U.S. soldiers, they can at least join a terror network. This is the bad fruit our rain from the sky nurtures - among survivors.

Suppose a postal worker attacks his mates and some folks in the post office one morning. The government - not the surviving workers in the post office - moves to capture and prosecute the culprit (not to attack his neighbors, etc. ). But hopefully the government also looks into the conditions that contributed to the postal workers heinous acts, as well. Suppose it discovers that stress levels in post offices are abysmal and contribute to anger and personal dissolution leading to "going postal. " Would the government be giving in to criminal pressures if it advocated a reduction in stress in postal work? No, on the contrary the government would be acting sensibly to reduce just grievances that needed reduction in any event, and which would have the very good by-product of helping reduce the likelihood of other postal workers attacking their workmates.

The same logic holds in this case. For the U.S. to alter its foreign policy to not support despots abroad, to not punish civilian populations abroad, to not support unjust policies by allies abroad, to indeed try to redress huge injustices of economic impoverishment abroad, are all choices that should occur in any event, in their own right, and whose implementation would also, as a desirable side benefit, reduce the conditions that breed the hate and desperation terrorism feeds on.

The Bush administration has now declared that its vision for the solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict includes a Palestinian state. The Bush administration is now in line with the former Clinton administration. This is better than Bush's previous backtracking, but it is still very far from what is needed. Washington says the boundaries of the Palestinian state are to be worked out by the parties -- the Palestinians and Israel -- but that means that Israel has an effective veto over any settlement, and until there is a settlement, Palestinians remain under Israeli occupation. Everyone now says they support a Palestinian state, including Israel, but the crucial question is whether the specific terms address the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. The issue is not a few square kilometers of desert on one side of the border or the other, but whether there will be Israeli security zones carved out of the Palestinian state, whether Israeli security roads will traverse the Palestinian state, and whether Israeli settlements will remain. In addition, there are the questions of whether Israel will continue to control East Jerusalem which it conquered in 1967 and whether the Palestinians have to foreswear their right to return to lands from which they have been driven out. Until the United States is willing to use its influence to pressure Israel to accept real self-determination for Palestinians, the problem will remain.

The U.S. government's guiding principle ought to have been to assure the security, safety, and well-being of U.S. citizens without detracting from the security, safety, and well-being of others.

Any response should have avoided targeting civilians or so-called dual-use targets and should have been carried out according to the UN Charter. We should have sought freely-offered Security Council authorization with the UN retaining control of any response.

For more specific recommendations, made before the bombing began, see also:

• Albert & Shalom: Z's Sept 11 Talking Points

It isn't crazy, in the U.S. to have locks on some doors, etc. But it is wise to try to enact policies that reduce poverty and desperation as well, not only because it is moral to do so to benefit those suffering, but because it will dramatically reduce inclinations to steal. Similarly, internationally, it isn't crazy to expend some energies and resources guarding against terrorist attack. But it is wise to try to enact policies that reduce conditions of poverty and disenfranchisement, not only because it is moral to do so to benefit those suffering, but because it will dramatically reduce inclinations to terrorize and prospects for finding allies willing to abet that terrorism.

What else could we do? David Corn offers some suggestions: a large increase of funding for the public health infrastructure (which is today inadequate to deal with a serious biological or chemical terror), funding programs to secure or neutralize Russian nuclear material and to prevent Russian weapons scientists from being exported, stop exporting hand-held guns that can bring down airplanes. Having the federal government take over airport security is a suggestion we made previously; right now the Bush administration opposes Congressional legislation to this effect because it will increase big government. Richard Garwin has additional suggestions. All these make sense. And they are likely to enhance our security, while war is likely to do the opposite.

First, it can't be achieved via war because, in this case, war kills huge numbers of innocents, reduces the attentiveness to law and justice, and creates huge reservoirs of hate fueling future terrorists possibilities.

Second, it can be achieved without war, however, by following the norms of international law, which, if need be, may even involve military aspects along with diplomacy and other features - but not war as in one country, or a pair, attacking another.

Peace movements in industrialized nations before September 11 should have attuned themselves to unjust and horrific violence that victimized the weak and was engaged to benefit the powerful. The same holds now.

Peace movements in industrialized nations before September 11 should have opposed unjust wars, particularly perpetrated by their own countries, and any policies making such wars more likely or more brutal. The same holds now.

Peace movements in industrialized nations before September 11 should have examined institutional causes for wars, seeking to reduce those causes as much as possible. The same holds now.

So did anything profound change calling for re-thinking by peace movements?

Yes, one thing did change, quite dramatically. For the first time some of the abhorrent violence has been turned toward the civilian populations of the developed nations. This means that defensive motives will enter developed nation's calculations vis-a-vis international relations with poor countries not solely rhetorically, but in fact. Peace movements will have to pay attention to that new reality even as they also pay attention to on-going structural causes of war and injustice.

• Albert: Movement Prospects

Winning gains against intransigent elites depends on convincing them that to ignore demands will lead to more losses for them than to meet demands. What accomplishes this is always the specter of growing numbers of people taking the side of dissidents, becoming sufficiently aroused and impassioned to work to recruit still more allies, and to manifest their dissent in demonstrations and civil disobedience, and especially of growing numbers whose concerns begin to transcend immediate issues and call into question broader and even more important institutional allegiances of elites.

Thus, peace movements, anti-racist movements, labor movements, anti-capitalist movements, ecology movements, feminist movements, movements against capitalist globalization, movements for great democracy or against incursions on freedom, and any other social movements will benefit to the extent they mutually support one another and convince elites that to ignore their focus is to risk enlarged opposition not only on that issue, but on all others as well. They will suffer losses in their efficacy to the extent that they are isolated from one another, or even pitted against one another

Peace movements and other movements should support and even take up one another's struggles, to the extent circumstances and resources permit

• Garson: Multi-Focus or Bust

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• Posted: Monday, October 15, 2001

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