Americans of a certain age remember things about their youth—Bert the Turtle and the ditty “Duck and Cover” (1951), Pat Frank’s apocalyptic novel Alas, Babylon (1959), and Sidney Lumet’s film Fail Safe, from Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s novel of the same name (1964 and 1962, respectively). “There was a Turtle by the name of Bert, and Bert the Turtle was very alert”; that song was whistled by kids like myself, ironically often at the same time we whistled the catchy tune from Peter and the Wolf, Sergei Prokofiev’s classic children’s story adapted by Walt Disney and very popular at the time.

My father, a career Air Force officer who spent the first part of his career with the fighter-interceptor squadrons of North American Air Defense Command, had borrowed Frank’s biblical reference in crafting his own nuclear war warning for my mother. It took me awhile to figure out what they were talking about, and when I finally did, it was terrifying. The delta-winged fighters that futilely chase down the errant nuclear-armed bombers in Fail Safe were identical to the F-106 Delta Darts my father’s squadrons flew to shield America from similarly armed Soviet bombers that probed our borders on a daily basis, and I was able to figure this out quickly the first time I saw the movie.

Nuclear Armageddon was a pervasive reality during the Cold War, and America had an arsenal and doctrine to make it a reality. Again, flashbacks from my childhood make it all-too real: F-100 fighter-bombers carried nuclear bombs on air-strip alert at an air base in Turkey. F-106 fighter-interceptors armed with nuclear “Genie” air-to-air missiles were on constant air patrol over the skies of Michigan. My father told my mother how he never wanted to be assigned to Strategic Air Command because the “Chrome Dome” mission was insane—packs of nuclear-armed B-52 bombers constantly in the air, flying towards the Soviet Union only to be called back on a routine basis.

Whether by accident or design—Cold War historians have differing accounts—over those years America perfected its nuclear Triad (the ground based missiles, manned bombers and missile-armed submarines that comprised its strategic nuclear force). Atlas missiles grew into Titans, which became the Minuteman and finally Peacekeeper. The first Atlas missiles carried a single W49 warhead possessing a yield of 1.44 megatons; the Peacekeeper carried ten 300-kiloton W87 warheads. (By way of comparison, the “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had yields of 15 and 21 kilotons, respectively.)

The generals and politicians who controlled this arsenal were schooled in the art of global apocalyptic warfare, having fought and prevailed against fascism in the Second World War. Nuclear war wasn’t an abstraction to them, but reality—America was prepared to fight and win a nuclear exchange with the Soviet enemy, using doctrines with names such as “counterforce,” “first strike,” and “mutually assured destruction,” better known as MAD. Only when the absurdity of the MAD acronym sunk in did these leaders finally undertake to control the arsenal of Armageddon they had created. One of the first agreements reached between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (the anti-ballistic missile, or ABM Treaty) limited their respective defenses against nuclear missile attack, so that neither side would be lulled into a false sense of security and thus be tempted to do the unthinkable.

And yet, even as both American and Soviet leaders sought to limit their respective nuclear forces through negotiations, each side continuously modernized and improved their arsenals to increase the responsiveness, survivability—and ultimately, accuracy and lethality—of the very weapons both parties claimed they never wanted to use. Nuclear war was always a math problem: The first planners calculated that 400 nuclear bombs were all it would take to destroy the communist world. One can assume that the Soviets had similarly calculated that a like-number of their bombs was all they needed to destroy western civilization as well. By the 1970s, each side possessed an arsenal of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the planet hundreds of times over.

Sometime in the 1980s a realization struck home. Confronted with the stark reality of the 1983 ABC television film, The Day After, and the buildup of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, whose speed and accuracy all but demanded a preemptive first strike by the other side, American and Soviet leaders began negotiating not simply limits on the numbers of nuclear weapons, but their reduction and eventual elimination. As a member of the first team of inspectors assigned to implement the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty inside the Soviet Union, I was part of this process. I came to that job from an assignment with a nuclear-capable artillery unit, where we trained to lob atomic-tipped shells toward an advancing Soviet host. The other inspectors and I turned to our new task with the kind of gallows humor only the recently reprieved can truly appreciate. When asked what he could see when looking into a Soviet missile launch canister, one American inspector spelled out “C-h-i-c-a-g-o,” and the first American film festival hosted by U.S. inspectors at a Soviet missile factory featured Stanley Kubrik’s Dr. Strangelove.

History, however, did not allow the Cold War to play itself out in normal fashion. At the very moment the U.S. and Soviet Union were making the greatest strides toward nuclear arms reduction, the Soviet Union simply disappeared. While the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist state in December 1991 was seen as a great victory for democracy and the free world, it was a disaster for arms control. One of the critical elements essential to the successful disarmament efforts of the 1980s was a sense of equality, that the reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons had reciprocal value to both parties. When, in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States emerged as the sole remaining superpower, this sense of reciprocity disappeared, and with it the sense of urgency that had once existed regarding the elimination of nuclear weapons.

