It sounded like the end of a dramatic era. "It is time to end America's longest war," said US President Joe Biden a few months after taking office and announced that all US troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021. So exactly 20 years to the day after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. "Some of our soldiers," said Biden, "were not even born when our country was attacked on September 11, 2001." Although Islamist terrorism has not been defeated, it has been weakened for the long term; the US would now have to concentrate on other threats, above all China - this is the reading of the White House after two decades of the "war on terror". Hundreds of millions of people between Baghdad, Kabul and Bamako are likely to see things differently.
The then President George W. Bush had proclaimed the "Global War on Terror" a few days after the attacks on September 11, 2001. The Al-Qaeda terrorist network was immediately suspected. "Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it doesn't end there," Bush told Congress. "It will not end until every terrorist group with global reach is found, stopped and defeated."
In the history of modern terrorism, nation states had previously avoided countering the violence of non-state actors with the rhetoric and means of war. Assassinations, whether by anarchists, secessionists, religious fanatics or members of a liberation movement, were considered criminal acts that were tried in court - even if they often had nothing to do with the rule of law. The central question, writes political scientist Herfried Münkler, was "whether the perpetrators should be given political motivation".
But in the mid-1980s the line between the crime and war paradigms began to blur. In 1985, US President Ronald Reagan described terrorist attacks as "acts of war". This was preceded by the detonation of a car bomb by the Shiite Hezbollah in Beirut, which killed 241 US soldiers, as well as several assassinations against American targets for which Washington blamed the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi.
In the case of Hezbollah, the US did not hit back. Instead, Reagan withdrew the troops a little later from Lebanon, which is said to have convinced and inspired a young Sunni jihadist named Osama bin Laden of the vulnerability of the superpower. In 1986, however, the Reagan administration bombed targets in Libya after two US soldiers had died in an attempt by the Libyan secret service on the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin.In 1998, after al-Qaeda attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Bill Clinton ordered rocket attacks on targets in Afghanistan and Sudan linked to the terrorist network. But the threshold for declaring war on terrorists was not crossed, also in order not to upgrade the latter politically.
This required the epochal attacks of September 11, 2001 and the equally epochal television images that they generated. At that time, some international lawyers and diplomats warned urgently against the "war paradigm" and advocated an alternative strategy: globally coordinated prosecution of the Al Qaeda network, sanctions against its state sponsors and a revision of US foreign policy in the Middle East. Whether this would have been politically enforceable under the impact of the collapsing World Trade Center is questionable. Osama bin Laden apparently knew well which physical and visual dimensions of terror he had to choose in order to get the declaration of war he wanted from the superpower USA.
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George W. Bush already had the legal basis for the "Global War on Terror" on his desk when he announced it. The Authorization for Use of the Military Force (AUMF), passed by Congress on September 14, 2001, allowed the President "to use all means and appropriate force against those nations, organizations and persons" involved in the planning, execution or support of the Attacks of September 11, 2001 were involved. For the first time, US armed forces could officially be used not only against states, but also against non-state groups and individuals.
The AUMF initially served as legitimation for the military intervention in Afghanistan, where bin Laden had set up his headquarters with the approval of the ruling Taliban . Their regime collapsed within a few weeks of Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7, 2001. However, Osama bin Laden was able to escape to Pakistan, where he was to remain undiscovered for ten years.
In the months and years that followed, the AUMF also served a far-reaching dismantling of international legal norms. After 9/11, a "council of war" was formed around Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, consisting of the military, intelligence officers, security advisers and lawyers. In their eyes, the AUMF granted the president unrestricted freedom of action in the fight against Islamist terrorism. The kidnapping or targeted killing of suspects by the CIA appeared to them to be just as legitimate as secret CIA prisons abroad (so-called black sites ), the use of torture (declared as "extended interrogation methods"), widespread wiretapping without a judicial order, and unlimited conviction in the prison campGuantánamo. For the Council of War there was no doubt that international humanitarian law, above all the Geneva Conventions, had no validity in the "war on terror". Bush's closest European allies in Great Britain shared this view. The West, wrote Robert Cooper, British diplomat and advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2002, needs to get used to the "idea of double standards": "Between us we obey the law. But if we operate in the jungle, we have to Apply the laws of the jungle. "
The "Global War on Terror" not only ushered in a security policy and legal paradigm shift. The doctrine also provided a media smoke screen for other geostrategic interests. Leading members of the Council of War in Washington, above all Cheney, Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, saw the turn of 9/11 as an opportunity for a political reorganization in the Middle East. This should come with a regime change in Iraqkick off. Despite global mass protests and criticism from other Western countries, including France and Germany, the US attacked Iraq on March 19, 2003. An extended AUMF was sufficient for the White House as a legal basis. The dictator Saddam Hussein's regime was overthrown at the end of April. Washington's justification for the war, according to which Saddam cooperates with al-Qaeda and possesses weapons of mass destruction, turned out to be untrue a little later.
The overthrow of Saddam and his Ba'ath Party, initially perceived by many Iraqis as a liberation, quickly led to a disastrous, completely unprepared occupation - and finally to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Al Qaeda members infiltrated Iraq after US troops arrived and allied themselves with the disempowered Sunnis, who put up growing resistance. The decision of the US occupation authorities in May 2003 to disband the Iraqi army as part of the "debaathification" and to make several hundred thousand men and their weapons redundant turned out to be a gift for the terrorist organization. Especially since more and more Sunnis felt threatened by the unhindered expansion of Shiite-dominated Iran in Iraq and by the revenge campaigns of local Shiite militias. Al-Qaeda suddenly not only had a huge pool of potential recruits, but also played a new role politically as the protector of the Sunnis.
