On Friday, people across the country will engage in several minutes of silence for the nearly 3,000 people who perished during the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. The 19th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks is an especially difficult day for New Yorkers, many of whom lost friends and family in what has turned out to be the largest inflection point in U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II.
In the days after Sept. 11, the public rightly demanded retaliation. Weeks later, the U.S. military began a campaign of airstrikes against al Qaida and the Taliban. The campaign achieved its objectives in a few short months: Al Qaida’s terrorist infrastructure was demolished, Osama bin Laden was cowering in Afghanistan’s eastern mountains, and a Taliban movement that once ruled 90% of the country was left floundering for a place in the new order.
Despite delivering a sense of justice to the victims of Sept. 11 many years ago, the men and women of the U.S. military remain spread across countries on three separate continents in what has long since been defined as a war on terrorism with no end date. Rather than celebrating a job well done and coming home, U.S. policymakers committed the fundamental mistake of enlarging the campaign to new places — helping to spawn more terrorist attacks than when the so-called war on terrorism began.
By now, the public and the very service members tasked with prosecuting the post-Sept. 11 wars have witnessed just how costly this dreadful mistake has been to our security and prosperity. According to Defense Department statistics, over 7,000 U.S. troops have lost their lives. More than 53,000 people in uniform have been wounded in action, some of which are so serious as to be life-altering. The financial cost to taxpayers can be categorized as nothing short of gluttonous: Brown University’s Cost of War Project calculates that $6.4 trillion have been spent on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria since 2001. The estimated cost for veterans’ care over the next five years will be greater than $1 trillion. Iraq alone has sucked up so many U.S. resources that the entire price tag amounts to approximately $8,000 per taxpayer.
None of this even touches the significant human dimension of these conflicts. A separate Cost of War Project investigation published on Tuesday finds that at least 37 million people (and perhaps as many as 59 million) have been displaced as a result of U.S. counterterrorism operations from as far afield as the Philippines to Libya.
A supporter of the status quo could look at all these numbers and conclude this is the unfortunate cost of doing business against an ugly enemy intent on killing innocent people. Yet as should be clear after 19 years, the way Washington has chosen to combat terrorism has been and indeed remains littered with assumptions, susceptible to expansion without so much as a cursory debate from members of Congress and powered by a sensationalism that inflates the marginal threat terrorism poses to the United States. The end result is what we see today: soldiers being put at risk in war-wracked countries such as Somalia and the U.S. foreign policy apparatus only now addressing more important priorities (including managing relations with China) after decades of distraction.
There’s a more effective way to protect the U.S. from anti-American terrorists, and it doesn’t require the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars to prop up weak and corrupt governments or sentencing another generation of U.S. service members to multiple deployments. But this better way will require the U.S. foreign policy community to prioritize between terrorist groups focused on killing Americans from those largely concerned with local contests for power.
It will also mean a rethinking in Washington of the terrorism problem as a whole, including a realization that physical safe havens are far less vital to terrorists in today’s interconnected world than they were in the pre-Sept. 11 period.
By providing domestic law enforcement agencies with the resources they need, removing U.S. troops from nation-building enterprises that have characterized U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and utilizing the U.S. military’s superior technology against terrorists when necessary, the U.S. can achieve counterterrorism successes at a fraction of the human and material cost.
Let Friday’s Sept. 11 anniversary serve not only as a period of remembrance for the victims but also as a time of reflection on how the U.S. can make smarter foreign policy choices.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a fellow at Defense Priorities.