American politicians from both political parties can point to the efforts that have been made since the end of the Cold War to reduce America’s nuclear arsenal and limit the risk of nuclear warfare: the reduction of the number of land-based missiles from 1,100 to 400, and a similar reduction in the numbers of submarine-launched missiles and manned bombers. The fact remains, however, that while our nuclear weapons are no longer automatically targeted at cities and installations inside Russia, we still maintain a nuclear Triad whose very premise is built on a Cold War doctrine of survivability—we can ride out any preemptive nuclear attack delivered by any enemy, and deliver a nation-killing response. This is the heart of the notion of “nuclear deterrence” that has dominated strategic thinking since the dawn of the nuclear age: We will destroy you if you attack us, so don’t think of attacking us.

The inescapable logic of “nuclear deterrence” is that its proponents can point to decades of nuclear-free conflict as a means of sustaining both its logic and success. It doesn’t matter that, at one time, the fallacy of “nuclear deterrence” had been exposed as a false dream, that when two parties are in a race to develop newer and more lethal forms of nuclear weapons delivery, at some point these weapons will stop being seen as a force for deterrence and actually become the weapon of choice in eliminating a threat so pervasive it cannot be allowed to continue. This was the lesson of the push for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, born as it was from decades of living under the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. When the end of life on earth as we know it was a visceral reality, disarmament was seen as a logical option.

Not so today. America’s collective nuclear amnesia has led to the lessons of the past having been largely forgotten. Our military and political leaders have not been schooled by global wars of destruction where hundreds of millions died, but rather minor battlefields where the death toll, while tragic, numbers in the thousands and tens of thousands. We have become accustomed to a war of precision strikes, where threats can be largely dealt with by remote control, either through a drone-delivered missile or a satellite-guided bomb dropped from 30,000 feet. American bodies come home singly or in small groups, enough to remind us of the cost of conflict, but not enough to be painful for anyone but the immediate family and friends of the deceased. The Civil Defense movement has morphed into Emergency Preparedness that is more focused on Mother Nature than nuclear Armageddon.

The Trump administration has just announced that it is moving ahead with an Obama-era plan to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal, sprucing up the nuclear Triad with a new fleet of land-based missiles, missile-carrying submarines, and air-delivered nuclear weapons that will cost the American taxpayer well over $1 trillion in the coming years. The ostensible purpose behind this modernization effort is to maintain America’s nuclear deterrence capability for decades to come. The harsh reality, however, is that through this nuclear upgrade, America is simply repeating the mistakes of the past, building weapons whose precision and speed will trigger a new arms race with Russia and China as they seek to match this new American capability with weapons designed to sustain their version of nuclear deterrence.  

Mutually assured destruction (MAD), once relegated to the trash bin of history, has had new life breathed into it. This time there is no foundation of arms control in place to limit the insanity—the ABM treaty is a thing of the past, and America today hides behind the false promise of a missile-defense shield that has questionable utility against a North Korean madman armed with a handful of missiles, let alone a Russian or Chinese military armed with hundreds. Disarmament talks with Russia—once a hallmark of the Trump foreign-policy vision—are stillborn in the face of allegations of election meddling from Moscow.  

American tanks patrol the Polish frontier opposite their Russian counterparts, while U.S. and Russian warplanes share the skies over Syria, and play cat and mouse over the Baltics. Into this volatile mix, President Trump now wants to deploy a new generation of nuclear weapons that any enemy possessing a modicum of strategic insight would have no choice but to view as possessing genuine first-strike capability. Given the enhanced performance of these weapons, there will be no “fail safe” mechanism to limit the scope and scale of inadvertent use. There won’t be time for military officers to call home with a furtive warning of impending doom, and “Bert the Turtles” lyrical admonitions to “duck and cover” will be rendered meaningless to a population who has long ago forgotten what it was like to live under the threat of imminent nuclear holocaust. Today Americans are unable or perhaps unwilling to hold their elected leaders responsible as they play nuclear Russian roulette—a game as avoidable as it is insane.

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Remember when military parades actually celebrated victories? Those were the days, or, better yet, the day—June 8, 1991 actually. A few months after the U.S. military’s 100-hour lightning ground war ejected Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, some 8,800 soldiers marched down Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. President George H.W. Bush and General Norman Schwarzkopf presided. The White House called it the National Victory Celebration.

The world seemed simpler then. Sure, some openly questioned Bush’s motives (no blood for oil!), the Senate authorization vote was uncomfortably close, and matters got messy when the Kurds and Shia rose up in postwar Iraq. Still, America had won a “victory” of sorts. At the cost of fewer than 200 dead (experts had predicted thousands), a highly professional U.S. Army and its coalition allies had liberated Kuwait and devastated the Iraqi military. Its objectives clearly set and now achieved, the army mostly returned home. Bush wisely ignored hawkish calls to seize and occupy Baghdad. Saddam, after all, was “in his box” and could be contained. It was time for the parades.

