Peter Konchak, Law & Public Policy Scholar, JD Anticipated May 2021
“You have the watches. We have the time.” So goes an insurgent’s aphorism about the alleged futility of his adversary’s campaign against him. The statement bears some truth: since the onset of the first modern counterinsurgency campaigns waged by the European great powers during the “second age of imperialism,” attrition has been recognized as a means by which guerillas may defeat great powers. In this paradigm, the objective of the insurgency is not to inflict a decisive military defeat on its more powerful opponent, but rather to force the latter’s disengagement from the conflict by exhausting him politically. Exhaustion is accomplished by inflicting a constant series of small-scale losses—each of which alone is likely militarily insignificant—over a prolonged period of time. Frustrated in its attempt to defeat the guerillas, the counterinsurgent extricates itself from the war. Thus might David defeat Goliath: time is on his side.
It is in accordance with this narrative that a growing and increasingly vocal opposition to so-called “endless war” has come to the fore of U.S. domestic political debate. Never mind that the evidence demonstrates that most insurgencies are unsuccessful—though they may be lengthy—an increasing number of prominent American leaders want America to disengage from “forever wars.” In his 2016 campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump repeatedly railed against American commitments abroad, especially with respect to the Middle Eastern conflicts.
As President, Trump has invoked that isolationist view in support of halting U.S.-South Korean joint military drills. He has pursued an agreement with the Taliban regarding the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Most recently, he has ordered an impulsive and destabilizing U.S. exit from northeastern Syria that is creating a security vacuum currently being filled by Russia, Turkey, and the Assad regime. Trump’s position may be regarded as an extreme iteration of the backlash against “endless war,” but it is not unique.
Many major contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential primary have promised to end the U.S. military role in Afghanistan. Senator Elizabeth Warren remarked in a recent debate that she intended, if elected President, to “get out of the Middle East.” Her campaign later clarified that she was referring to ending the combat role of U.S. forces in the region. Therefore, the exact contours of each candidate’s foreign policy proposals remain to be seen. What is clear, however, is the emerging belief among an apparently growing segment of the body politic that the conflicts in which we are engaged, in particular those conflicts that involve low-level counterinsurgency or counterterrorism operations in the greater Middle East, are detrimental to our interests in large part because of their temporal indefiniteness. Implicit in the arguments put forth by many of our elected representatives is that the efficacy of our efforts in places like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Pakistan is questionable because the achievement of our aims has not been immediate.
We might well ask ourselves, however, whether time is a proper means by which the costs of war may be measured. For 44 years, this nation—in the words of President Kennedy—bore “the burden of a long twilight struggle” against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. In the course of that conflict, the United States suffered over 150,000 casualties and incurred over $8 trillion in military expenditures to defend Western Europe, Northeast Asia, and large parts of the developing world against Soviet expansionism, and liberate the populations of Eastern Europe. In the Second World War, the United States sustained over one million casualties to defeat the apocalyptic aggression of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and militarist Japan, prevent the establishment of totalitarian hegemony across the whole of Eurasia, and save millions of innocents from subjugation. Between 1940–1945, 40% of the U.S. economy was devoted to building the “Arsenal of Democracy” necessary to outstrip the Axis war effort. And in our Civil War, this nation endured the fratricidal carnage of Antietam and Gettysburg, the destruction wrought by a March to the Sea, and the most existential constitutional crisis in its history in order to preserve the Union, free people from enslavement, and ensure that government of, by, and for the people did not perish from the earth.
Thus the United States has, in the past, expended staggering amounts of blood and treasure in pursuit of its most consequential foreign policy objectives. In each case, those sacrifices were made, because our political leaders understood that an alternative course—of inaction or acquiescence—would lead to even greater catastrophe. Often, to sacrifice time was considered a small price to pay in order to avert greater human and financial calamity on the part of the United States and its allies. This calculus was demonstrated in the Second World War when the U.S. decided to prolong its campaign against Japan in order to concentrate its forces more heavily against the greater strategic threat posed by the Third Reich and its satellites, and to forego opening a second front in Europe for two years until a decisive invasion could be launched against Nazi-occupied Europe in France. The same consideration was again evinced during the Cold War when the U.S. decided to maintain 350,000 troops in Western Europe for four decades in order to deter a Soviet invasion of the region rather than liberate it at much greater cost in the aftermath of such aggression, and to effectuate the containment of the Soviet Empire in order to defeat it by economic attrition rather than a general war that would risk escalation to a nuclear exchange. The strategic wisdom of those determinations should inform the conduct of our foreign policy today, by cautioning against automatic aversion to lengthy military commitments irrespective of their strategic utility.
In our own era, among the myriad threats faced by this nation remains the risk that radical jihadi terrorists, operating out of ungoverned spaces, will utilize those locations as bases from which they can plan, organize, and launch terror attacks against the West. To combat this threat, the U.S. and its allies maintain special forces and military advisors in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria (despite the U.S. withdrawal from most of northeast Syria over the last few weeks, U.S. forces will remain at a base in the southwest of the country near the al-Tanf border crossing on the Iraq-Syria border), and several other states in the greater Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. The U.S. and allied militaries also conduct intermittent air strikes against extremist groups in Libya and Somalia, and the CIA regularly launches drone strikes against jihadi militants in Pakistan and Yemen. This campaign has been remarkably effective in maintaining pressure on and degrading the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and other jihadi militant groups over the last five years.