Shortly after the supposed victories in the "war on terror" in Afghanistan and Iraq, a dynamic that has persisted to this day manifested itself, which at that time hardly anyone wanted to perceive: the "war on terror", used as an ideological template without Consideration of historical, social and political realities in the affected countries, reproduces the extremist violence that it is supposed to fight.
Can it even be ended then? A US president had tried before Joe Biden. When Barack Obama took office in January 2009, war rhetoric suddenly disappeared from the White House vocabulary. Obama never concealed the fact that he considered the declaration of a temporal and localized war against terrorists to be a capital mistake and the US invasion of Iraq to be "stupid". No sooner sworn in than he took back some of the worst excesses of the "War on Terror": He banned the "extended interrogation methods" and ordered the closure of all black sites and the Guantánamo prison camp. The latter failed - due to opposition from the US Congress and Obama's lack of will to enter into a confrontation with the legislature.
Ultimately, Obama was more interested in reducing the presence of American troops in the Middle East and legally safeguarding the war on terror than ending it. Already in his first term of office, killer drones and hit and run missions by special commandos became the preferred means. The most spectacular took place on May 2, 2011, when a team of the U.S. Navy Seals shot Osama bin Laden and four companions in their hiding place in Abbottabad, Pakistan. For Obama a domestic political success, in the eyes of lawyers like the German international lawyer Kai Ambos, however, an "extrajudicial execution".
Images of Obama watching the operation of the Navy Seals live in the White House suggested at the time that the United States was undisputedly directing the course of the war on terrorism. In May 2013, Obama actually declared the "War on Terror" to be over. It is no longer about an endless global war, he emphasized in a speech at the National Defense University, but about "targeted efforts to paralyze certain networks of violent extremists who threaten America".
In truth, Washington had long since lost its authority to interpret the war on terror. Shortly after 9/11, China used the doctrine of the "War on Terror" for a campaign of repression against Muslim Uyghurs. To this day, other authoritarian regimes invoke the fight against terrorism in order to eliminate the opposition. Still others have instrumentalized jihadists for their own power interests. After the "Arabellion" began in 2011, the Syrian Assad regime released Islamist fighters from prison - with the aim of radicalizing the opposition in order to then fight them as "terrorists". Turkey, hostile to Damascus, for its part allowed Sunni extremists to cross the border into Syria for a long time, knowing full well that there were numerous supporters of the "Islamic State" among them. Iran and Saudi Arabia, citing the fight against terrorism, heated up their competition for regional supremacy - and with it the tensions between Shiites and Sunnis. For their part, radical Islamic groups developed an ever better sense of using existing ethnic or sectarian conflicts, social tensions and anger over corruption and repression for themselves.
Such a mixture made a decisive contribution to the fact that IS was able to proclaim its "caliphate" on Syrian and Iraqi territory in the summer of 2014. The highly professional media staging of his atrocities as well as several attacks in Europe mobilized the Obama administration and its Western allies to form a "global alliance against IS". Their operation " Inherent Resolve " (" natural determination") began using combat bombers against the "Islamic State" in September 2014. The war on the ground was mainly carried out by Kurdish and pro-Iranian militias. After more than three years and more than 30,000 air strikes, the jihadists got rid of their "caliphate" and liberated the "capitals" of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq. However, at the cost of extensive destruction and thousands of civilian casualties. The IS by no means disappeared, it was transformed from a territorial power back into a decentralized terror network, now in competition with al-Qaeda.
The US-led "War on Terror" has undoubtedly weakened Islamist militias and networks - above all through ever new surveillance technologies and through Obama's massive use of drones. The question is at what price. In 2020, scientists at Brown University in the United States drew up an interim balance sheet of the human, political and fiscal costs of the war on terrorism. According to this, at least 800,000 people, almost half of them civilians, had been killed in direct combat operations by then - the vast majority in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. According to the authors of the "Cost of War" project, a much larger number died of indirect consequences such as malnutrition, hunger and the collapse of health systems in contested areas.
As part of the "War on Terror", the US has so far carried out military operations in 85 countries. In the USA alone, the costs of wars now amount to over six trillion dollars, including many billions for civil development projects in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, which have disappeared through corruption and mismanagement.
This list does not include the costs of the anti-terror war on its new battlefields on the African continent. In Mali, Niger and other countries in the Sahel region, Islamists with ties to al-Qaeda and IS brought large areas under their control or made them uncontrollable in early 2021. Here, too, government corruption, ethnic tension and unemployment provided them with enough recruits. The national armies proved to be overwhelmed, and the state, openly or covertly, prepared ethnic militias for the fight against terrorism, which in turn committed serious human rights violations. An international anti-terror coalition flew air strikes and deployed special commandos; this time not under the leadership of the USA, but of France. A vicious circle that will continue until further notice.
When Joe Biden promised the withdrawal of US soldiers from Afghanistan in April 2021, IS was firmly established there too. Washington did not conduct the withdrawal negotiations with the Afghan government, but with the Taliban, who now controlled large parts of the country again. The deal: Withdrawal of US troops against the assurance that the Taliban would no longer allow preparations for attacks on American targets on Afghan soil. The talks had already begun under Biden's predecessor Donald Trump, who added a whole new chapter to the American anti-terror war: on the one hand, terrorists were redefined as negotiating partners for the first time during his term in office in the case of the Taliban, on the other hand, Trump expanded the war to include new goals. In January 2020, the Iranian General Kassem Soleimani.
The US must finally be honest, wrote the Afghan journalist Mansoor Faizy after Joe Biden's announcement that all American soldiers would be brought home from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021. "The war on terror campaign was nothing but a huge flop." Most of all, Faizy was bitter that Biden made no mention of the Afghan victims. "It's worth noting that the war on terror has only brought us more war and more terror." And that it won't end in 2021.
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