So as we awaken to news that President Trump ordered the Pentagon to plan for a massive military parade, one cannot help but wonder what it is we’re celebrating. Nearly 17 years of indecisive quagmire? Hardly. Make no mistake, this is not about the soldiers or the vets. Trump, following the lead of his predecessors, has turned the petty political appropriation of the troops into an art form. Soldiers are a pawn in the game, a very old game, in which the hawkish interventionists inspire the base and depict the opposition as dovish traitors. This is distraction, meant to disguise what amounts to paltry policy in foreign affairs; it’s spectacle not strategy. In truth, our soldiers languish in indecisive operations across the Middle East and North Africa—a human “sunk cost“ dilemma.

Still, were we to pretend that this parade is meant to celebrate military accomplishment, it’s worth asking: how are our wars doing? The short answer: not so well. But wait, someone will inevitably protest, hasn’t the U.S. military “beaten” the Islamic State?  Yes and no, actually. ISIS ideology remains strong and what now amounts to an indefinite U.S. presence in Syria just might kick off a new insurgency. What’s more, America’s ostensible ally, Turkey, is attacking U.S.-partnered Kurdish militias. There’s no exit strategy, folks, once again. That’s the Syria trap. Scarier still, the fight with ISIS is actually the good news.

Against his better “instincts,” Trump let Secretary of Defense James Mattis and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster nudge him into a new mini-surge into Afghanistan. That means more troops, more treasure, and more dead in an unwinnable—and now America’s longest—war. For all the talk of new strategies, “turning corners” and “breaking stalemates,” the truth is that Afghanistan is a failing resource sinkhole. These days, despite America’s best efforts and more than 2,000 dead servicemembers, a record number of Afghan provinces and districts are under the control of, or contested by, the Taliban. Any limited, short-duration successes were never sustainable. Afghanistan’s economy still cannot support itself. In any given year, foreign aid accounts for about 95 percent of total GDP. Worse still, as events over the last few weeks have shown, no area of the country is immune to terror bombing, not even downtown Kabul.

U.S. Special Forces continue to fight “terror” all around the globe. In 2016, these advisors and trainers deployed to 70 percent of the world’s countries. Special operators died this year in Niger, Somalia, Yemen, and, of course, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They’re not winning, though, not in any real sense. In Africa, a new hot spot for the U.S. military, the number of Islamist threat groups has only risen in response to the American presence. And, as I recently wrote at TAC, the high operational tempo might just be “breaking” America’s cherished army. As for those ever-strained, overstretched Special Operations forces, well, relentless deployments are breaking them down, too. Reports indicate that mental distress and suicide are again on the rise in America’s special ops community.

U.S. military operations in Iraq and Yemen aren’t exactly dazzling success stories either. Iraqi forces have, after three years, finally snuffed out most ISIS conventional forces from their so-called caliphate, sure. Nevertheless, they only did so by relying on popular mobilization forces (militias often backed by Iran) to augment the demoralized regular army. And, of course, a a Shia-dominated, Iran-friendly government still presides in Baghdad. It’s unclear whether it will magnanimously reintegrate the still-alienated Iraqi Sunnis. If they don’t, the country is ripe for the rise of ISIS 2.0.

Yemen is starving, literally. Saudi terror bombing, enabled by U.S. munitions and in-flight refueling, is killing a Yemeni child every 10 minutes or so, and the blockade and resultant famine have kicked off the worst cholera epidemic in human history. None of this has dislodged the Houthi rebels from north and west Yemen, and has only strengthened the real threat to America, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which has found sanctuary amid the chaos. Chalk up Yemen as another likely defeat for the US.

Still, if it’s a parade Trump wants, it is a parade he shall get. He is, after all, the commander-in-chief, and, closed-door Pentagon groaning aside, the military will get it done. The cost will be profligate, of course. The logistics, like getting armored brigades from Fort Stewart, Georgia, or Fort Hood, Texas, to Washington D.C., will be daunting as ever. The can-do military professionals will perform obediently, just as they have for 17 bloody, indecisive years. And what a display it will be—one, you can be sure, that will rival the best Kim Jong-un has to offer in Pyongyang. Our button, as our president said, is bigger than his.

When the time comes, maybe a slew of winless generals should lead Trump’s parade—from Tommy Franks (who kicked things off with no plan for occupying the countries we conquered), to David Petraeus (who tried and failed to “surge” us to victory in Iraq), to Stanley McChrystal (the Rolling Stone bad boy who thought he could apply the Iraq surge to Afghanistan), to, well, whoever’s been trudging along since. It’s taken a baker’s dozen of otherwise talented commanding generals to lose a war that couldn’t be won, so let’s give them a prominent place in the coming cavalcade. Americans will continue to pour on the effortless adulation, at least until their iPhones ding.

Hail the generals-who-tried! Hail the young soldiers who died for naught but their mates! Hail the forever war and…the new American militarism!

