តើសង្គ្រាមប្រឆាំងភេរវកម្មជាអ្វី?

 A Quarter Century of Fear and Fantasy

For anyone under 30 years old, it must be difficult to fully appreciate the fear that gripped the United States after September 11, 2001. On that terrible day, millions of Americans witnessed airplanes flying into buildings, people jumping off skyscrapers, and the Twin Towers collapsing with thousands of innocents inside. The months and years that followed saw deadly anthrax attacks; attempted bombings of airliners with explosives hidden in shoes, underwear, and soft drink containers; terrorist atrocities in Bali, Istanbul, Jakarta, London, Madrid, Mumbai, and elsewhere; the use of vehicles to plow into pedestrians; and a regular stream of shootings and stabbings. For much of the decade that followed 9/11, the question for most Americans was not if, but when, the next major terrorist attack on American soil would take place.

Peter Bergen’s All the Presidents’ Wars chronicles the fateful decisions and events that were shaped by those fears. The terrorists hijacked not just airplanes but also the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Disavowing the need for Washington to be the world’s policeman, President George W. Bush was elected in 2000 on a platform of conducting what he called a “humble” foreign policy, his realism summed up by Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser: “We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.” Yet by 2003, that very division found itself not escorting kids but spearheading an invasion of Iraq designed to transform and democratize the entire Middle East. Singularly focused on the need to prevent another 9/11, Bush’s modest approach to world affairs morphed into the so-called global war on terror that became the primary paradigm for U.S. foreign policy, akin to the role of the Cold War from 1947 until 1989.

Bush launched the war on terror, but he was hardly the last president to wage it. Barack Obama, although skeptical of U.S. military intervention and elected in part because of his opposition to the Iraq war, found himself not just fighting but expanding the war in Afghanistan—where between 2009 and 2012 he ordered a surge of nearly 50,000 additional U.S. troops (bringing the total to around 100,000)—and turning lethal drone warfare from a novel tactic into a routine tool. In May 2011, U.S. special forces finally killed Osama bin Laden, the architect of 9/11, but the war on terror was far from over. Three years later, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIS, a group that Obama had initially disparaged as a terrorist “JV team,” declared a “caliphate” and waged a savage campaign of killing, ethnic cleansing, kidnapping, and rape—leading to another multiyear U.S.-led military intervention in the region.

Donald Trump, a critic of foreign interventions (at least for campaign purposes), was first elected president in 2016 hoping to de-prioritize the war on terror but, like his predecessors, failed to do so. In August 2017, Trump said his “original instinct” was to pull out of Afghanistan entirely, but that “decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.” He agreed with his military advisers to shift to a “conditions based” withdrawal, the same strategy that had kept U.S. troops in Afghanistan since 2011. Similarly on Syria, Trump twice announced plans to withdraw U.S. troops but never fully executed them, primarily because of institutional resistance from those concerned about the enduring need to contain ISIS. His administration continued to conduct drone strikes and special operations raids in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, often with looser rules of engagement than in the past.

Thus did Joe Biden, in January 2021, become the fourth U.S. president since 9/11 to find counterterrorism—and the war in Afghanistan in particular—intruding on his initial foreign policy agenda even as he tried to deal with other big strategic challenges. Biden inherited from Trump a deal with the Taliban that included a commitment to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, but it was left to Biden to implement it. He did so, but at great cost. Without the backing of U.S. and other allied troops, the Afghan government quickly collapsed, allowing the Taliban to take over the country almost exactly 20 years after they were expelled from power. The chaotic U.S. withdrawal left 13 service members (and hundreds of Afghans) dead, stranded thousands of Afghans who had worked with the United States, and damaged the American public’s perception of Biden, a blow from which he never recovered.

Americans have come to see U.S. policy in the decades after 9/11 as a litany of failures. Bergen’s deeply reported account shows in vivid detail the various costly misjudgments and mistakes that dogged U.S. efforts. Yet the greater error was embarking on such an expansive campaign in the first place and believing that the United States could use military force to transform the Middle East to its liking.

Now, in the second Trump administration, the war on terror appears to be coming to an end. Trump has framed his interventions in the Caribbean and Venezuela as campaigns against “narcoterrorists” and justified his February 2026 attack on Iran as a strike against “the world’s number one state sponsor of terror.” But in practice, combating what the administration calls “legacy” groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS ranks far below Trump’s other strategic priorities and consumes fewer resources and attention than it has at any point in the past 25 years. Far from prioritizing the fight against global jihadism, Trump’s November 2025 National Security Strategy barely mentions it and instead emphasizes shedding “forever global burdens.”

