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 WHO WON THE WAR ON TERROR?
T
“ his battle will take time and
resolve,” President George W.
Bush declared on September 12,
2001. “But make no mistake about it:
we will win.” For much of the next two
decades, pursuing victory in the “war on
terror” would serve as the central
fixation of American foreign policy. Yet
even as the United States invaded two
countries and launched drone strikes in
others, as governments around the
world erected vast security structures
and attackers plotted with mixed
success to evade them, as jihadi groups
rose and fell and rose again, a basic
question was never answered: What
would it mean to “win”?
Drawing on thousands of al Qaeda
documents seized in the 2011 raid that
killed Osama bin Laden, Nelly Lahoud
reveals that the other side struggled
with the same question. The 9/11 attacks
were meant, in bin Laden’s words, to
“destroy the myth of American invinci-
bility.” Ultimately, Lahoud writes, “bin
Laden did change the world—just not in
the ways that he wanted.”
One factor he failed to anticipate was
the overwhelming U.S. response. “By
any measure,” writes Ben Rhodes, “the
‘war on terror’ was the biggest project
of the period of American hegemony
that began when the Cold War ended—a
period that has now reached its dusk.”
The vast scale and consequences of
that project, Rhodes argues, continue
to shape U.S. foreign policy, as Wash-
ington imposes the same us-versus-
them construct on new threats.
American counterterrorism, mean-
while, has settled into what Daniel
Byman calls a “good enough doctrine,”
meant to “manage, rather than elimi-
nate, the terrorist threat”—with a
degree of effectiveness that few imag-
ined possible in the aftermath of 9/11.
Other outcomes would have seemed
equally surprising. Thomas Heggham-
mer traces how the fight against jihadi
terrorism fueled “the steadily growing
coercive power of the technocratic
state.” Cynthia Miller-Idriss traces how
it fueled a different strain of extremist
violence: 2020 saw a record number of
domestic terrorist plots and attacks in
the United States, and “two-thirds of
those were attributable to white suprem-
acists and other far-right extremists.”
“If the goal of the global war on
terror was to prevent significant acts of
terrorism, particularly in the United
States, then the war has succeeded,”
Elliot Ackerman concludes from his
survey of the expansive use of U.S.
military power in that war. “But at
what cost?” In the last few years,
terrorism may have vanished from the
top tier of American national security
concerns almost as quickly as it ap-
peared. Yet the costs continue to
accrue—leaving the question of what
winning means as unsettled now as it
was on September 12, 2001.
—Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Editor
 For two decades, pursuing
victory in the “war on
terror” has served as the
central ixation of
American foreign policy.

Bin Laden’s Catastrophic Success From 9/11 to 1/6

PAO L O P E L L E G R I N / MAG N U M P H O T O S

Nelly Lahoud 10 Cynthia Miller-Idriss 54

Them and Us Winning Ugly

Ben Rhodes 22 Elliot Ackerman 66

The Good Enough Doctrine

Daniel Byman 32

Resistance Is Futile
Thomas Hegghammer 44

I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y T K