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On January 17, Petr Pavel, a Czech army general and NATO’s military committee chairman, led meetings with his counterparts from Ukraine and Georgia, which he tweeted were “Sessions dedicated to Projecting Stability.” Yet while NATO’s collaboration with nations historically intertwined with Russia could lead to a number of possible outcomes, “stability” seems the least likely one. Like so much of what the alliance does, the purpose of these meetings is to push the alliance ever eastward.

That raises a question. Why should Americans participate in an alliance in which a general—from a minuscule military power that spends 1 percent of its GDP on defense—hosts a meeting that is more likely to provoke a catastrophic U.S.-Russia war than to prevent one? As Ted Galen Carpenter recently explained here at TAC, this is the dangerous calculus that results from interlocking the United States with so many NATO nations, including some that Moscow regards as within its sphere of influence.  

Let me offer another reason to be skeptical about the long-term future of U.S. participation in the Western alliance: the West is dying. The historical and cultural legacy that animated Western civilization is atrophying. This is particularly the case in Western Europe, where elites see nothing particularly valuable in their cultural heritage, which will increasingly make them unreliable partners to the United States. How can a Western alliance be maintained when less and less remains of common, distinctly Western values and ideas?

At the end of the Cold War, the late Harvard historian Samuel Huntington pointed out that the world was reorganizing itself along civilizational lines and that cultural commonalities were replacing Cold War alliances. Western European nations signed the Maastricht treaty, Russia rebuilt its Orthodox cathedrals, Islam experienced a historic reawakening, and China rediscovered Confucius. Huntington therefore recommended that NATO serve as “the security organization of Western civilization.”

According to Huntington, the Western heritage is rooted in “Greek philosophy and rationalism, Roman law, Latin and Christianity,” a common culture with penchants for the separation of “spiritual and temporal authority,” the rule of law, representative governments, and civil liberties. In the post-Cold War world, Huntington advised that the West reanimate its principles and avoid meddling in the affairs of other civilizations that were rediscovering, and taking pride in, their own traditions.

Because Western elites, the “Davos men,” do not cherish or even particularly admire the unique Western cultural inheritance—Christianity in particular—they did not see civilizational criteria as a basis upon which the West should form post-Cold War alliances. We have thus done precisely the opposite of what Huntington recommended: we have meddled, sometimes aggressively, in other civilizations, and we have repudiated more and more of our own heritage, replacing it with a mishmash of multiculturalism, universalism, globalism, and anti-Christianity. And with our worldwide meddling and fading fondness for civil liberties has come the national security behemoth, weakening our commitment to freedom, privacy, and the rule of law. The recent FISA scandal is another reminder of the legacy that we are squandering.  

Because Western elites no longer recognize and respect the unique characteristics of their own civilization—let alone those of competing civilizations—the foreign policy of the West has been marked by ineptitude. For example, as ethnic and religious aspirations came to the fore in the former Yugoslavia, NATO fought to keep the country intact, and, when that failed, essentially allied itself with Bosnian Muslims whose other friends included Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and al-Qaeda. We launched a massive invasion of Iraq in the heart of Islamic civilization that provoked the entire Muslim world. We sponsored an anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, a nation so closely tied to Orthodox civilization that its capital, Kiev, has historically been described as “the mother of all Russian cities.”

This civilizational cluelessness has also marked Western mismanagement of the NATO alliance. Had elites understood in 1990 that NATO was no longer an anti-Soviet bloc but the “security alliance of Western civilization,” huge changes would have been made at the end of the Cold War and afterward. Turkey, an increasingly authoritarian country that is aspiring to a leadership role in the Islamic world, is a sponsor of terrorism and is overtly hostile to the United States; it should hardly be a NATO member, its strategic position and large army notwithstanding. China has both a strategic position and large army, and no one would argue that it would be a constructive NATO member. Macedonia, a corrupt and unstable nation with an Orthodox majority and a Muslim minority, shouldn’t have been considered for membership either. Finally, Western leaders should never have pushed to admit Georgia and Ukraine, and they should not now be playing footsie with those countries’ generals. Any statesman with civilizational awareness would have recognized and respected the historically rooted interests and prerogatives of the leader of the great Orthodox civilization, Russia.  

But nothing highlights the civilizational cluelessness of Western elites quite like the deliberate facilitation of mass Islamic migration into Europe. When a leader such as Angela Merkel defends Islamic migration on economic and multicultural grounds, she shows herself to be simply ignorant about what made Western civilization distinctive and successful and what is now threatening it. The embers of our heritage will ultimately burn out in nations like Germany, where domestic politics will trend toward ambivalence about NATO. A demographic profile with large blocs of Muslim voters will transform the geopolitical views of the political classes in a number of Western countries. (The political implications of Islamic migration for Europe are presaged in Michel Houellebecq’s controversial novel Submission.) Some Western nations, it seems obvious, will no longer support a Western alliance because they will no longer be Western. One can envision a time when certain Eastern European countries, which still cherish their heritage, will be the only reliable alliance partners. NATO, famous for scenario planning, ought to plan for that, rather than covetously eyeing Vladimir Putin’s neighbors.

