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.