When Americans mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks this fall, the threat of Islamist terrorism will certainly not be gone. But the war on terror, the guiding framework for U.S. foreign policy for the previous quarter century, will be.

THE PRICE OF VICTORY

Few writers are better placed than Bergen to take the measure of the war on terror. One of the last Western journalists to meet with bin Laden (his team interviewed the al-Qaeda leader in a mud hut in Afghanistan in 1997), Bergen followed him and his organization closely, as an analyst for CNN and to gather information for his many excellent books on al-Qaeda, Islamic extremism, and U.S. military and counterterrorism policy.

Bergen tells a gripping story from 9/11 to the present day. He is sharply critical of many of those who waged the war on terror but does not fail to acknowledge its major successes. Decades of careful U.S. and allied intelligence work and advances in lethal targeting have seriously eroded the leadership structures of al-Qaeda and ISIS, neither of which now controls significant territory or threatens Western or regional governments as they did at their peak. Those groups and their offshoots are still capable of mass-casualty attacks, as bombings by an ISIS affiliate in Moscow and in Iran in 2024 demonstrated, but are now shadows of their former selves, devoid of charismatic leaders, ideological momentum, and resources. In late 2001, few Americans would have predicted that the next 25 years would pass without any large-scale, lethal terrorist attacks carried out by foreign groups on U.S. soil. That was the primary goal of the war on terror, and it has been achieved.

But the costs of that achievement have also been enormous—and higher than they needed to be, thanks to repeated misjudgments and overreach. According to Bergen’s estimates, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the United States at least $4 trillion ($6 trillion, if military pensions are included). Some 7,000 U.S. service members lost their lives, alongside an estimated 8,000 contractors. Conservative estimates suggest that 200,000 Iraqis were killed, as were tens of thousands of Afghans. Beyond the human and financial costs, revelations about the Bush administration’s manipulation of intelligence to sell the war in Iraq, the systematic use of torture, violations of domestic and international law, and civilian casualties in the Middle East and South Asia from two decades of drone strikes took an enormous toll on Washington’s global reputation. The wars exacerbated Americans’ distrust of government and soured an entire generation on the notion of the United States as a force for good in the world.

Bergen is tough on all those who waged the war on terror, none more than those in the George W. Bush administration who launched it. Consumed by the fear of another major terrorist attack, Bush and his team “massively overreacted,” especially by going to war in Iraq despite lacking any evidence that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was involved in 9/11 (and despite their desperate efforts to find it). The strategic mistake of invading Iraq on false pretenses was then compounded by tactical errors. Chief among those were the decisions made in May 2003 by Paul Bremer, often referred to as Washington’s “viceroy” in Baghdad, to dissolve the entire Iraqi army and fire tens of thousands of Baath Party officials, thus helping to create a well-armed, resentful insurgent force that U.S. troops would end up fighting in the streets of Iraqi cities for years. No one in the George W. Bush administration ever took responsibility for those missteps—and neither the U.S. military nor its civilian bosses adequately prepared for the chaos that would result.

All of Bush’s successors had to cope with the consequences of his decisions: an underresourced war in Afghanistan that had failed to eliminate al-Qaeda and a war in Iraq that morphed into both a sectarian civil war and an anti-American insurgency. Once the expansive war on terror had been launched, Obama, Trump, and Biden all found themselves unable to reverse course and uncertain about the right way to wage it. Each president came to office determined to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan and reorient resources to other foreign policy priorities; none managed to do so, at least until Biden’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal.

Was there an alternative to this costly outcome? Bergen doesn’t say so explicitly, but a reasonable takeaway from his narrative is that there was. The United States obviously had to respond militarily to the worst attack on its soil in history. But it did not have to pursue a sprawling, global war on terror that went well beyond destroying terrorists who threatened the United States and instead set out to somehow eliminate terrorism as a political tool and transform the entire Middle East. Had Bush focused on al-Qaeda and bin Laden, rather than the Taliban and Iraq, he might have been able to destroy that group and its leaders and the global terrorist threat before getting dragged into a costly 25-year conflict.

There is of course no guarantee that any deal with the Taliban would have been possible had al-Qaeda been defeated and bin Laden captured in 2001, or when bin Laden was killed and the Taliban were on the ropes in 2011. But it is hard to argue that any such deal would have been a worse outcome than the one that ultimately turned the country over to the Taliban 20 years after the group’s ouster. The deal Trump negotiated, and Biden implemented, ostensibly required the Taliban to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for global terrorism, but it contained no real mechanism to enforce that commitment, nor any way of excluding extremists from the Taliban government that took over the country and reimposed harsh Islamic rule. There is no doubt that American and allied forces in Afghanistan over two decades eliminated many terrorists and denied them sanctuary, but it is also true that the U.S. occupation and resulting civilian casualties inspired others to join the cause.

Similarly, it is impossible to know what would have happened had Bush not launched the invasion to remove Saddam from power in 2003. But it is hard to argue that the costs of leaving him in place would have been greater than a war that cost trillions of dollars, took thousands of Iraqi and American lives, empowered Iran, fanned the flames of sectarianism, and led to the rise of ISIS and the bloody multiyear effort that was required to defeat it. Bergen’s narrative gives the reader good reason to conclude that a more narrowly focused, modest counterterrorism campaign could have protected Americans at a far lower cost.

CATEGORY ERROR

Many of Bergen’s harsh critiques of policymakers’ decisions are warranted, and he documents plenty of wishful thinking, costly mistakes, bad faith, and unintended consequences. At the same time, Bergen sometimes falls into the familiar trap of suggesting the main problems with the war on terror were tactical miscalculations or flawed implementation rather than the fundamental strategic error of declaring an all-encompassing war on a tactic and trying to transform an entire region with military force. Indeed, Bergen’s repeated complaint about policymakers’ failure to “plan for the day after” raises the question of just how they might have done that effectively in a context of political vacuums, sectarian divisions, meddling neighbors, and resentment of foreign intervention. As multiple administrations discovered, too little U.S. military force in the wake of a government’s ouster could allow rivalries to fester and terrorist groups to grow, but too much could lead to local resistance, anger at civilian casualties, and unsustainable costs. Once a government has been removed from power, few “tactics” or “plans” are likely to establish stability. For all the missteps of the past 25 years, most U.S. policymakers were genuinely trying to do what they thought was right to protect fellow Americans from real threats, none had the luxury of clairvoyance, and in virtually every case the road not taken would also have had serious costs.

A good recent example of that phenomenon was Biden’s decision early in his presidency to fully implement the Trump administration’s commitment to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2021 and not leave behind a residual force. Bergen is highly critical of that decision and argues that even a force of only 2,500 U.S. troops, along with twice as many Europeans, contractors, and the Afghan National Security Forces, would have been enough to “hold off the Taliban.” But this critique overlooks the fact that the Taliban had been refraining from attacks on U.S. forces only because Trump had committed in 2020 to pull them all out. If Biden had abandoned that commitment and stayed in Afghanistan, the Taliban would certainly have resumed their military offensive, and the Afghan army might have collapsed anyway in the long run. That would have meant extending the U.S. war in Afghanistan into its third decade and draining scarce resources even as the United States dealt with other major conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. And then Biden’s successor would have been faced with the familiar choice between ordering a further surge of forces or risking military defeat.

All the Presidents’ Wars is more a historical overview than an attempt to break new ground, but Bergen does make valuable contributions to the general understanding of key episodes in the war on terror. He convincingly argues that despite Bush officials’ claims of uncertainty, bin Laden was almost definitely in the Tora Bora cave complex in eastern Afghanistan in late 2001, and the failure to commit sufficient U.S. forces—in part because military and political attention was already shifting toward Iraq—allowed him to escape into Pakistan. Bergen also reviews new evidence on Saudi Arabia’s relationship with al-Qaeda and concludes that although nothing suggests direct governmental involvement with or advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, Saudi government agencies had been infiltrated and exploited by al-Qaeda associates or sympathizers to a greater degree than was commonly understood. Finally, contrary to common suggestions that bin Laden believed the 9/11 attacks would draw the United States into a bloody Middle East war, he in fact believed the opposite: that the strikes on American soil would encourage the United States to withdraw its forces from the region, just as the 1983 Marine barracks attack in Beirut and the “Black Hawk down” affair in Mogadishu in 1993 spurred Washington to pull its forces out of Lebanon and Somalia, respectively. It turns out that just like American officials, terrorist leaders can also badly miscalculate.

If the 25-year war on terror really is over, its repercussions are not. It has left the United States safer in some ways, but also poorer, more divided, less respected, more world-weary, and less sure of itself. Every citizen—and especially those who will make U.S. policy in the future—should reckon with the primary lesson of All the Presidents’ Wars: that legitimate fears and a quest for absolute security can lead a great power to overreach, with consequences no one can predict or easily reverse.

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