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If Turkey is not bluffing, U.S. troops in Manbij, Syria, could be under fire by week’s end, and NATO engulfed in the worst crisis in its history.

Turkish President Erdogan said Friday his forces will cleanse Manbij of Kurdish fighters, alongside whom U.S. troops are embedded.

Erdogan’s foreign minister demanded concrete steps by the United States to end its support of the Kurds, who control the Syrian border with Turkey east of the Euphrates all the way to Iraq.

If the Turks attack Manbij, America will face a choice: stand by our Kurdish allies and resist the Turks, or abandon the Kurds.

Should the U.S. let the Turks drive the Kurds out of Manbij and the entire Syrian border area, as Erdogan threatens, American credibility would suffer a blow from which it would not soon recover.

But to stand with the Kurds and oppose Erdogan’s forces could mean a crackup of NATO and a loss of U.S. bases inside Turkey, including the air base at Incirlik.

Turkey also sits astride the Dardanelles entrance to the Black Sea. NATO’s loss would thus be a triumph for Vladimir Putin, who gave Ankara the green light to cleanse the Kurds from Afrin.

Yet Syria is but one of many challenges facing U.S. foreign policy.

The Winter Olympics in South Korea may have taken the menace of a North Korean ICBM out of the news, but no one believes that threat is behind us.

Last week, China charged that the USS Hopper, a guided missile destroyer, sailed within 12 nautical miles of Scarborough Shoal, a reef in the South China Sea claimed by Beijing, though it is far closer to Luzon in the Philippines. The destroyer, says China, was chased off by one of her frigates. If we continue to contest China’s territorial claims with our warships, a clash is inevitable.

In a similar incident Monday, a Russian military jet came within five feet of a U.S. Navy EP-3 Orion surveillance jet in international airspace over the Black Sea, forcing the Navy plane to end its mission.

U.S. relations with Cold War ally Pakistan are at rock bottom. In his first tweet of 2018, President Trump charged Pakistan with being a false friend.

“The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools,” Trump declared. “They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!”

As for America’s longest war in Afghanistan, now in its 17th year, the end is nowhere on the horizon.

A week ago, the International Hotel in Kabul was attacked and held for 13 hours by Taliban gunmen who killed 40. Midweek, a Save the Children facility in Jalalabad was attacked by ISIS, creating panic among aid workers across the country.

Saturday, an ambulance exploded in Kabul, killing 103 people and wounding 235. Monday, Islamic State militants attacked Afghan soldiers guarding a military academy in Kabul. With the fighting season two months off, U.S. troops will not soon be departing.

If Pakistan is indeed providing sanctuary for the terrorists of the Haqqani network, how does this war end successfully for the United States?

Last week, in a friendly fire incident, the U.S.-led coalition killed 10 Iraqi soldiers. The Iraq war began 15 years ago.

Yet another war, where the humanitarian crisis rivals Syria, continues on the Arabian Peninsula. There, a Saudi air, sea, and land blockade that threatens the Yemeni people with starvation has failed to dislodge Houthi rebels who seized the capital Sanaa three years ago.

This weekend brought news that secessionist rebels, backed by the United Arab Emirates, seized power in Yemen’s southern port of Aden from the Saudi-backed Hadi regime fighting the Houthis.

These rebels seek to split the country, as it was before 1990.

Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE appear to be backing different horses in this tribal-civil-sectarian war into which America has been drawn.

There are other wars—Somalia, Libya, Ukraine—where the U.S. is taking sides, sending arms, training troops, flying missions.

Like the Romans, we have become an empire, committed to fighting for scores of nations, with troops on every continent and forces in combat operations of which the American people are only vaguely aware.

“I didn’t know there were 1,000 troops in Niger,” said Senator Lindsey Graham when four Green Berets were killed there. “We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing.”

No, we don’t, Senator.

As in all empires, power is passing to the generals.

And what causes the greatest angst today in the imperial city?

Fear that a four-page memo worked up in the House Judiciary Committee may discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia-gate.

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Sitting in a chair across from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting last September, President Donald Trump was sober in his comments. The dispute between Israel and the Palestinians had gone on for far too long, he said, and U.S. officials had failed repeatedly to facilitate a Mideast peace deal that would end the conflict permanently. The Israeli and Palestinian people, Trump said, deserve much better than the status quo that’s held for decades. “I will do everything within my heart and within my soul to get that deal made,” Trump confided to Abbas during a cameo with reporters. “For so many years, I’ve been hearing about peace between Israel and the Palestinians…we’re going to see what we can do.”

