It’s the only war in American history designed never to end and fought against an enemy who will never surrender.
Throughout its 25 years, the post-9/11 War on Terror and all of the conflicts that branched from it — from Afghanistan and Iraq to the Horn of Africa — defined presidencies, exacted a staggering human cost, remade the pillars of the federal government, and exposed the hard limits of what raw American military might can achieve.
Some analysts also say the nation’s quarter-century fight against Islamic extremism paved the way for today’s global state of play. Emerging rivals such as China spent the last two decades closing military and technological gaps with a United States that for many years was more focused on battling terrorist networks such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State than preparing for a major multi-domain, great power war.
Other reverberations can be seen in the U.S. war against Iran, long considered the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and the benefactor of extremist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. The Trump administration’s reluctance to commit ground troops to the Iran conflict can be traced back to the national scars inflicted by the war in Afghanistan, the longest conflict in American history, and the 2003 ground invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — and the ill-fated nation-building endeavors that accompanied both.
Some of the key decision-makers who helped craft America’s military strategy in the tense, uncertain weeks that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks say the War on Terror achieved many of its goals over the short and medium terms. But there were long-term strategic miscalculations.
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“The initial campaign in Afghanistan accomplished enormously important things. It destroyed the sanctuary from which al Qaeda had planned the 9/11 attacks, removed the regime that had provided that sanctuary … and demonstrated that the United States could respond rapidly and decisively without committing a massive conventional ground occupation force,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, who led the U.S. air campaign in Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.
“Where we went wrong was in failing to recognize when those vital national security objectives had been achieved,” Gen. Deptula, now the dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told The Washington Times. “We became exceptionally proficient at dismantling networks and attacking threats. We were much less successful when we asked military force to transform societies.”
The Taliban, the hardline Islamic government that ruled Afghanistan when al Qaeda used the country as its base of operations in the 1990s through the 9/11 attacks, is now back in control. The final U.S. troops withdrew from the country in August 2021, ending a nearly two-decade war and, along with it, America’s nation-building experiment there.
After the U.S. invasion in 2003, attempts to transform Iraq into a bulwark of democracy and a reliable security partner in an otherwise chaotic Middle East have had mixed results at best. The country remains a base of operations for dangerous Iran-backed Shiite militias that target U.S. troops across the region.
A huge swath of the country became part of the Islamic State’s “caliphate” last decade, requiring the U.S. to once again commit significant military resources to battle threats there.
A never-ending fight
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Over time, America’s military presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan grew deeply unpopular. But in the aftermath of 9/11, polls showed that as much as 90% of the American public supported invading Afghanistan to topple the Taliban and destroy al Qaeda.
Even then, President George W. Bush laid out a goal for the War on Terror that seemed by definition to be impossible to meet.
“Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated,” he said during a famous Sept. 20, 2001, address to a joint session of Congress.
Under Mr. Bush, those early years of the War on Terror saw a major restructuring of the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security was established in 2002. U.S. Northern Command, a military combatant command tasked with guarding the homeland, was set up the same year.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, aimed at streamlining America’s intelligence-gathering efforts, was founded in 2004. The federal Patriot Act, passed just weeks after 9/11, gave the government sweeping new surveillance powers and other tools to guard American shores from potential terrorist attacks.
Critics say some of those powers stretched too far and infringed on Americans’ personal privacy. The “enhanced interrogation techniques” and other seemingly extreme steps taken by the U.S. to gain information from terror suspects also sparked severe domestic and international backlash against how the campaign was prosecuted.
But the core objectives of the War on Terror endured.
Fifteen years after 9/11, and two years after committing a fresh wave of U.S. military troops and assets to battle the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, then-President Obama echoed his predecessor in telling Americans that the counterterrorism battle had no end.
“We will not achieve the kind of clearly defined victory comparable to those that we won in previous wars against nations. We won’t have a scene of the Emperor of Japan and Douglas MacArthur in a surrender,” Mr. Obama said in December 2016.
Months later, a new president, Donald Trump, unleashed his own military strikes targeting the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria. Mr. Trump also negotiated the deal with the Taliban that ultimately led to America’s withdrawal from the country under his successor, President Biden.
Throughout the presidencies of those men — Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden — the fight against extremists expanded into new corners of the world.
In 2011, the U.S. launched a now-famous special forces raid to capture al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from a compound in Pakistan.
U.S. forces have routinely struck the Islamic State and other terror targets inside Syria. The relationship between Washington and Damascus is now mending under new Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa. But Mr. al-Sharaa has his own past ties to al Qaeda, underscoring how dramatically America’s approach has evolved over the past 25 years.
Even as it battled al Qaeda and ISIS in the Mideast, the U.S. also waged war against al-Shabab, an al Qaeda affiliate, in Somalia. It’s also targeted the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and engaged in counter-terrorism operations across Africa. The continent’s Sahel region has become one of the planet’s terrorism epicenters, with ISIS, al Qaeda, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM) and other extremist groups operating there.
American special forces are active across Africa and have partnered with regional governments to limit those groups’ ability to attack U.S. interests.
Analysts say that revamped approach, focused on containing extremist groups rather than “defeating” them in a traditional military sense, has brought success.
“The language of jihadism and that narrative is stronger in many parts of the world than it was 25 years ago, but much of it is not focused on the United States. And many of the core groups that focused on the United States are weaker in part due to the U.S. counterterrorism” strategy, said Daniel Byman, director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“We’ve shifted from trying to defeat them completely to trying to minimize the threat,” Mr. Byman said in an interview.
Most recently, the Trump administration designated Latin American drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, offering a political and legal justification for the military to target alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific.
An exceedingly high price
Accomplishing the goal of crushing some extremist groups and limiting the reach of others has come at a high cost.
With so many military missions across the globe, many of them highly secretive and involving clandestine special forces, it’s hard to pin down exact casualty figures for the War on Terror as a whole.
At least 2,350 Americans were killed and another 20,149 injured as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, the 2001-2014 U.S. mission to topple the Taliban and destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan, according to the Defense Department’s official Defense Casualty Analysis System.
More than 4,400 were killed and nearly 32,000 wounded in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Another 74 were killed and 298 wounded during Operation New Dawn, the final phase of the formal U.S. military mission in Iraq, according to Pentagon casualty data.
At least 123 U.S. troops were killed and 499 wounded during Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State that started in 2014.
Eighteen U.S. service members have been killed in the war against Iran, which started Feb. 28, with hundreds more wounded.
U.S. troops have also been killed or wounded in operations in Africa, though specific data on those instances isn’t as clear and publicly available.
In October 2017, four U.S. Green Berets and four Nigerien soldiers were killed in an extremist ambush while pursuing an Islamic State-affiliated militant.
Those instances, where American troops died carrying out the mission to hunt down extremists around the world, represent the immeasurable sacrifices tied to the post-9/11 War on Terror.
“When such a grand strategic, tectonic, psychological, sociological, political event happens to the most powerful country in the world, then it’s going to affect the world,” said Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, referring to the 9/11 attacks.
“It initiated a 20-year experience in the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan … that was traumatic for the United States of America, where thousands of Americans paid the ultimate price and many came home with scars, seen and unseen, that changed their lives for the rest of their lives,” Mr. Bowman, a U.S. Army officer who served in Afghanistan, told The Washington Times’ Threat Status podcast.
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