The war on terror is almost eighteen years old. George W. Bush declared it a few days the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, and at first it all seemed to go the way he wanted. It took less than three months to terminate the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and disperse the presumed remnants of the Al-Qaida movement. Immediately Bush extended the war to an “axis of evil” of Iraq, Iran and North Korea; in early 2003 an intense war brought down Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in just three weeks.
In Washington the expectations were that there was little more to do: Afghanistan and Iraq would come into the western fold, thereby constraining Iran with no need for another war. More generally, 9/11 had been avenged and the much-vaunted ‘new American century’ would be back on track. Such was the hubris.
Now it all looks so different. The only victor in the Iraq war turned out to be Iran, its regional influence substantially increased. In Afghanistan US negotiators are near-desperate to do a deal with the Taliban: whatever the long-term consequences, they need to get ten thousand troops back home before Trump seeks his second term in the White House.
