Against The War on Terror

Note -- this does not make me pro-terror

Introduction

Here, I’ll argue that the war on terror has been a massive failure that should be discontinued. I’m not the first to have argued this, but I think the case for it is fairly overwhelming. US interventions to combat terror just don’t work very well. Contra Cheney, some problems can’t just be bombed into oblivion.

One initial reason to think this is the following — the government just isn’t very good at doing things. Simple tasks are fine, but complex tasks that involve carefully threading the needle in difficult ethical situations aren’t pulled off well. If you think the government is bad at passing covid restrictions, gun control, and designing healthcare, as most who support the war on terror do, then you should also think they’re bad at killing large numbers of people without having deleterious effects.

Another reason to think that counterterror wouldn’t work well is that the United States doesn’t care very much about people in other countries. We routinely kill vast numbers of people without even looking into efficacy. Virtually no one cares about the US killing lots of people in other countries. Thus, we ought to expect the US to kill people wantonly, even for meager benefit.

So, just based on priors, we should expect the war on terror not to work. But then, when we update on the evidence, this becomes even more obvious.

The Data

As Thrall notes

1. The war on terror has not made us much safer than we were pre-9/11. Terrorism already killed virtually no people.

2. The war on terror has not achieved its goals. As Thrall says “the United States has not destroyed or defeated al Qaeda, the Islamic State, or any other terror groups of global reach.”

3. The war on terror is a bad way of keeping us safe given that a vanishingly small portion of murders have anything to do with terrorism. Thrall notes “In their exhaustive investigation into post-9/11 terrorist plots, John Mueller and Mark Stewart point out that, despite the fact that 173 million foreigners enter the United States legally each year, al Qaeda has conducted exactly zero successful attacks since 9/11.”

4. Since the war on terror started, the number of terror attacks in the middle east has increased rapidly. “There were 1,880 terror attacks worldwide in 2001 when the U.S. began its War on Terror. In 2015 the number was 14,806”

5. There’s solid evidence that, when the US engages in counterterror, it increases the number of terror attacks dramatically.

To investigate the impact of U.S. military intervention, we compared the terror rates between War on Terror states, other Muslim majority countries, the United States, and the global average. Additionally, we created regression models to examine the significance, if any, of U.S. military strikes when controlling for other variables often used in the study of terrorism such as a state’s GDP per capita, economic growth rate, social fractionalization, polity, and education levels (see Appendix 1).

As Table 2 reveals, the number of terror attacks rose an astonishing 1,900 percent in the seven countries that the United States either invaded or conducted air strikes in, while other Muslim majority states saw a much more modest 42 percent increase. The regression models also found that countries where the United States conducted air or drone strikes saw a dramatic increase in terror attacks compared to countries where the United States did not conduct strikes.50 Even more startling, the models showed the greatest effect when comparing drone strikes conducted in year one with the number of terror attacks carried out two years later, a finding consistent with the theory that U.S. strikes have a catalyzing effect on terror groups. In short, contrary to the intentions of the U.S. government, as the War on Terror has expanded, it has led to greater levels of terrorism.

6. The underlying causes of terrorism are things like violence, corruption, a weak economy, and general instability. But those have gotten worse in places where the US launched the war on terror.

Us counterterror wars kill enormous numbers of people. After 9/11, the Watson institute notes

At least 929,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. The number of people who have been wounded or have fallen ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who have died indirectly as a result of the destruction of hospitals and infrastructure and environmental contamination, among other war-related problems.

Thousands of United States service members have died in combat, as have thousands of civilian contractors. Many have died later on from injuries and illnesses sustained in the war zones. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and contractors have been wounded and are living with disabilities and war-related illnesses. Allied security forces have also suffered significant casualties, as have opposition forces.

Far more of the people killed have been civilians. More than 387,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting since 2001.

Millions of people living in the war zones have also been displaced by war. The U.S. post-9/11 wars have forcibly displaced at least 38 million people in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria. This number exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II.

This number is based on a detailed report about the cost of the war on terror. The report notes that the displacement numbers could be “perhaps as many as 59 million.” Additionally “37 million is a very conservative estimate.” Thus, the US war on terror has displaced tens of millions of people and has almost definitely been counterproductive at actually stopping terrorism. Savell notes

Nearly 20 years after the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan, the cost of its global war on terror stands at $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths, according to a new report from the Costs of War project at Brown University.

Thus, in response to 9/11, the US has killed, by conservative estimates, 300 times as many people as died in 9/11.

Gledhill notes

1. “Between 2001 and 2018, annual terror attacks worldwide increased fivefold.”

2. “From 2001 to 2015, the annual number of terror attacks rose by 1,900% in the seven countries where the United States has either conducted air strikes or militarily invaded.”

3. “Indeed, evidence shows that only 7% of terrorist groups have been “quelled by a military effort.””

4. “A 2018 RAND Corporation study, found that unless paired with United Nations peacekeeping operations, U.S. security assistance programs in Africa conducted in the post-Cold War period had no statistically significant effect on levels of terrorism.”

5. “In 2020, there were at least 1,000 attacks, massacres, and other violent incidents linked to terror groups across Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger—a sevenfold increase since 2017, when all three countries entered a U.S.-supported joint force to combat terrorism.”

6. They conclude that there are “More fighters and groups willing to engage in terrorism,” since the start of the war on terror. For example “A Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that there were an estimated 230,000 Sunni Islamist-inspired fighters willing and able to use violence to achieve their goals in 2018, amounting to an increase of 270% since 2001.”

