The Wars of 9/11: how will history judge and what can we learn from them?
Blair and Bush April 2002 2002 (PA Images)
As Western withdrawal proceeds, the next chapter of Afghanistan’s tragedy begins to unfold and the baleful task of placing the Wars of 9/11 in historical context begins. The overwhelming immediacy of the images of that September morning, almost 20 years ago, marked the start of a new strategic epoch. Acts of terrorism – and, much more potent, the constant threat of terrorism – dominated everything from global politics to personal security. We had entered a new age, but one that now, in immediate retrospect, looks fleeting and aberrant in historical terms, though its consequences are profound.
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the Wars of 9/11 was their strategic brevity. Exceptionally, we can mark the exact days on which future historians might define the start and end of the epoch. September 11, 2001, clearly marks the beginning; rather less obviously, January 16, 2018, might mark its end. The second date was when the then US Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, released the unclassified version of the quadrennial National Defense Strategy of the United States, which stated clearly and unequivocally that America’s brief preoccupation with terrorism was at an end and the business as usual of great power competition had been restored in its place.
A self-contained strategic epoch of less than 17 years is historically remarkable for episodes usually marked by multiple decades and sometimes centuries. The 9/11 epoch was preceded by what the historian Eric Hobsbawm characterised as the “short twentieth century”. A period of demonstrable historical continuity, centred on Europe and classical in the grand strategic sense that it was defined by the use of all instruments of state or alliance power in a series of adversarial relationships. An unbroken narrative links Wilhelmine aggression in 1914 to Soviet exhaustion in 1989, marking the start and finish of a recognisable and unified passage of history. A history, moreover, that in 1989 would have been recognised by the participants of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Both Castlereagh and Kissinger would acknowledge themselves as players in the balance of power game, the only difference being that with American intervention in 1917 it became an Atlanticist affair, rather than something parochially European. It remains so to this day.
So, taken in a long view, the 9/11 epoch looks fleeting, local and aberrant. Fleeting in the sense that it held the world’s attention for a period shorter than many individual conflicts, as the 30 Years’ War attests. Local in the sense that, while the application of terrorism might be global, its effects are local: an attack on the offices of a magazine, Charlie Hebdo, briefly replaced the clash of armies in war on a continental scale. And aberrant, in the sense that it has been bookended by strategic epochs of great power competition, to which we have now returned, with China reprising the role successively played by Germany, Japan and Russia in the last century.
Strategic context is not the only aberration of the 9/11 epoch. Just as significant is the purpose of the wars we fought. Britain fought the wars of the short 20th century in defence of liberal values in this country; both American and Britain fought the Wars of 9/11 in order to promote liberal values in other people’s countries. This rather strange juxtaposition meant that war as an instrument to resolve the balance of power between states was replaced by its use as an instrument to resolve the balance of power within states. This did not happen spontaneously on 9/11 and can probably be traced back to the first Gulf War. The subsequent UN Security Council Resolution 688 of April 1991 did not authorise any specific action within recently defeated Iraq, but it created an atmosphere sufficiently permissive to allow a ground intervention in Iraqi Kurdistan and the imposition of two no-fly zones within Iraqi airspace, to wide international approbation.
In 1991 this still had a one-off look, justified by local and exceptional conditions. However, as the decade proceeded, those conditions looked increasingly ubiquitous and habitual, as the Balkan conflict, East Timor and Sierra Leone saw interventions of increasing diplomatic and military fluency. The process culminated in Tony Blair’s speech in Chicago in April 1999, laying out a formalised manifesto for liberal intervention. That speech itself followed a UK Strategic Defence Review in 1998 that had identified the British military as a “force for good” rather than solely an instrument of national power to be rationally applied in the classical, realist sense.
Before 9/11, the Blair doctrine was no more than a sub-textual contribution to the debate on the use of power in a post-Cold War world. After 9/11, it provided the intellectual underpinning for the profoundly felt but inchoately expressed American search for vengeance. The US President (Bush) became the leading actor but the British Prime Minister (Blair) wrote the script, in a production that re-defined the purpose of war, with significant consequences for both countries.
The way in which the Wars of 9/11 were fought was novel rather than aberrant. All militaries adapt during conflict and those able to adapt best usually prevail, yet few cover as much ground as US forces after 9/11. From the Powell/Weinberger army of overwhelming force inherited at the outset, through the improvised military iconoclasm of the initial Afghan invasion, to the counter-insurgency army that found full expression in the 2007 Surge and on to the counter-terrorist army that accounted for Osama bin Laden in 2011, US forces showed an ability to evolve that few could emulate, and none at the scale on which the Americans operated. Yet it ended in defeat, because of a fundamental dysfunction between the military and political strands of strategy.
It is possible to commit unlimited resources to a war of national survival. The nature of the threat from, say, Nazi Germany was such that the cost had to be borne; we have recently discovered the same is true of fighting a pandemic. What became the global War on Terrorism was a hard sell as a non-discretionary war of national survival and there was always likely to be a mismatch between the ends that were politically willed and the means that were militarily applied to achieve them.
The most egregious failure available to strategy is to fail to match ends and means, and the West duly fell into that trap. But the disjunction between the soldiers and the suits went deeper than that. Generals on both sides of the Atlantic spoke of a generational war and the need for a 30-year commitment; some still do. In doing so they were simply trying to give operational form to the political objectives that had been given to them, but without acknowledging that no politician in a liberal democracy can hold their country – or their party – hostage to the demands of a discretionary open-ended war: strategic stamina is too fragile and electoral politics too capricious. At the heart of this failure of the West, therefore, was the inability of the military and political dimensions of strategy to comprehend the dilemmas facing the other. Hence improved integration must be top of the To Do List for the next generation of strategic leadership.
What of the consequences? It may be too early to tell and some will be unforeseen, but even at this range three stand out. First, the West spent its power with a profligacy unimaginable when it stood at the height of its powers in 1989. As a result, China has been given a free run, new forms of hybrid warfare have been developed to exploit the frailties exposed in the wars of 9/11 and no assumptions of automatic primacy can any longer attach to Western military power or the liberal democratic political model. Second, the energies released in the region from India to the Levant remain unresolved. Wither Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria are the obvious questions, but the possibility of intra-confessional conflict within Islam between the Iranian-led Shia and the Saudi-led Sunni on a scale to resemble the religious wars of 16th- and 17th-century Europe is probably the greatest threat. Third, at some point since 9/11, trust in Western political leadership has become forfeit. Whether in this country it is attributable to dodgy dossiers, MPs’ expenses or the conspicuous failures attending the financial crisis can be argued over, but the possibility exists that a direct line can be drawn between the decision to go to war in 2001 and the political disillusionment that led to the Brexit vote in 2016.
This article cannot do justice to its theme. The challenge is too large to be addressed in this form and my focus has been too Anglospherically narrow, but we have to start somewhere if we are to understand what we have recently lived through and place it in history.
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