How We Lost the War on Terror: Part II

How We Lost the War on Terror

Part II: The Costs Outweigh the Benefits

I remember when I was still in high school doing team policy debate. That was Russia year (the resolution we were arguing had to do with changing the US policy towards Russia) and the affirmative team was arguing something or the other that basically boiled down to spending a lot of money doing stuff in cooperation with Russia to counter terrorism. 

My partner and I rolled in quickly, citing statistics proving that bathtubs were more dangerous than terrorists. Our point was simple: is it really worth all this money to institute another counter-terrorism plan?

Of course, the rebuttal is simple: "Any amount of money spent is worth a human life!" And the argument is a good one: compared to a human being, money is worthless.

Unfortunately, that argument suffers from a fatal reaction to reality. In the real world, human life is not our greatest priority, simply because there are some things that we value above human life. (And, in my opinion, rightfully so.) At the best, safety is balanced by economy and practicality. 

For starters, we don't have unlimited money. We have to make do with what we have. That's why the IRST was deleted from the F-22. Sure, it's a valuable tool. But someone, somewhere, decided that we didn't have the money. 

But even if we did have infinite money, there are some things that we wouldn't do. One of these is institute a Health Safety Force to deploy Safety Officers to your home every time you prepared to take a bath. We hold that privacy and freedom are more important than safety.

(Or at least we should. Today, I sometimes think that we are becoming more like Nietzsche's Last Men, men who claim to have "invented happiness." They live safe, comfortable lives, but lives not really worth living because they involve nothing approaching a challenging or discomforting experience.)

However this may be, the point remains that safety is not, or should not be, the main focus of our lives. I think this is borne out by both our founding fathers ("They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety") and Scripture, which continually emphasizes the fact that the days are not our own, and that we do not know what tomorrow will bring. 

With all this being said, however, it must be remembered that one of the duties of the federal government is to "Provide for the common defense." I believe this should remain one of the US Government's primary duties, but I think we should all be asking whether the methods the United States government has used to protect the American people are actually causing more harm than good.

To fight the War on Terror, the US invaded two sovereign states, Afghanistan and Iraq.  The motivations for invading Iraq were more complicated than Afghanistan, (what with the whole WMD arguments and UN resolutions.) Afghanistan, on the other hand, was invaded because it refused to extradite bin Laden without seeing evidence of his involvement in the 9/11 attacks/because they harbored and aided terrorists, something the United States and Israel both have done in the past. 

In invading Afghanistan, the United States committed to months (as it turns out, years) of strenuous, low-intensity conflict with next to little return. Remember, Afghanistan is the "Graveyard of Empires," the country that put the Soviet Union in the grave. Since the invasion of Afghanistan, US operations have expanded to include Yemen and Pakistan. 


Now, I don't pretend to be on the inner circles of worldwide terrorism, but from my perspective, the actions of the United States could not have been better tailored to further the goals of the Islamic terrorists who perpetrated the attack. In short, we were playing right into Al-Qaeda's strategy. By invading Afghanistan, we not only gave them further grounds for recruitment with every civilian that we killed, we also engaged them on their terms. We played into their battlefield and allowed ourselves to be bogged down to a protracted, long-term war...in Asia, no less.


Sun Tzu was quite explicit on this kind of warfare. He actually waxes wordy on this particular issue, saying in part:


"When you do battle, even if you are winning, if you continue for a long time it will dull your forces and blunt your edge...then others will take advantage of your debility and rise up. Then even if you have wise advisers you cannot make things turn out well in the end. Therefore I have heard of military operations that were clumsy but swift, but I have never seen one that was skillful and lasted a long time. It is never beneficial for a nation to have a military operation continue for a long time."

Obama recently declared an "end" to the War on Terror. I agree with Sun Tzu: we did not make things turn out well in the end. Aside from the thousands of innocent lives lost in the conflict and the billions of dollars (that we don't have) spent to fight in the war, the cost must be measured in those things that we hold more dear than life. The War on Terror may be over, but the vigorous and prolonged efforts to erode constitutional rights in the name of national security, however well-intentioned, have brought forth fruit that is here to stay. American noncombatants have been killed without a trial. Expansive and invasive data mining programs have been enacted, and Americans cannot even board an airplane without being virtually strip-searched. Our international status as a world leader in human rights and the rule of law has become a joke.

We should not be surprised by this, of course. In the modern age, war is directly linked both to the expansion of government and the profits of many individuals in the private and public sector. 


Instead of remaining unmoved in the face of adversity, we reacted to terrorists; we changed our ways of life and we spent vast swaths of time and money to achieve little besides the wholesale slaughter of a number of our "enemies."  In the long term, however, the heavy casualties we have inflicted on terrorist organizations around the globe are irrelevant, because the enemy we are fighting are not loyal to a political system or an organization; they are motivated by a vibrant and thriving ideology that set down its roots long before the Constitution was penned. An ideology can only be defeated by another ideology; force of arms or military action is rarely effective.


