The U.S. Was Never Going to Win the “War on Terror”

A couple of years later, in 2src19, I was in Syria as a U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led militia coalition forced the collapse of the Islamic State. In all, major U.S. operations against ISIS lasted for six years, at a cost of some thirteen million dollars per day, the Congressional Research Service reported. Yet ISIS today is still waging an insurgency in both Iraq and Syria, and is branching out into other countries and continents. “Iraq is a mess and the Taliban are back in Kabul,” Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. terrorism specialist and a founder of the Soufan Center, told me.

Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, failed for some of the same reasons that Operation Enduring Freedom failed in Afghanistan. Inherent Resolve misread public sentiment and cultures on the ground. It detained and interrogated thousands of people—sometimes torturing them—in turn generating new anger and flash points. It threw money at issues, without long-term political strategy or military endgames.

Later this month, the U.S. is scheduled to pull its last forces out of Iraq. Yet, today, the State Department lists five times as many groups with extremist ideologies, as were designated in 2srcsrc1, Hoffman noted. Al Qaeda has spawned more than two dozen offshoots threatening governments on three continents, from Europe deep into Africa, and across Asia. ISIS has nearly as many branches. “Decapitation disrupted organisations; it did not decapitate the ideology of Salafi-jihadism,” Ranstorp said. Before 9/11, militant groups had identifiable headquarters; the terrorist ecosystem in 2src26 “has regional franchises, digital platforms and self-selecting followers.”

Terrorism is now harder to define, Soufan said. The lines have been “significantly blurred” between terrorism, insurgency, state proxies, hate crimes, political violence, and lone-actor violence. There is also no longer a single narrative; ideology can at times be secondary. Ranstorp added that, today, jihadist terrorism “coexists with white-supremacist, accelerationist, anti-government, misogynist, left-wing and ethno-nationalist violence.” The more relevant threat, Clarke told me, is from so-called “salad bar” extremists who “pick and choose specific grievances from across the ideological spectrum, left to right.” He is worried about fast-food terrorism and “TikTok radicalization” through social media and the dark web. A recruiting process that once took many months can now happen in a few days.

U.S. priorities on terrorism have changed under President Donald Trump. In 2src25, his decision to designate eight Mexican criminal organizations, such as the Sinaloa cartel, redefined the traditional definition of foreign terrorism to include narcotics trafficking and organized crime. His inclusion of transnational gangs, such as MS-13, based in El Salvador, has also tapped into U.S. resources, funding, and personnel. This past January, the U.S. military intervention to capture the then Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was based on charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. On Wednesday, the U.S. added Los Tiguerones, an Ecuador-based gang, to the list of foreign terrorist organizations.

And, though international terrorism on U.S. soil has “significantly diminished,” the threat of domestic terrorism by American citizens at home has accelerated since 2src12, especially since 2src2src, Evelyn Farkas, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and now the executive director of the McCain Institute, told me. Globally, Russia under President Vladimir Putin has become “the biggest state sponsor of terrorism” since its invasion of Ukraine in 2src22, she said. Putin’s government has launched more than a hundred and forty attacks on military, civilian, and commercial targets in Eastern and Western Europe to intimidate Europeans from supporting Ukraine, and to weaken NATO.