War on terror

• 1. Introduction

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  On the morning of the 11th of September 2001, nineteen men hijacked four jet airliners, all of them bound for California. They told passengers a bomb was on board and that lives would be spared once demands were met. No passenger suspected the planes themselves would become suicide weapons, because in the entire history of hijacking it had never happened before. A total of 2,977 victims and the 19 hijackers died that day. Out of that morning grew the war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism, a campaign the United States began in response to the attacks. Some researchers and political scientists argue it replaced the Cold War. How does a nation declare war on a tactic rather than a country? Who decided that a metaphor would justify operations in dozens of countries over more than two decades? And what did it cost the people caught inside it?

• 2. A Word Becomes A War

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  Tom Brokaw, watching one of the towers of the World Trade Center collapse, declared that terrorists had declared war on America. The phrase war against terrorism already existed in North American popular culture, but the attacks turned it into part of everyday speech. On the 16th of September 2001, at Camp David, George W. Bush used the phrase war on terrorism in an ostensibly unscripted answer to a journalist. He called it a new kind of evil and said, this crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while. The word crusade drew heavy criticism for its connotations in the Muslim world. Four days later, on the 20th of September 2001, Bush told a joint session of Congress that the war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. He named the enemy as a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them. The term uses war as a metaphor for actions that fall outside the traditional definition of war. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, criticized the phrase almost immediately. The political theorist Richard Jackson argued it was both a set of actual practices and an entire language or discourse of assumptions and narratives. Osama bin Laden answered Bush in an interview on the 21st of October 2001, saying Bush had told the world it must divide in two, and that many governments were forced to support this new terrorism.

• 3. Roots Before The Towers

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  In May 1996, a group called the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, sponsored by Osama bin Laden, began building a base of operations in Afghanistan, where the Taliban had seized power that year. The group was later re-formed as al-Qaeda. In August 1996, bin Laden declared jihad against the United States. In February 1998, he signed a fatwa as head of al-Qaeda, declaring war on the West and Israel. On the 7th of August 1998, al-Qaeda struck the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans. President Bill Clinton retaliated with Operation Infinite Reach, a bombing campaign in Sudan and Afghanistan. The strikes hit a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that produced much of the region's antimalarial drugs and around half of Sudan's pharmaceutical needs. They failed to kill any leaders of the group or the Taliban. On the 12th of October 2000, the USS Cole bombing occurred near the port of Yemen, and 17 US Navy sailors were killed. These attacks formed a long fuse that reached its end the following autumn in New York and Washington.

• 4. The Authorization Engine

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  The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, known as the AUMF, became law on the 14th of September 2001. It let the president use all necessary and appropriate force against those who planned, committed, or aided the September 11 attacks, or who harbored them. Bush signed it on the 18th of September 2001, and it remains in effect. Congress declared it specific statutory authorization within the meaning of the War Powers Resolution of 1973. The brevity of that text concealed its reach. The 2001 AUMF has authorized the president to launch military operations worldwide without congressional oversight or transparency. Between 2018 and 2020 alone, US forces initiated what they labelled counter-terror activities in 85 countries. Of those, the AUMF was used to launch classified military campaigns in at least 22 countries. Critics widely perceive it as a bill granting the president powers to unilaterally wage perpetual world wide wars. The Bush administration set out a long list of objectives under the campaign, from defeating named figures like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to ending state sponsorship of terrorism and winning the war of ideals.