7. “Since the post-9/11 wars began, over 387,000 civilians have been killed as a direct result of fighting.27 This figure doesn’t include the civilians who have died as an indirect result of war, including water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.”

8. “Terrorist groups were more likely to achieve victory (10%) than they were to be disbanded through military force.”

Gledhill provides various mechanistic explanations of the failure of the war on terror. For example, they conclude that a major focus has been on disrupting terrorist safe havens — which doesn’t work when terrorists are spread out and do a lot of their planning online. US military actions also generate blowback which make people much more sympathetic to terrorism. The war on terror has killed numerous people and fostered instability, which makes people much more supportive of terror groups. Contra Bush, we are not greeted as liberators when we kill 900,000 people and displace over 37 million people.

This is why “the countries in which the U.S. military has been most heavily engaged became the countries most impacted by terrorism.” More evidence for the failure of counterterror comes from the fact that this relationship is reverse causal. “Deaths resulting from terrorism in Iraq fell by 75% from 2017 to 2018, coinciding with the drawdown of U.S. troops from the country to one of the lowest levels seen since U.S. invasion in 2003.”

Even so-called targeted decapitation strikes are often counterproductive.

Rather than dismantling terror groups, lethal targeting contributes to their recruitment efforts. U.S. lethal force regularly results in civilian casualties.46 Terror groups take advantage of this, using civilian harm from U.S. military operations to win the sympathies of impacted communities.

Indeed, both the al Qaeda network and ISIS have used U.S. strikes as propaganda tools to stoke resentment against American and other foreign forces and to bolster recruitment.47

This also results in more violent terror attacks. Gledhill notes

The anti-American resentment generated by U.S. military operations abroad has also made the United States more susceptible to attack. According to a study examining the correlation between military participation and terrorist attacks, the citizens of countries that contributed ground forces for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been attacked at a greater frequency by al Qaeda and groups that affiliate with al Qaeda.48 This effect is known as “blowback,” a term originally coined by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to describe the residual damaging effects of U.S. militarism.49

Some like O’Hanlon of brookings try to defend the war on terror by claiming it’s averted another 9/11. He says

However, to date what George W. Bush called the global war on terror has succeeded remarkably, if provisionally, in its single most important goal from an American national security perspective: protecting the homeland, and Americans therein, from attack. This accomplishment has become internalized in our consciousness, almost mundane in our thoughts. But it is remarkable. As the 20-year anniversary of 9/11 nears, we should take a moment to ponder it.

Only about 100 Americans have died in Salafist attacks in the United States since 9/11 — that is, attacks inspired or conducted by al-Qaida, ISIS, and related organizations that preach a perverted and inauthentic version of Islam that advocates death to “infidels” with the strategic purpose of driving the United States out of the broader Middle East so that extremists will have a greater chance of seizing powers.

But this is a bad argument for a lot of reasons.

First, he never identifies the mechanism by which the global war on terror keeps us safe, a war that has — by his own admission — dramatically increased global terror, making it so that “today the number of attacks, and victims, worldwide are three to five times higher annually.” If there’s more terror in foreign countries that we’re bombing, how does the war on terror make us safe? The aforementioned evidence shows that terror has gotten worse — another 9/11 is more likely because of the war on terror.

Second, there was a major US response to 9/11. Thus, we shouldn’t expect there to have been in the absence of the war on terror another 9/11. Even if we did something to prevent another 9/11, it probably wasn’t related to the war on terror.

Third, 9/11 was rare and unprecedented in world history. Thus, we shouldn’t have expected 9/11 to happen in the absence of counterterror. If 9/11s were not intrinsically improbable, we’d expect lots of countries to have similar experiences.

Fourth, even if it prevented another 9/11, it killed 300 times as many people as 9/11. If you solve a problem by killing 300 times as many as are affected by the problem, that makes things worse. Even if you think the death of a foreigner caused by the US military is only 1% as bad as the death of an American — itself a rather odious proposition — you should still think that the harms outweigh the benefits.

Fifth, the war on terror cost 8 trillion dollars. This is roughly 8% of the annual income of the world. The money spent on the war on terror could have increased people’s global incomes by roughly 8%. That’s pretty shocking. Thus, even if you think that the life of an American is worth 2 billion dollars — roughly 2000 times the standard economic estimates — the monetary cost of the war on terror will be equivalent to 4000 lost lives, more than were lost on 9/11. And if you think that one can’t put a price on a life, you’re super wrong — Huemer explains why here. If you go by the more standard economic estimates, then the monetary costs alone are roughly as valuable as saving 800,000 lives.

But as long as we’re not currently experiencing 9/11, neocons will be attributing the absence of 9/11 to their reprehensible and murderous foreign policy.

Conclusion

The war on terror is totally indefensible. Most political science and economic questions are tricky empirical topics. This is not one of them. The war on terror has produced little benefit and killed huge numbers of people. Every problem it tried to solve, it only made worse.

And yet, despite the abject failure of the war on terror, 2016 republicans couldn’t get enough of if. They fought over who would fight ISIS the most — totally ignoring the utter failure. Politics, sadly, does not respond to data, which is no surprise. Contra Ted Cruz, we shouldn’t bomb until we find out if sand can glow in the dark. Some problems just can’t be solved with bombing and US military interventions. Terrorism, like spouse problems, is just one of those.