At points during Trump’s first year in White House, it appeared that the mercurial, unconventional, scattershot real estate tycoon might just be able to hammer out the “ultimate deal.” He discussed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process (or lack thereof) in somewhat magical terms, all but daydreaming about what a peace agreement would look like in the many interviews he gave as a Republican presidential candidate. During an MSNBC town hall at the beginning of the GOP presidential primary, Trump refused to be goaded into saying what party was at fault for the moribund peace process, telling Joe Scarborough that it wouldn’t help if he started to assign blame. “Let me be sort of a neutral guy,” Trump remarked. Months earlier, he even caused a minor political kerfuffle by questioning whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was really interested in a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Marco Rubio, who at the time was still viewed in Republican political circles as a potential president, was quick to exploit the comment, suggesting that Trump was putting Israel on the same playing field as its enemies.

Up until last fall, Abbas bought into the Trump-as-the-ultimate-dealmaker mystique. After the longtime Palestinian politician met the president at the White House for the first time in May of last year, Abbas all but declared that Trump was the only one who could salvage the two-state solution: “we believe that we can be partners…to bring about a historic peace treaty under your stewardship,” he said.

Whatever good will and mutual trust that existed between the two men is now gone. Nine months is an eternity in international politics, and even longer on matters related to the Holy Land. Abbas is now denouncing Trump as the man who killed the Oslo process for good. The Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a commonsense step to many American peace negotiators who have long argued that Western Jerusalem would be given to Israel in a final status agreement anyway, was seen by Abbas as a slap in the face to Palestinian national aspirations. The same man who talked about a rosy relationship with a new American administration in 2017 is, in the first weeks of 2018, attacking that same administration as extremely biased and hostile towards the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state.

The Palestinian national leadership is by all indications done interacting with Washington on the peace file. If there is to be a peace process with Israel, Abbas has made it vocally clear that the Trump administration cannot be the one to manage it. Vice President Mike Pence’s recent trip to Israel, during which he fiercely defended the president’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, was taken as further affirmation by Israeli-Arab lawmakers and Palestinian officials that Washington is contributing to the problem. What Pence has called a commonsense move—“The United States,” he said, “has chosen fact over fiction, and fact is the only true foundation for a just and lasting peace”—has been castigated by supporters of the two-state solution as another body blow to peace talks.

Trump has his own grievances, most of which are not new in Washington circles. The White House is puzzled beyond belief as to why the Palestinian Authority continues to grant stipends from its national budget to prisoners who have been locked up in Israeli jails for terrorist attacks. Mideast peace takes a notorious amount of patience, and Trump is not exactly into the whole patience thing; he sees little reason why the U.S. should continue to send hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars to the PA if it isn’t interested in participating in a dialogue with Israel. Indeed, two weeks after Trump rang in the new year with two tweets describing the Palestinians as all talk and no action, the administration suspended a $65 million payment to the U.N. agency responsible for caring for the five million Palestinian refugees scattered throughout the region. State Department assurances that the aid freeze is not designed to punish the PA will be scant comfort to Abbas given Trump’s previous remarks.

The $64,000 question is how relations between Washington and Ramallah have disintegrated so rapidly. At least some fault lies with the PA, an organization dominated by old men past their prime who have proven over the years to be much more interested in blaming Israel for every conceivable ill than going back to the negotiating room. The Israelis share blame as well: with every house constructed on a West Bank settlement or East Jerusalem neighborhood and every resolution Netanyahu’s party passes, peace is dealt another setback. The Trump administration’s fault lies in the uncensored bluster of its president and a belief that using American aid as a stick will be enough of a sharp object to scare Abbas into U.S.-sponsored peace talks. The absence of a comprehensive peace plan from the White House, despite hundreds of meetings between Israeli and Palestinian officials and a year of listening sessions, hasn’t helped either.

So, here we are, over two years after Donald Trump the candidate promised to do everything in his power to solve a problem that no other American president, Republican or Democrat, has been able to solve. It may be that 2018 ends up being historic—the year the last bit of oxygen keeping the two-state solution alive in the discussion is let out of the tank and the idea of a Palestinian state is suffocated to death.

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I’ll admit I was taken aback. This senior officer and mentor—with nearly 28 years of military service—wasn’t one for hyperbole. No, he believed what he was saying to me just then.

“We’re killing these kids, we’re breaking the army!” he exclaimed.

He went on to explain the competing requirements for standard, conventional army units—to say nothing of the overstretched Special Forces—in 2018: balancing Russia in Eastern Europe, deterrence rotations in South Korea, advise and assist missions in Africa. Add to that deployments to the usual hotspots in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He was genuinely concerned about the physical and emotional toll on the active-duty force, pushed to its limits by 17 years of perpetual combat. After all, with high military suicide rates now labeled the “new normal,” and a recent succession of accidental training deaths, it seems reasonable to wonder whether we are, indeed, “killing [our] kids.”

The overall effects of this rapid operations tempo on morale and readiness are difficult to measure in a disciplined, professional, all-volunteer military such as the one the United States possesses. What we do know is that despite former president Obama’s ongoing promises that “the tide of war is receding” and that America could finally “start nation-building at home,” nothing of the sort occurred then, or is now, under President Trump. Though the U.S. military (thankfully) no longer maintains six-figure troop counts in either Iraq or Afghanistan, American soldiers are still there, as well as serving in 70 percent of the world’s countries in one capacity or another in what has become a “generational war.” America’s troops are still being killed, though in admittedly fewer numbers. Nevertheless, U.S. servicemen continued to die in combat in several countries in 2017, including Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Niger.

