Murat SofuogluTwenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the US’s war on terror has largely defeated the two global terrorist groups – Al Qaeda and Daesh – following prolonged wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria that saw the deployment of tens of thousands of American troops in different theatres.
Washington used its superior military power to oust regimes in Kabul and Baghdad, claiming their backing for terror groups allegedly planning attacks on American soil, like 9/11.
However, the so-called war on terror strategy adopted following the 9/11 attacks has also left a trail of death and destruction across a vast swathe – crippling nations from Afghanistan to the energy-rich Middle East.
Afghanistan proved a classic example of American duplicity. Two decades after the US ousted the Taliban from power, it facilitated the return of the same group in 2001 following the hasty and chaotic US withdrawal from the Asian nation.
Saddam Hussein’s ouster from the Iraqi leadership also produced dangerous results, leading to armed resistance and internal clashes, which paved the way for the emergence of Daesh across the country. The US invasion also led to the empowerment of pro-Iran armed groups in a country with a large Shia population, helping Tehran increase its influence over Iraq.
Currently, the US is engaged in another Middle East war on Iran, a country which Washington sometimes describes as a terror regime, signalling the continuation of America’s post-9/11 strategy.
While President Donald Trump appeared to want to end the conflict in the short term, there is no clear indication that the unpopular US war will reach an end quickly.
Even top American officials have recently warned Trump that the conflict, which has led to large disruptions in oil trade due to the Hormuz blockades, might continue through the rest of his presidential term, signalling that Washington might face another “forever war”.
Military power alone not enough
In the face of mixed outcomes from Afghanistan to Iraq and most lately Iran, experts see many gaps, disorientation, and implementation problems in America’s post-9/11 strategy, which has fluctuated as Washington has occasionally tried to seize opportunities to pull back from turbulent regions.
As long as the objective was to dismantle terror networks, it seemed to work to some extent for the US, says Iftikhar Firdous, a senior Pakistani investigative journalist with a focus on Afghanistan and militant groups.
“But the problem began when the objective expanded from counterterrorism into state-building, regime change and political engineering,” he tells TRT World.
“Once you start trying to engineer societies through military power, you enter a completely different strategic environment. The US had overwhelming military superiority, but military superiority does not automatically translate into political legitimacy or sustainable political outcomes. That is really the central contradiction of the post-9/11 era,” he adds.
As the Iran war meanders on, the US has come to terms with a grim reality: the tech-powered American military supremacy is unable to bring down the Iranian power structure backed by the powerful IRGC.
“Many of the difficulties emerged from the gap between American military capabilities and the political objectives that developed around them,” says Ali Mammadov, a PhD researcher in political science at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government.
“The US could remove hostile governments and severely weaken terrorist organisations relatively quickly, but establishing durable political orders afterwards proved considerably more difficult,” Mammadov tells TRT World.
Afghanistan and Iraq, the two Muslim states, have complex ethnic, tribal and sectarian structures with different competing local actors, which “military superiority alone could not resolve,” he says,
US government reviews of the country’s conduct in Afghanistan identified many policy problems, including “incoherent strategy, unrealistic timelines, weak sustainability and insufficient understanding of local conditions,” he adds.
“Repeated interventions also generated political backlash within parts of the region. At the alliance level, NATO unanimously invoked Article 5 after 9/11, but divisions became more pronounced as the broader agenda expanded, particularly over Iraq.”
Dania Koleilat Khatib, an expert on Arab-US relations, is more direct about the consequences of the post-9/11 strategy. “It definitely failed, which got the US into endless wars affecting its image worldwide, and created a huge financial burden with the spiralling debt,” Khatib tells TRT World.
From deterrence to uncharted territories
Experts also say that launching a war on terror without well-defined objectives has proven to be more difficult than dealing with a country like the former communist Soviet Union, against which the US Cold War strategy employed a strategy based on the combination of deterrence, containment and ideological arguments promoting democracy, freedom and free markets.
“The war on terror has never attracted that kind of international allegiance,” wrote Rabart Kagan, a well-known scholar of geopolitics, referring to differences between Cold War-era attitudes sympathetic to the US and a generally muted global response to American post-9/11 policies.
Since the end of the Cold War, the US has developed no overarching strategy in foreign policy, and after 9/11, Washington all of a sudden decided to adopt a preemptive military strategy, moving away from its traditional deterrence and containment policies.
Matthew Bryza, a former top US diplomat, who was in the White House working as a National Security Council official on September 11, does not see a single post-9/11 policy which has “really assembled a clear strategy”. He says that launching the Iraq war right after the war on the Taliban led the US to lose focus on Afghanistan’s reconstruction, bogging down American forces in the Middle Eastern state for two decades.
While the US effectively prevented terrorist attacks on American soil, criticism has increased against the US’ policies of regime change and ‘nation-building’ that have “unleashed new instabilities”.
Bryza says the numerous wars have proven “very difficult to control”.
Critics also see the current war on Iran as “an outgrowth” of this pos- 9/11 US approach, he adds.
“The very difficult situation the US has found itself in Iran will lead to a new debate whether the US should be engaged in these sorts of attempts to overthrow governments in the Middle East.”
While Bryza believes that leaving nation-building efforts behind and shifting American focus to the Asia-Pacific region might be a better approach for the US, he adds that unpredictable “events” have repeatedly pulled Washington back to the region.
Empowering China and Russia
Experts also draw attention to the fact that the forever wars not only drained the US of huge resources and cost many lives, but also distracted the country’s leadership from the great power rivalry with China and Russia.
“Twenty-five years later, the irony is that Washington’s post-9/11 wars diverted strategic attention and resources,” says Firdous, referring to how the US strategy has left American power vulnerable to China and Russia.
Geopolitical analysts note that US focus on the Middle East has left Eastern Europe and Caucasia unguarded against Russian operations, allowing Moscow to exert its power in the breakaway regions of Georgia and attack Ukraine.
More importantly, China, the world’s second-largest economy, has steadily increased its hold on global politics by using its big pockets and deepening ties with countries from Africa to Latin America and Asia. Beijing has also improved its ties with Middle Eastern states, from anti-Western states like Iran to oil-rich Arab Gulf states and Egypt.
“There was a broader strategic opportunity cost: the US devoted enormous attention and resources to counterterrorism and the Middle East during a period in which China was steadily accumulating economic and military power,” Mammadov says.
A recent Wall Street Journal analysis also concludes that the US post-9/11 strategy has empowered Chinese and Russian challenges to American global supremacy, quoting Kagan: “China and Russia have welcomed it because it has distracted the United States’ strategic focus away from them.”
