The Foreign Service Journal, September 2021

32 SEPTEMBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL America’s “Long Wars” in Perspective In retrospect, America’s “long wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq were never wars against terrorism or extremism, per se. They were instead the result of rather faltering efforts to transform the politi- cal and economic system of each country. It is unclear whether letting Afghan factions try to shape a working government or peace after the Taliban was initially defeated would have worked, but it is all too clear from reporting by the Special Inspector Gen- eral for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the Lead Inspector General and the World Bank that the U.S. has failed to create a successful, honest or effective Afghan regime and now seems committed to leaving without a credible peace plan. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 to meet a threat that did not exist and without a plan for what would happen after the fall of SaddamHussein. As was the case in Afghanistan, it engaged in a haphazard and constantly changing exercise in nation-building. It then left Iraq prematurely in 2011 and seems to be repeating the process there in 2021. It has fought two major wars in Iraq—first against Sunni rebels and then against ISIS—without creating a truly functional Iraqi government and a successful pattern of Iraqi development. The U.S. fight in Afghanistan against the Taliban has been guerrilla and irregular warfare, rather than counterterrorism. Its fight against Islamic elements in the first war in Iraq was, again, more a war against hostile factions than against terrorism or extremism; and its second war in Iraq was fought against a hard- line Islamic “caliphate” proto state, rather than an extremist or terrorist movement. Like Vietnam, both were U.S. ground and air wars that attempted with very mixed success to create effective governance and nation-building. They, too, are likely to be seen as expensive failures. While the U.S. has never issued a credible official esti- mate of the full civil and military costs of both wars, these costs clearly exceeded a total of $2 trillion dollars—and estimates by Brown University put the cost as high as $6.4 trillion. Ironically, as any close reading of the State Department coun- try reports on terrorismwill show, the real U.S. successes in fight- ing terrorism came frommuch lower-level efforts to help other countries create effective national counterterrorism forces, and from supporting international agreements and bodies designed to fight terrorism. In fact, diplomacy and more routine efforts at security assistance had far more success than the two vast expen- ditures on warfighting. As for the broader patterns in global terrorism since 2001, they have scarcely been dominated by Islamic extremism. They have instead been characterized by state terrorism and the violent repression of legitimate civil unrest on the part of secular regimes such as Syria, China, Iran, North Korea and, now, Myanmar. Syria is a particularly grim example. While casualty estimates differ, most United Nations and nongovernmental organization estimates of the number of civilians that the Assad regime and its supporters alone have killed, injured or made into refugees since 2011 exceeds the casualty number for all of the world’s nonstate extremist or terrorist movements since 2001. The same seems true of nonstate actors who have sought to seize power in various states, most of which have not been hard-core Islamist movements. Broader Directions in U.S. Strategy As for the broader directions in strategy and national security efforts, one of the few areas of consensus in a deeply partisan United States is a general agreement that U.S. strategy must shift back toward deterring and competing with secular major powers and “rogue” states. Moreover, though with notably less consensus, the focus on terrorist and extremist threats to the U.S. is largely on domestic and secular movements; and the primary defense against this domestic threat is the FBI and state and local law enforcement—not foreign policy, military action, security assistance or the Department of Homeland Security. The critical transitions that now affect U.S. national security interests, and the main elements of U.S. strategy, have little to do with terrorism and extremism. As both the Trump and Biden defense budgets and national strategy show, the primary threats the U.S. and its strategic partners now focus on are regimes such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. The optimistic hopes of the 1990s have largely vanished. Rus- sia has not evolved as a democracy or a partner, but has rather become a revived authoritarian challenge led by Vladimir Putin. Progress in nuclear arms control may not have failed but has certainly faltered; and nuclear forces are again making radical improvements, along with the rise of hypersonic and precision conventional strike capability. Russian regular military forces, The critical transitions that now affect U.S. national security interests, and the main elements of U.S. strategy, have little to do with terrorism and extremism.