After major drawdowns in Iraq (2011) and Afghanistan (2014), many soldiers, myself included, looked forward to longer “dwell time” at home stations and, just maybe, something resembling peace and even normalcy. It was not to be. Aside from deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, conventional U.S. Army brigades currently support regular overseas rotations to Kuwait, South Korea, and Eastern Europe. To use just one example, the 1^st Armored Division webpage currently boasts that the division has soldiers supporting 20 missions on five continents. Of my three former classmates and colleagues in the West Point History Department (2014-2016), two are currently deployed: one in Romania, another to the ubiquitous Mid-East region. That’s just about as busy as we all were back in the bad old days of 2006-2007.

The military—and the Army in particular—brought some of this upon itself. As conventional ground combat elements (of which the Army owns the preponderance) withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan, and President Obama signaled a strategic pivot to Asia, U.S. Army leaders became understandably concerned. The Asia pivot would, logically, lean more heavily on the Air Force and Navy—especially when new military doctrine took the (exclusive) name “Air-Sea Battle.” As the economy struggled and budgets tightened, the various service chiefs fought to convince Congress and administration kingmakers of their continued “relevance.” If the Army didn’t appear busy—engaged in a countless number of vital missions—well, it’d be hard to justify its current budget.

It should come as no surprise that around this time the Army touted the versatility of its Regionally Aligned Forces (RAF) brigades—units trained and tailored to support an array of missions for specific geographic combatant commanders. Army leaders also emphasized threats from Russia and North Korea and the need for deterrent brigades on the ground in those theaters. And, with Special Operations Command under strain, the Army also provided six new Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFABs) to carry some of the advise-and-assist workload around the globe. This is not to say that Army leaders fabricated threats or invented missions. It’s all far more complex. Rather, brutal budget squabbles on Capitol Hill combined with increasingly politicized foreign policy threat assessments created an atmosphere where demonstrating “relevance” and “busyness” presented the only sure path to funding at the rates to which the various services had become accustomed. Relevance is a double-edged sword—well-justified budgets require a frenzied operational pace and an overwrought Army.

Some troopers, at least, appear fed up with the scope and pace of deployments in year 18 of the conflict formerly known as the “war on terror.” No one is publicly sounding the alarm, but there are signals—if you know where to look. When Vice President Mike Pence made a surprise holiday season visit to Kabul and publicly praised U.S. forces in Afghanistan, one observer described the crowd as “subdued,” and noted “several troops stood with their arms crossed or their hands folded behind their backs and listened, but did not applaud.” Polls also demonstrate that although the current president is slightly more popular among the military than the general public, among officers Trump counts only a 30 percent approval rate. More concerning are the February 2017 polls indicating that military service member satisfaction has dropped 50 percent since 2009, due in part, one assumes, to never-ending deployments and time spent away from families. And, among the ever-strained Special Operations forces, reports indicate that mental distress and suicide are again on the rise.

As it stands, the system just about holds together—no doubt due to the determination of leaders and dutiful sacrifice of soldiers—but one wonders whether the active component force could truly weather even one major regional crisis. Something, it seems, would have to give—a drawdown in other missions, compressed training schedules, or—heaven forbid!—calling up the reserves, something American politicians certainly wish to avoid.

The all-volunteer force was always a devil’s bargain: by cutting out the citizenry in the form of a draft out of the equation, presidents, pols, and military leadership could move soldiers around the chessboard with fewer checks on their authority and the decision-making process.

That’s all well and good, until the system cracks. The president’s modest troop escalations in Afghanistan and Iraq, if combined with a (ever more likely) shooting war in Korea, could be just the thing to “break” the professional, volunteer military.

At that point Americans would have some tough decisions to make: ante up some cash and bodies to keep the U.S. military on top, or, just maybe, do less. Let’s hope it never comes to that. In the meantime, count on Congress and the American people to cover their eyes and let the “war on terror’s” third straight president run its cherished heroes into the ground.

What a way to say “thanks for your service!”

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As defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld used to entertain (and befuddle) reporters with his song-and-dance about Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, and Unknown Unknowns. This last category—“things we don’t know we don’t know,” as the inimitable Rummy put it—was the one that could really get you in trouble.

Allow me to posit a similar taxonomy for news. There’s Real News, based on fact and responsibly reported. Then there’s Fake News, made up of stuff propagated by disreputable outlets ranging from the National Enquirer and Breitbart to cable news networks and a bazillion websites. And finally there’s Real News That Gets Ignored. Once again, it’s that last category that will eventually land us in trouble.

