As a candidate, President Donald Trump devoted most of his national security platform to defeating international terrorism as we know it. The Islamic State, a short year ago perhaps the richest terrorist group in the world, were casted as a sorry bunch of 21st-century barbarians—the kind of religiously indoctrinated and ideology brainwashed lunatics who couldn't be negotiated with, but only killed and kept under relentless pressure. The U.S. military campaign against ISIS, Trump declared, was wholly insufficient to the task; far from taking the fight to the enemy, the conventional wisdom circulating at the time (and continuing to the present day) was that the U.S. military was kept on a short leash by the Obama administration and micromanaged to such an extent that operations were being delayed and ISIS was given more time to prepare.
The first five weeks of the new administration is a clear illustration of what President Trump believes: that ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and any terrorist organization seeking to kill Americans at home or overseas can be defeated if U.S. military professionals are provided with more room to do their work. Indeed, President Trump's tenure so far has seen an acceleration of drone strikes against terrorist targets in multiple countries and serious discussion among the National Security Council about deploying more special operations forces in the Middle East and East Africa to snuff out and eliminate their leaders, financiers, bomb-makers, and foot-soldiers.
For the Trump administration, military power is the key to destroying America's terrorist adversaries, a reason why the Defense Department needs an increase of $54 billion in FY2018 and a supplemental cash infusion this year. When the Pentagon simultaneously launches over 30 airstrikes on Al-Qaeda targets in Yemen over a 48-hour period, talks about expanding the rules of engagement for U.S. counterterrorism forces in Somalia, and has forwarded recommendations to the NSC that would deploy more U.S. troops, artillery systems, and apaches in northern Syria, one would be forgiven for thinking that the White House assumes that terrorism can in fact be extinguished from the earth if just enough bombs are dropped or if just enough senior to mid-ranking terrorists are killed.
Shooting a hellfire missile into a crowded terrorist training camp in Pakistan's tribal areas or launching a covert raid into Libya to pick up an internationally-wanted terrorist operative have traditionally been used to measure success in this war. The Trump administration appears to set to continue that definition of success.
And yet, by concentrating so much on the tactical components of this fight—how many special operators to deploy and where, how many aircraft should be assigned to which combatant commander, how much authority should be delegated to commanders in the field—U.S. policymakers often lose sight of the overarching, strategic questions that have been avoided much too often over the last sixteen years: What does "winning" the war on terrorism look like? And is "winning" in the conventional, World War II-interpretation of the word an attainable objective?
Despite combatting Al-Qaeda and its affiliates in multiple countries over a decade and a half, at a cost of so much money that it's impossible to track, the United States still doesn't have a good construct for how a war on terrorism ends. In fact, because U.S. officials have repeatedly set the bar for victory so high—not only the destruction groups that use terrorism, but the destruction of terrorism itself—the U.S. has created a situation that guarantees war will continue and tens of billions of additional dollars will be spent far into the future to fund it.
One terrorist attack on one target by any group is branded a catastrophic and systemic failure or lapse in judgment by the entire U.S. counterterrorism and intelligence apparatus.
What is so distressing about this situation is that the U.S. should know better by now. Sixteen years of conflict against terrorist organizations in seven countries, including two full-blown invasions, should have taught national security policymakers in Washington that while terrorism can be a national security threat to the nation, it is compulsory upon the United States to keep the threat in perspective and not let it dominate our country’s foreign policy relative to other priorities. Unlike Russia’s nuclear stockpile, the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda is not an existential threat to America’s way of life.
This, of course, shouldn’t be a suggestion that the U.S. should sit on its heels and let terrorism percolate without countermeasures or without the use of force if groups pose an imminent threat to U.S. homeland or to Americans around the world. What it does suggest is that our politicians should understand by now that America can send 170,000 of its soldiers into Iraq to perform a counterinsurgency mission and decrease sectarian violence, but that terrorist groups will continue to thrive, prosper, or morph into new outfits if regional governments aren't capable of carrying on with the job or able to introduce even the smallest amount of reconciliation into their politics. And from on all of the wisdom they proclaim, the foreign policy establishment should have long recognized that the last sixteen years of counterterrorism policy has only afforded us with short-term returns.
As the Trump administration continues to deliberate about what its counterterrorism policy will be, they must never lose sight of some basic truths: not all terrorists groups in every stretch of desert or every piece of ungoverned land requires a new front in the war on terrorism. The U.S. should make no excuses for combating terrorist groups unilaterally when we must, but neither should we make any apologies for incorporating our state and non-state allies to increase their own burden in the fight — partners that in many way live in the the same territory where these groups operate and thereby have an even more significant incentive in rooting them out and shutting them down.
Above all, the U.S. cannot afford to let fear and bravado dominate our foreign policy, let alone how we deal with terrorism.
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities.