By Maha Hilal
This article was originally published by Truthout
The war on terror was not inevitable, nor was the extraordinary violence carried out in its name necessary.
In a 2013 Congressional hearing on drone warfare, a young Pakistani boy named Zubair Rehman, aged 13 at the time, talked about the feeling of living under the threat of constant drone strikes. In his powerful testimony, Zubair stated that “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies…The drones do not fly when the skies are gray…When the sky brightens, drones return and we live in fear.”
More than a decade after his testimony and twenty-five years into the so-called global war on terror, far from being a relic of the past, drone warfare is one of the many omnipresent threats that have been cemented by the U.S. in countries across the globe. Generations of Muslim children have grown up in the world that the war on terror has created — a world in which endless war has been normalized, torture justified, and with both the state and the media painting a target on the backs on entire Muslim populations across the globe. For children like Zubair, who should be turning 26 this year, the color of the sky still serves as an ominous threat warning of the likelihood of state violence.
Within the United States, much of the media coverage of the September 11 attacks has focused on assessments of the war on terror and retrospective lessons. Of course, what goes largely undercovered are some of the injustices that followed in its wake, such as the Islamophobia directed at Muslims and bigotry against other racialized populations within the U.S. Mainstream media has also largely minimized the extent to which the war on terror has fundamentally reshaped political and social life within the United States. Islamophobia has been central to this transformation, permeating political discourse and providing the ideological justification for increasingly repressive policies. Even though much of the war on terror has been shrouded in secrecy, many forms of its violence and horrors have been transformed into spectacles of violence in order to normalize the punishment of Muslims while rendering Muslim life disposable, all in the service of preserving an enduring national security apparatus.
At the twenty-five-year juncture of the war on terror, we know now more than ever that the way this war has been fought was not inevitable, nor was the extraordinary violence carried out in its name necessary. We also know that the war on terror was never about ending political violence, but instead about building a sustained campaign and continuum of violence that has included large-scale wars like the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq; the continuous bombing of Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and now Iran; mass surveillance; and indefinite detention and torture, among numerous other injustices. The “forever wars,” as those in Afghanistan and Iraq are often labelled, imply that they are never-ending because of the lack of a plan. But if we have learned anything about U.S. wars, it’s that they never really end and instead only morph into violence that preserves the brutality of past wars. Moreover, U.S. imperialism never emerges as an unintended consequence; it is always by design.
Two and a half decades after the war on terror was launched and with devastating state violence that has continued to evolve and expand, we know that this war was never meant to end.
That’s why we must renew our commitment to confronting the war on terror and the totality of its violence — its wars, institutions, laws, technologies, and narratives — in order to dismantle the apparatus it has entrenched, and secure meaningful accountability and justice for the millions of people whose lives have been devastated in the name of national security.
A Blueprint for a Constant State of Emergency
In a speech to a Joint Session of Congress on September 20th, 2001, just nine days after the September 11th attacks, President George W. Bush officially declared the launch of the war on terror. Laying out the official narrative of the war, including identifying the perpetrators of the attacks and their motivations for attacking the United States, he advised the American public that they “should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen.”
“Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” Bush proclaimed. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” With these lines, the U.S. president effectively granted himself, and every president who followed him, permission to perpetually wage war on anyone who could fit under the nebulous umbrella of a “terrorist.” While the full scope of what would become the war on terror was not clear at the time, twenty-five years later, what Bush was laying out was not simply a military campaign, but a catastrophic and enduring national security infrastructure that has continued to evolve and expand to target and criminalize Muslims, other marginalized groups, and those who dare dissent from the violence of the state. Its legal blueprint has grown to include expanded executive powers, increased immigration policing, and a virtual blank check for warmaking in the form of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force.
If there was any doubt about the war’s continuity, just this week, U.S. President Donald Trump renewed the national emergency declared by Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 for the 25th year in a row, because, as the renewal stated, “the terrorist threat continues.”
Despite the war on terror’s continued expansion — including through the war the U.S. and Israel launched against Iran earlier this year — media has long ceased to treat it as an ongoing issue. For example, an article published earlier this month in Foreign Policy argues that the war on terror ended in August 2021 with the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. This claim only makes sense if we understand the war on terror as something with a discrete beginning and end, rather than as an enduring infrastructure that was designed to fundamentally reshape the institutions, laws, and narratives through which state violence is normalized and justified in the name of national security.
Other assessments of the war on terror frequently ask whether it has made us safer. In an NPR interview by Steve Inskeep with journalist Peter Bergen on his new book All the President’s Wars, Bergen is asked whether after a quarter century of the War on Terror, we are now safer, to which he responds: “Well, we are safer in the sense that we have spent a tremendous amount, not just on our offensive measures, but, I mean, the defensive measures we have are extraordinary. There was no TSA before 9/11. There was no Department of Homeland Security, which is the largest government agency outside the Pentagon. The number of FBI-led joint terrorism task forces has tripled since 9/11.” Bergen’s statement begs the question of who exactly these institutions have made safer, as it would be hard to believe that any of the communities who have been caught in their violent crosshairs would make the same assertion. Accordingly and imperatively, twenty-five years later, we owe it to the people whose lives have been implicated in this war to ask the questions that should have been put to officials in 2001: Who, exactly, was this war meant to make safer and at whose expense? What would an end to the war on terror actually look like for those whose lives have been indelibly changed by the its violence?
Others have critiqued the war on terror as fundamentally counterproductive, pointing to an increase of the very violence and armed groups it purportedly sought to eliminate. But measuring the war by whether it successfully reduced “terrorism” risks accepting its stated objectives as the appropriate measure of its success. More problematically is what this framework obscures: the immense state violence carried out in the name of counterterrorism, and the Muslim lives rendered expendable in pursuit of an ever-expanding national security project.
It is difficult to fully capture the totality of the war on terror’s violence domestically and across the globe, though, in my book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11, I lay out a taxonomy of five dimensions: militarism and warfare, draconian immigration policies, surveillance, federal terrorism prosecutions, and detention and torture. Fighting the war on terror on all these fronts has not only led to catastrophic consequences for Muslims and other marginalized communities. This war has also demonstrated that the law is malleable — particularly when national security narratives are deployed to justify it. That’s why John Yoo was able to author memos sanctioning torture without consequence. It’s why the Trump administration has now been able to authorize strikes on fishing boats in the Caribbean in the name of fighting “narcoterrorism.” By ascribing the terror label, people in positions of power have found that they are able to get away with a slew of human rights abuses with minimal, if any, repercussions.
Moreover, by weaponizing the politically charged construct of terrorism, each presidential administration since 9/11 has demonstrated a vested interest in wielding more laws and policies to further demonize and criminalize communities, whether it’s to authorize extrajudicial killings, indefinite detention, or to crackdown on free speech and nonviolent protests. Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) is the latest iteration of the calculated manipulation of the terrorism paradigm to crush dissent and silence any criticism of his own war on terror.
Reckoning With the Harms
The effects have fallen downstream as well. As a recent Pew Research poll made clear, a substantial portion of Americans still view Muslims through the terror paradigm, finding, in fact, that perceptions of Muslims are more negative now than they were in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Forty-two percent of respondents said they thought Muslims had a negative impact on the U.S., with some survey respondents making comments like “Remember the twin towers?” when asked to explain their beliefs.
In a recently released YouGov poll, over 50 percent of people surveyed said that they do not think Americans born after 2001 have a good understanding of the 9/11 attacks. The poll doesn’t ask any follow-up questions, for example, about what it might even mean to have a good understanding of the 9/11 attacks. But we can perhaps assume that having “a good understanding” of the 9/11 attacks means to accept the official government narrative of why they occurred and the kind of country the United States is — benevolent, generous, innocent, and blameless.
Another survey question asks whether military operations and surveillance in the U.S. after 9/11 have been worth the cost; 50 percent of people responded yes. It’s not hard to understand why those answering this question would respond in this way. Americans who aren’t Muslim, who have not been racialized as terrorists or as the other, have largely been shielded from the worst of the violence unleashed by the state. But finally, 25 years later, people around the U.S. are being forced to more directly reckon with the host of evils this war has unleashed — the terrors of immigration policing, the relentlessness of surveillance, indefinite detention and torture, federal terrorism prosecutions and increasing militarism and warfare.
In a speech at the Pentagon this morning, Trump paid tribute to those who have served the United States in the war on terror. Praising their service, he stated that “in the generation since 9/11, American sons and daughters have traveled to the darkest corners of the earth and done battle with a shadowy enemy so that our children might once again know carefree days and cloudless skies.” While the United States continues to wage the war on terror, we must wonder if children like Zubair Rehman will ever experience cloudless skies without the trepidation of more violence to come.
The national security state may never have intended for the war on terror to end, but those of us who believe a better world is possible must continue working to dismantle and abolish this catastrophic infrastructure of violence. As incarcerated activist, author, and Black abolitionist George Jackson instructed, “we must prove our predictions about the future with action.” If we believe a world beyond the war on terror is possible, then we have to act as though it is by refusing its normalization, confronting the institutions and narratives that have allowed it to continue, and building towards collective liberation where state violence is obsolete.
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