I am reminded of the story of the US officer who, while engaged in negotiations with the North Vietnamese, told his counterpart from Vietnam that the US had never lost a single battle in the war. "That is true," replied the Vietnamese officer, "but that is also irrelevant." 


Similarly, our killing of "terrorists" is irrelevant inasmuch as it will never defeat America's enemies and terrorists worldwide. Did we know this before we went into Afghanistan and Iraq? Whether we did or not, our approach determined the outcome: before the war began, we committed ourselves into an unending and fruitless conflict. 

In short, I believe that the overall effect of the War on Terror has done little towards the ultimate defeat of militant Islam, has played into the hands of Al-Quada by involving the US in a number of exhausting and financially draining military operations worldwide, and has eroded the civil liberties and rights that Americans ought to hold dear.


However, nothing is not exactly an appropriate response to a terrorist attack on the level of 9/11. So in my next post in this series, I'll try to outline what I believe would have been an appropriate response.

How We Lost the War on Terror

How We Lost the War on Terror:

Part I: Not Winning is Losing

Therefore a victorious army first wins and then seeks battle; a defeated army first battles and then seeks victory. -Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu may have written long before "terrorism" was a word, but his words live on today because of their enduring applicability to even the most modern of conflicts. Despite changes in technology and politics, human nature remains the same.

Sun Tzu believed that a talented general did not go to battle without first understanding the strategic balance between himself and his enemy and ensuring that it was in his favor. "Therefore," said Sun Tzu, "the victories of good warriors are not noted for cleverness or bravery. Therefore their victories in battle are not flukes. Their victories are not flukes because they position themselves where they will surely win, prevailing over those who have already lost."

Today, I would like to examine Sun Tzu's contentions in the context of the War on Terror. It is my contention that the United States of America lost the battle before the first shots were fired in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Before we begin, however, we must first define our terms. Because I dislike the rather oxymoronic idea of a "War on Terror," let's specifically outline what kicked off this worldwide party.

Most (if not all) of the United State's military actions against terrorists stem from the Authorization for Use of Military Force, a Congressional Resolution (and not a declaration of war.) The AUMF gives the president the authority 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, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons." For the purposes of defining the War on Terror, then, let us treat the AUMF and the Patriot Act, as well as subsequent actions taken by the United States government to stamp out terrorism, as the parameters of the "War." Thus the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the current drone wars in Yemen and Pakistan would presumably fall under this category, but efforts to eradicate poachers in Africa would not.

There is one more thing we must understand: genuine war is fundamentally an extension of politics. Carl Von Clausewitz, who laid the foundations for much of Western strategic thought with his hefty On War, dealt with this truth well when he said "war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means...war itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different." Fundamentally, then, war is the effort to compel one's opponent make political decisions. Now that that's out of the way, let's dive in.

The War on Terror renders true victory impossible simply because it is too broad. With the AUMF, Congress essentially surrendered decision making authority to the president to determine against whom and where the war will be conducted. Without any real predetermined goals that can be achieved, the war becomes an ongoing operation carried out at the whim of the president. Although one could hold to the view that an elimination of the primary sponsors of the 9/11 attacks would be considered "winning," this path has not been taken by the government. Instead, under the auspices of "prevent(ing) any future acts of international terrorism against the United States," the war has been expanded and shows every sign of carrying on. Our efforts to fight pretty much any terrorist who dislikes us, anywhere, guarantee that the end of the War on Terror will be a political decision, not a military reality.

We said before, of course, that war is an extension of politics, so it does seem appropriate for a war to end with a political decision. But war also has goals that should be fulfilled to win. Clausewitz defines war as "an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will," and although he acknowledged the theory of war often differed from the practice, it is hard to imagine a war that does not abide by this definition. According to Clausewitz, in theory a pure war is over when one side has an "inability to carry on the struggle," but says that in practice, this can "be replaced by two other grounds for making peace: the first is the improbability of victory; the second is its unacceptable cost." The important point to note here is not any of these alternatives: after all, we will never force the enemy to "do our will," he is often firmly and religiously convinced of ultimate victory, and an enemy that will sacrifice himself is unlikely to find any cost unacceptable. The important point is the Clausewitz concludes that a war ends with peace.

