The 9/11 terrorist attacks obliged the U.S. government to begin a war to destroy al Qaeda. To do otherwise would have only invited further terrorist attacks, causing significant global political and economic instability and the loss of many more American lives.
Sadly, that truth is one that Bernie Sanders does not understand. We saw Sanders’s silliness at the Democratic presidential debate on Thursday. Asked whether he was wrong to vote to authorize the war in Afghanistan, Sanders said, “Only one person, my good friend, Barbara Lee, was right on that issue. She was the only person in the House to vote against the war in Afghanistan. She was right. I was wrong.”
The Afghanistan War has been badly enough managed that it seems easy to take this position, in hindsight. But Sanders is just plain wrong to say that the allied invasion of Afghanistan was a mistake. Don’t believe me? Then, let’s game this out a little bit. What would have happened had 2019 Sanders held the presidency in 2001 and America and our allies hadn’t invaded Afghanistan?
For a start, avoiding war against al Qaeda would have given the group new reason, a greater political space, and a retained capability to keep fighting America. Considering that al Qaeda nearly blew up a transatlantic airliner before Christmas 2001, operationalized a 2002 West Coast successor attack to 9/11, and that at least seven al Qaeda terrorists on U.K. soil got close to blowing up seven transatlantic passenger airliners in 2006, we must ask what more al Qaeda would have done had the United States not invaded. Absent American and allied military pressure, al Qaeda would have been able to retain its terrorist training camps, its global logistics flow of fighters and resources, and its engagement with the Taliban. More plots would have been developed, and probability alone suggests that at least some would have succeeded.
Sanders might suggest that he would have engaged a global intelligence and law enforcement effort against al Qaeda instead of war. But I’m convinced that such an effort would not have functionally addressed al Qaeda’s threat as it existed in 2001. It would not have destroyed al Qaeda’s training camps, neutralized its leaders, or throttled recalcitrant nations such as Pakistan into cooperating with the American fight. More innocent Americans would have died had Sanders had his way.
America’s decision to take 9/11 on the chin would also have enabled al Qaeda in another way by giving Osama bin Laden and the global Salafi-jihadist movement proof of their ultimate claim that America is a paper tiger, ready to crumble at the first serious challenge. The perception of God’s ordained victory is pivotal to the recruitment and activity of Salafi-jihadist groups such as al Qaeda. Indeed, some of the best proof of how perception enables operational capability and culture is found in the Islamic State’s 2013-2014 rise.
Enabled by a sectarian Iraqi government and unrestrained by the global community, ISIS used its early successes to attract legions of new fighters. It used them to seize increasingly vast areas of Iraq and Syria and to carry out a dramatic attack on Paris in November 2015. Many more recruits flocked to the ISIS flag. New attacks on Western cities were only prevented by allied intelligence services. For a moment, the group seemed unstoppable.
More importantly, only the allied military operations to destroy ISIS’s infrastructure and leadership mitigated the threat. Just as no one can seriously say that ISIS is more of a threat now than it was in 2015, no one can seriously argue that al Qaeda is more of a threat thanks to the war in Afghanistan than prior to it.
Sanders doesn’t get this. But his counterterrorism reality deficit isn’t singular here. It fits into his broader delusions about the world. Explaining on Thursday, “What we need to rethink is the entire war on terror,” Sanders offered the alternative that we should “bring the world together” to solve these issues. This foreign policy is built on platitude, ignorance, and close alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agenda. If a President Sanders brought his “bring the world together” speech to Putin, Pakistan, and Iran (all of which have vested interests in destabilizing Afghanistan so as to damage American interests), they would laugh at him and proceed to take full advantage.
Don’t get me wrong. My argument is not that war should be our first or even second or third choice to address threats. But where a serious and structural threat exists and diplomacy has failed (recall that before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, President George W. Bush gave the Taliban a chance to hand over al Qaeda), force is sometimes the answer. That was the case in Afghanistan, a war that made us safer, even if its management has often been sorely lacking.
