New research offers an alternative to the war on terror as the Biden administration rethinks its counterterrorism playbook.
On September 19, 2001, CIA officers collected cardboard boxes filled with $3 million in nonsequential $100 bills to buy off Afghan warlords, beginning America’s martial response to the 9/11 attacks. A day later, President George W. Bush stood before Congress and declared a “war on terror” that would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”
Over the next 20-plus years, the tab on that conflict, which began in Afghanistan but spread across the globe to Burkina Faso, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Niger, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen, has ballooned to more than $6 trillion. The payoff has been dismal: To date, the war has killed around 900,000 people, including more than 350,000 civilians; displaced as many as 60 million; and led to humanitarian catastrophes and the worst U.S. military defeat since the Vietnam War. American cash has built armies that have collapsed or evaporated when challenged; meanwhile, the number of foreign terrorist groups around the world has more than doubled from 32 to 69.
“Counterterrorism strategies which address the root causes of terrorism, rather than the organizations and people that commit it, might end the waves of terrorist violence.”
It didn’t have to be this way, according to a new study of counterterrorism approaches from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. “Terrorism is a political phenomenon,” writes researcher Jennifer Walkup Jayes in “Beyond the War Paradigm: What History Tells Us About How Terror Campaigns End,” which was shared exclusively with The Intercept ahead of its release on Tuesday. “Counterterrorism strategies which address the root causes of terrorism, rather than the organizations and people that commit it, might end the waves of terrorist violence.”
Sophisticated statistical analyses have demonstrated that there are proven, effective methods to hasten the demise of terrorist organizations, according to Walkup Jayes’s report. But the “war paradigm,” which was a departure from America’s previous law enforcement approach to counterterrorism, is not one of them.
One innovative study of 648 militant groups cited by Walkup Jayes notes that only 7 percent of terrorist groups were defeated through military efforts. What bleeding-heart, leftist, ivory tower eggheads came to this conclusion? The 2008 study was conducted by the RAND Corporation, the military’s go-to think tank, when the cost of the war on terror was still a paltry $752 billion.
“In Iraq and Afghanistan,” Bush said that same year, “we set a clear definition of success: Success will come when Al Qaeda has no safe haven in those countries and the people can protect themselves from terror. Success will come when Iraq and Afghanistan are economically viable. Success will come when Iraq and Afghanistan are democracies that govern themselves effectively and respond to the will of their people. Success will come when Iraq and Afghanistan are strong and capable allies on the war on terror.”
Today, Al Qaeda is still present in Afghanistan. Its successor, the Islamic State, is active in Afghanistan and Iraq. And neither of those nations is a democracy or economically viable, as Afghanistan now teeters on the brink of economic collapse and is ruled by the very regime that Bush deposed in 2001. Most Read Elon Musk Reveals Jaw-Dropping Ignorance About Social Security Jon Schwarz NRA Silent as Amir Locke Slain by Police for Having a Gun He Legally Owned Ryan Grim Student Vaccine Mandates Are the Next Political Crisis Rachel M. Cohen
Experts say this cascade of failures could have been largely avoided. “You can envision a scenario, after 9/11, in which the terrorist attacks were treated primarily as a criminal justice problem,” said Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project, noting that the FBI and the CIA could have led the effort with a goal of arresting, prosecuting, and imprisoning Osama bin Laden and others who planned the attacks.
While noting that the Costs of War report highlights drawbacks to this approach, Savell told The Intercept that it would have been transformational. “You wouldn’t have seen 20 years of conflict and this incredible waste of resources,” she said. “The U.S. response wouldn’t have led to this spiral of escalation, of war and violence begetting more war and violence.”
The money spent on the war paradigm could instead have been allocated to more serious national security concerns. Walkup Jayes draws attention to the perils of the global climate crisis, the fact that a lack of health insurance kills more than 45,000 people a year, and the Covid-19 pandemic which has not only led to the deaths of close to 1 million Americans but also laid bare the sorry state of U.S. health care. “The reality is that poverty, racism, and other structural inequalities pose far greater threats to human lives than do terror attacks,” she observes. “These threats are far more dangerous to far more people than are militant groups who use terror tactics, and there are feasible policies to address them.” Related What the U.S. Could Have Bought After 9/11 Instead of a “War on Terror”
It all raises the question of what might have been if the budget for the war on terror had been repurposed. “If the U.S. government had used even a portion of the $8 trillion spent and obligated on the post-9/11 wars on other domestic policies to promote societal health and well-being or mitigate the effects of climate change, that would have resulted in far more meaningful human security in this country,” Savell told The Intercept.
“Beyond the War Paradigm” lays out 10 distinct, though sometimes overlapping, counterterrorism alternatives to America’s militarized approach. These include the law enforcement model, which relies on policing and the judicial system; using public messaging and media campaigns to blunt radical ideologies; addressing the root causes of terrorism by funding development projects and aid groups; and an even more holistic “human security” model, which “aims to empower disenfranchised groups politically and economically … making terrorism a less compelling tactic for changemaking.”
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