Terrorism, like piracy, never "ends," it merely drifts from public consciousness. True peace is impossible. It seems, then, that the United States has declared war on an enemy that cannot be defeated, merely combated. In my mind, this is a poor approach. While it is stirring to declare that a "country is at war!" a war is meant to be won or lost–and to fight a war with no intention of winning is to fight a losing fight. The War on Terror, then, was lost before it began because it initiated a conflict that can never end with an enemy that cannot be defeated. The subsequent US expansion of the war to encompass terrorists who were not directly responsible for the 9/11 attacks made this inevitable.

I realize that at this point, however, I've merely hammered in why calling the War on Terror a "war" was a terrible idea. It is easy to agree with the actions taken and merely suggest that the operation be given a different name, like "Overseas Contingency Operations" or "Efforts to Counter Violent Extremism." So in Part II of this post, I'm going to assess the actions of the War on Terror and whether it was really worthwhile.

On Old Age

I visited my grandfather today. We toured his new house–downsized from the 13 acres he used to inhabit–and examine his dwindling firearms inventory. A .38 caliber revolver. A silvery 1911-style .45 manufactured in Argentina.

“I’ve got a Saturday night special under my pilla,” my granddad declares. He checks near the head of his bed, then tosses the sheets about, looking for the firearm. “I moved it to make it less conspicuous,” he comments.

I eye the bedside desk. “Is it in here, Papa?” I ask, opening the top drawer and removing an ancient gray revolver loaded with rat-shot.

My grandfather may be 85, but he is still mentally acute and physically fit, as I discovered when I stepped into his house and found myself caught in his crushing handshake. I haven’t seen him shoot recently, but I remain confident that his revolver is in the hands of a capable user.

We’re in the process of collecting some of his paraphernalia. He has a list compiled of some of his more important items and who is to have them, “In case I die without permission,” as he laconically puts it.

I hope I’ll be like that when I’m his age.

My generation seems to fear old age. Youth is something to be relished and enjoyed, but with old age comes a dysfunctional body, it seems. Beauty fades. Money is no longer spent on pleasures and instead spent on hospital bills. Old people become disagreeable, self-centered, walking surgeries.

I’ve never really been keen on keeping up physical appearances, myself. Perhaps, for me, that would be a case of crying over spilt milk. But I understand the natural fear of growing old and the various health problems associated with it.

That’s another reason I want to grow up like my grandfather; he’s exceptionally healthy. If I live on 13 acres tending a garden until I’m in my mid-eighties, I’ll be pleased.

But the one real benefit that I believe comes with old age is experience. That seems sort of obvious and trite, I suppose, but I don’t believe my generation understands or appreciates that.

I find this forgivable, however, because I believe many members of my grandfather’s generation have become self-centered and petty in many ways. In part, I think we encourage that–we worry about them, ask them how they’re doing, and then wait patiently for the never-ending list of medical information that we really don’t want to hear about in the first place. We ought to be asking the right questions if we want to learn from our elders.

But I also believe that many of my grandfather’s generation have succumbed to believing they deserve something. They’ve adopted a selfish attitude because they’re old, they’ve done their part for society, nobody really cares about how they feel–and quite frankly, they feel a lot of pain. There is nothing like pain, physical or emotional, to turn people into themselves. It is, after all, the body literally screaming, crying for our attention. And we are a captive audience.

And all this makes me wonder, what will I be like when I am a grandfather? Will I be a selfish, crotchety old man? Will I be disillusioned because I put my hope in money or fame or my appearance or my relationships? Will I be selfish because I am in continual pain?

Or will I live instead to pass my wisdom onto the next generation?

I spend a lot of time looking at my grandfather’s collection of cups and baseball caps. A CIA glass. Rumor has it that agency aggressively conducted a fruitless pursuit for my grandfather’s talent in his younger days. I sometimes wonder if they succeeded.

A Nimitz cap. My father’s carrier. A VF-211 cap. My father’s squadron. An F-35 JSF cap. My father’s job.

So much of the life of a parent–in this case, my mother’s father–is wrapped up in their children. I can see that my grandfather’s son-in-law–my father–seems to have contributed much to his life.

My grandfather has contributed much to mine. Besides his direct contribution in the form of my mother, my grandfather’s resilience and advice has made a lasting impression on me.

Sleeping the night before a test will do you more good than staying up all night studying for it, he wrote in his spidery, thin handwriting when I first arrived at college. I’ve found his advice to be sound.  Some of my friends should try this novel idea.

My grandfather is even more stoic than I am, which makes it difficult to tell if he realizes how much I look up to him. It also feeds my own reticence, making me unwilling to say something like that directly. As I’m saying goodbye, I comment that I hope I’m able to crush my grandson’s hands when I’m his age. He shows me how to exercise my wrist.

“I’ll start doing that when I start getting grandkids,” I say.

“If you wait until then, it’ll be too late,” he replies.

My grandfather is right.  If I want to grow up to be like him, I’d better start now.