The War on Terror is essentially over. The United States has only experienced one terrorist attack since 9/11, and the number of troops deployed overseas has steadily decreased.
But even though “The nature of the jihadist terrorist threat to the American homeland has fundamentally changed...the U.S. government and much of the foreign policy establishment have failed to recognize this or alter their response.”
That’s a mistake. Going forward, the United States should respond to this new normal by “reducing the scope and intensity of U.S. CT operations and increasing congressional oversight, while retaining an effective capacity for self-defense.”
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks I wrote this about our military response and that it could require big efforts based on the threat:
We cannot reason with our terrorist enemy and should seek to destroy them all. Although America must be ruthless in pursuing the terrorists and killing them we cannot smash about blindly in our rage, killing innocents and neutrals in the process. Indiscriminate carnage will recruit more terrorist enemies. We should be ruthless across the entire conflict spectrum as appropriate, from covert operations, to special operations missions, to large-scale conventional operations. As the saying goes, not every problem is a nail so not every tool is a hammer. America has many tools to fight terrorism and each has its place and time.
Fighting the states that have supported terrorism is another matter. They must not be treated the same as the terrorists. The goal with these states is not to destroy them but to prevent them from supporting the terrorists. Destroying such states should only be an option when we cannot persuade them by other means to end their support for terrorism. Just as ruthlessness is the proper mindset for going after the terrorists, cool reasoning is the proper state of mind for dealing with the supporting states. Making these states neutral or friendly will help dry up the terrorist recruiting pool and cripple the infrastructure that supports them. Terrorism is the main enemy and an emphasis on fighting the supporting states is a potential distraction.
We've come a long way from those days. What Sunni-majority state supports terrorists who target America? How many states now work with us to fight terrorists--including Iraq, which is amazingly overlooked? What terrorist groups seem poised to strike big at our homeland today?
The threat still exists. But we can afford to set aside our biggest hammers and use different tools than those we needed to use in the aftermath of the threats made apparent on September 11, 2001.
Indeed, I've written about adjusting to the new circumstances that our efforts have achieved:
Yes, American forces are in combat at low levels. And there are occasional casualties. But we are not engaged in large scale combat using larger combat forces in direct combat. We are advising allies who exist because of past wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and other entities that can fight for themselves with our help (like the Kurds and many African states who fight jihadis)[.] ...
But we aren't used to this background "noise" of conflict. Colombia had a five-decade war against insurgents. The Philippines has been fighting terrorists and separatists since independence. And there are Israel, Afghanistan, Somalia, Burma, Zaire, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey, and Iraq, just to name some countries with ongoing and lengthy political violence.
Perhaps the British had the right idea by calling their long struggle with Irish terrorists "the troubles."
We have the "war on terror" which for a while in the Afghanistan and Iraq theaters was a real war.
But once the direct threats were defeated on the battlefield and whittled down to a size allies can handle with our help, it is something other than a war despite continued American military roles. ...
So the fight goes on. And the real fight is a civil war within the the Islamic world where we are potential collateral damage in the fight over who defines Islam--jihadis or normal people who would rather just get along with non-Moslems or even just Moslems who aren't Islamist fanatics of the proper sect.
Americans aren't war weary. Or war apathetic. Americans are perhaps realizing that we've joined the rest of the world whose people long faced endless violence. Travel and media got good enough that our long isolation in the New World has shrunk the distance that once kept us safe from global troubles.
And it is an adjustment Americans have to make if we are to carry on until a victory that might not come for many decades.
I've long said that our war on terror is a holding action to prevent collateral damage from the Islamic Civil War from hurting Americans at home. In many ways we've done that and paid the price to achieve it.
While there are still military tasks to be done in the fight against jihadis, America and the West need different tools from those that dominated in the decade after 9/11 to finally defeat the Islamo-fascists that wish to kill and define all of Islam as an expression of that will to kill.
We are in the age of the Global Troubles now.
This is not a declaration of Mission Accomplished. Much like that 2001 sentiment actually was a declaration of one mission accomplished rather than of final victory, we accomplished our initial post-9/11 mission of breaking the back of international terrorism and the states that supported them.
If we keep working on this problem, even the Global Troubles will one day finally fade.