• 5. The Two Long Wars

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  On the 20th of September 2001, Bush delivered an ultimatum to the Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden or face attack. The Taliban demanded evidence and offered to handle a trial in an Islamic Court. In October 2001, US forces with UK and coalition allies invaded Afghanistan, and the official invasion began on the 7th of October 2001 with airstrikes. By mid-November, Kabul fell, and remnants retreated to the rugged mountains of Tora Bora. It is believed bin Laden escaped to Pakistan during that battle. Iraq became the second long war. In his 2002 State of the Union Address, Bush grouped North Korea, Iran, and Iraq under the term Axis of evil. On the 5th of February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN Security Council that Iraq was building a secret weapons program and had ties to al-Qaeda. On the 17th of March 2003, Bush gave Saddam Hussein and his two sons 48 hours to flee. The Iraq War began that month with an air campaign and a US-led ground invasion. Baghdad fell in April 2003, and on the 1st of May 2003 Bush announced that major combat operations had ended. An insurgency followed instead. Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003 and executed in 2006. In January 2007, Bush presented a new strategy built on counterinsurgency tactics developed by General David Petraeus, and the troop surge that year has been credited with reducing violence by up to 80%. The Afghan war ended on the 15th of August 2021, when Kabul fell to a swift Taliban offensive, and the United States completed its hasty withdrawal on the 30th of August 2021.

• 6. Many Fronts, Many Names

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  In January 2002, US Special Operations Command, Pacific deployed to the Philippines to help combat Filipino Islamist groups on the island of Basilan, pairing military work with a humanitarian program called Operation Smiles. The Joint Special Operations Task Force there disbanded in June 2014, ending a 12-year mission. In Africa, Operation Enduring Freedom Trans Sahara, now Operation Juniper Shield, ran counter-terrorism across the Sahara and Sahel. In October 2002, the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa was established in Djibouti at Camp Lemonnier, holding roughly 2,000 personnel. Pakistan became both ally and battlefield. Former president Pervez Musharraf sided with the US and gave it the use of three airbases, though he later testified the stance was pressured by US threats. In 2004, the Pakistan Army sent 80,000 troops into the Waziristan region. Osama bin Laden, his wife, and his son were killed on the 2nd of May 2011 during a raid by United States special operations forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan. After the September 11 attacks, US aid to Pakistan spiked, and the Enhanced Partnership for Pakistan Act granted it 7.5 billion US dollars over five years. In Yemen, US military aid rose from less than 11 million dollars in 2006 to more than 70 million dollars in 2009. The list of theaters kept growing, from Operation Inherent Resolve against the Islamic State to the deployment of 300 soldiers to Cameroon in October 2015.

• 7. The Home Front

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  A new cabinet-level agency, the United States Department of Homeland Security, was created in November 2002 to lead the largest reorganization of the federal government since the armed forces were consolidated into the Department of Defense. The USA PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001, dramatically reduced restrictions on law enforcement's ability to search telephone, e-mail, medical, and financial records. It also expanded the definition of terrorism to include domestic terrorism. Critics have described the Patriot Act as Orwellian for its expansion of federal surveillance powers. On the 30th of July 2003, the American Civil Liberties Union filed the first legal challenge against Section 215 of the act. In a speech on the 9th of June 2005, Bush said the act had been used to bring charges against more than 400 suspects, more than half of whom had been convicted. The ACLU cited Justice Department figures showing 7,000 people had complained of abuse of the act. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched the Total Information Awareness program in early 2002, which Congress later defunded. The Patriot Act is still in effect.

• 8. Detention, Torture, And The Reckoning

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  Starting in 2002, the US government rendered hundreds of detainees to US-controlled sites under a program of extraordinary rendition, the abduction and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another. Its aim was often torture by proxy, conducting interrogation that would be difficult in the US legal environment. In July 2014, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Poland for participating in CIA extraordinary rendition and ordered it to pay restitution to men taken to a black site there and tortured. In 2005, The Washington Post and Human Rights Watch revealed the kidnapping of detainees and their transport to black sites, covert prisons whose existence the US government denied. The US had ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture in 1994. The complex at Stare Kiejkuty, a Soviet-era compound once used by German intelligence in World War II, may have been the facility first identified but never named when the Post's Dana Priest exposed the secret prison network in November 2005. The human cost reaches far beyond the cells. According to the Costs of War Project, the post-9/11 wars have displaced 38 million people, the second largest number of forced displacements of any conflict since 1900. They estimate more than 4.5 million deaths, direct and indirect, across Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, and a cost to the US Treasury of over 8 trillion dollars. Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, said in her 2011 Reith lecture that the 9/11 attacks were a crime, not an act of war, and that she never found it helpful to refer to a war on terror.