Supported by only a few thousand U.S. and allied troops operating on the ground, the Iraqi military and the Syrian Democratic Forces—which were recently abandoned by the United States—recaptured all of the territory once held by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria at the height of its power in 2015. In Afghanistan, the situation is less favorable, but the limited U.S. presence there continues to prevent the emergence of a terrorist safe haven. Though the security situation has deteriorated in recent years, the national government remains in control of half of all Afghan territory, including the most heavily-populated parts of the country, without assistance from U.S. combat troops. Therefore, despite continued instability in Afghanistan, the provision of materiel and combat support to the Afghan national government has prevented the country from descending into complete chaos. Moreover, while the Taliban have gained territory in Afghanistan, the continued ability of U.S. forces to conduct air and special operations strikes in the country alongside a friendly government means that al-Qaeda and other groups cannot operate with impunity within that territory. Finally, in those places where the United States uses force in a limited, targeted manner in order to strike at jihadi militants operating in ungoverned spaces—via CIA covert strikes or one-off military engagements—small-scale American involvement keeps pressure on al Qaeda and Islamic State.
Furthermore, the level of U.S. commitment to so-called “endless wars,” as outlined above, has proven effective at combating jihadi militants while allowing the United States and its allies to begin to reorient their defense postures from the Middle East to Europe and Asia. Importantly, current counterinsurgency and counterterror operations in the Middle East differ markedly from the large-scale ground campaigns that saw hundreds of thousands of U.S. forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003 and 2014. Instead, as discussed above, local forces are now largely responsible for engaging in ground combat, maintaining internal security, and supporting the development of stable state institutions. The role of the United States is now limited to activities that bear far fewer human and financial costs, such as military and developmental advice, and combat support, such as air strikes and intelligence. Thus, the indeterminacy of the conflicts in that region no longer threaten to preclude the United States and its allies from responding effectively to Chinese or Russian aggression in more strategically important theaters. Recent U.S. strategy towards jihadist groups has therefore been relatively sound insofar as it has been predicated upon the rational connection of means to ends; small contingents of U.S. forces and strong diplomatic ties with Middle Eastern states are being utilized to continue to degrade al-Qaeda, Islamic State, and other militant groups, thus freeing U.S. forces from large-scale commitments while protecting the United States and Europe from major terror attacks.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, those who polemicize against America’s “endless wars” fail to articulate an alternative course of action. If the strategy is not limited engagement in a strategically important part of the world, and if no one is advocating for an escalation of the current U.S. presence, then what is the strategy? One must assume that the admonition for America to “get out” of the Middle East must be taken literally; we should cede the region to Russia, Iran, Turkey, and China, and allow jihadists to operate in the ungoverned spaces those regimes fail to police. This has already begun to happen with the U.S. withdrawal from northeastern Syria. Its incidence is threatened further by the likelihood of the United States pulling its forces out of Afghanistan after signing an agreement with the Taliban that will not produce a ceasefire in that country. So the women and girls, the ethnic and religious minorities, the nascent democracies, the security of the Western world, and the fate of Middle East be damned—it is time for America to go home.
Except that America can’t “go home,” at least not without precipitating a crisis far more costly to its interests than the state of its present position in the Middle East. Turkey, Russia, and Iran are already in the process of carving up Syria following the U.S. exit. A reduction in U.S. engagement with Iraq would leave that country more firmly under the suzerainty of Iran. If the United States were to terminate its support for the Afghan national government, the state could collapse and Afghanistan could again full under Taliban control. The influence of Pakistan, Russia, and China in the country would likely grow. If the United States were to stop striking at jihadi militants in ungoverned spaces in Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, and Syria, terrorist networks would regain sanctuaries from which they could begin to reorganize themselves. And a broader U.S. disengagement from the region diplomatically would heighten the risk that regional and world powers would more lightly pursue aggression in the Middle East.
None of this is to argue that recent U.S. policy in the Middle East has been perfect. Greater effort should be expended to facilitate settlements among the various ethnic and religious factions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere, whose protracted political and social disputes have created the conditions for armed conflict exploited by extremist groups and external powers. Similarly, the United States should engage in a comprehensive effort to restructure its relationship with regional allies such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan by providing them with greater security assistance and building closer ties with them to the extent they increase their support for diplomatic processes. And where violence persists, the United States should increasingly pursue the involvement of a large number of its allies whenever it seeks to intervene with force. Thus, there is much room for a reasoned and nuanced debate of how the United States can best move forward in the Middle East and around the world. Many different risks and opportunities should be considered when the United States takes action anywhere around the world, and sometimes it may be necessary for the United States to pull back, or withdraw, or retreat on a tactical basis. But it should not be the policy of the United States to disengage wholesale from an entire region of the world. And it should never be the policy of the United States to let the enemy run out the clock.