In this superheated milieu, elites in the United States framed the attacks as an intelligence failure that enabled “a group of barbarians” to drag the country into war. This has produced a war like none other in U.S. history. First, it is religio-ideological, since the conflict is ostensibly with a particular rendering of Islam rather than a state. Second, it is global, and the United States has maintained military operations in the War on Terror in more than eighty countries. As the 9/11 Commission explained, “the American homeland is the planet.” Third, it is permanent, since trying to defeat a weaponized religious fundamentalism with arms is like trying to stop the wind with a musket. Fourth, it is dystopian, since it depends on the state learning everything about anyone who might conceivably be, or become, a threat. And, finally, it is potentially apocalyptic.
Though the War on Terror has morphed over time, nearly all of its ugliness can be traced to this initial framing. We launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at unfathomable cost to human life, national treasures, and global stability. (Unfathomable but not incalculable; the Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that, through 2020, the War on Terror has cost over $8 trillion and more than 929,000 lives, including more than 300,000 civilians). “We tortured some folks” in the name of intelligence, as President Obama acknowledged in 2014. We continue to detain people indefinitely and without meaningful legal process in offshore prisons. We maintain a drone war that has already claimed thousands of civilian lives throughout the Muslim world, including ten more in Kabul last week. And while the Biden security team is tinkering with Trump-era rules about the use of drone strikes outside battlefields, it still intends to conduct them and recently launched drone strikes in Somalia—not to support U.S. troops, but in defense of Somali government forces.