A distinctive characteristic of the Trump era finds Fake News displacing Real News as the basis of what passes for our national conversation. This stems in part from the fact that Donald Trump himself obsessively denounces as fake any reporting he doesn’t like, with those in the news business repeating and thereby amplifying the president’s complaints no matter how bizarre or preposterous. But it’s also because Trump and his administration on a daily basis generate their own counter-narrative of news that they insist is genuine even though it’s manifestly bogus. The media landscape is thus awash in reports that one side or the other loudly condemns as fraudulent.

With all this emphasis on Fake News, the third category of our taxonomy has mushroomed. That is, the quantity of Real News that is underreported, shrugged off, or treated as an afterthought is increasing by leaps and bounds.

I was reminded of this the other day when the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) released its latest update on how U.S. nation-building efforts in that country are faring.

This particular report focuses on a Defense Department-created entity called the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO), charged with overseeing U.S. taxpayer-funded economic development projects in Afghanistan. From 2010 to 2014, Congress appropriated approximately $823 million to fund TFBSO operations in Afghanistan. SIGAR now provides what is, in effect, a report card.

Among its key findings regarding TFBSO’s performance are these:

• More than 50 percent of funds obligated for TFBSO—$359.5 million of $675 million—were spent on indirect and support costs—that is, on overhead—rather than on actual projects in Afghanistan.
• Only $70 million of the $316.3 million obligated on contracts directly supporting TFBSO programs (22 percent) fully achieved their objectives. The remaining $246.3 million (78 percent) fell partially short or failed altogether.
• Nearly half of the TFBSO contracts that SIGAR reviewed, worth $201 million, were let on a limited competition or sole-source basis, thereby increasing the risk of waste. Seven contracts worth $35.1 million went to firms employing former TFBSO staff as senior executives.
• Further hampering the prospects of success was the fact that TFBSO projects routinely overlooked local conditions such as politics, culture, weather, and security, i.e., all the things that distinguish Afghanistan from Wisconsin or Vermont.
• Ill-defined contract requirements prevented TFBSO from holding contractors accountable for poor performance, resulting in further waste.
• Overall, the Pentagon is today unable to say whether TFBSO projects actually created jobs, facilitated foreign direct investments, increased exports, or hiked Afghan government revenues. In other words, no basis exists for determining whether TFBSO actually contributed anything useful.

Now, SIGAR has been releasing reports about waste, fraud, and abuse in the Afghanistan War for years. TFBSO’s abysmal performance, now irrefutable, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Notably, all SIGAR reports, including this latest one, are readily available online. There is no need for reporters to cajole some unnamed source into spilling the beans or for editors to worry about courting trouble by publishing leaked classified material. It’s all there for the New York Times, Washington Post, PBS, NPR, etc., etc., to bring to the attention of the public. Yet these prestigious outlets never seem able to spare much attention for TFBSO’s troubles.

We should not be surprised. As it stumbles from one year to the next, the wayward U.S. project in Afghanistan receives sporadic media coverage at best. Even when some tidbit of awfulness attracts an occasional nod—when we learn, for example, that Afghan opium production has today reached yet another all-time high—the story ends up being a one-day affair, with no serious follow-up. Afghanistan, the longest war in American history, is a prime example of Real News That Gets Ignored.

There are many other examples. Staying in the arena of national security policy, other neglected stories include foreign arms sales (here the U.S. is truly the world’s number one), the global disposition of U.S. forces (now present in two-thirds of the world’s countries), cost overruns of major weapons programs, and the ongoing trillion-dollar modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Let me emphasize: It’s not that you can’t find the odd reference to such matters, whether in your local newspaper or on TV. But compare the coverage such stories receive to the extravagant attention conferred on women graduating from the U.S. Army’s Ranger School or the service eligibility of transgendered persons. No doubt those are worthy topics. Yet at the end of the day they are unlikely to have anything more than marginal relevance to the safety and security of the United States.

The Real News That Gets Ignored poses a greater threat to the nation’s well-being than any of the Fake News in which we are presently drowning. And the fault is not Trump’s alone.

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In 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan and quickly smashed the Taliban government. It also killed hundreds of members of the al Qaeda group that had launched the attacks, although leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri escaped to Pakistan, along with about 200 followers. Ever since, we have been told that the U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan must continue indefinitely or else al Qaeda will return and make the country once again into a “safe haven” from which to attack the United States. In U.S. political discourse and news stories, this has often been stated as a flat fact, beyond dispute.

Last August, Donald Trump invoked the threat of Afghanistan as a terrorist sanctuary torationalize extending the already 16-year war indefinitely and increasing the U.S. military presence by at least 4,000 troops. The president cited the same argument heard since 9/11: “A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists—including ISIS and al Qaeda—would instantly fill.” In his speech outlining the policy, Trump added that his government would not negotiate with the insurgency until some undefined point years from now. “Nobody knows if or when that will ever happen,” he said. The implication was that U.S. forces must stay and fight indefinitely or the country will once again become a base from which terrorists can attack America and its allies.

This safe haven argument is a myth—a false but widely believed tale used to justify continuing a policy of perpetual failure. President Barack Obama often invoked this safe haven myth to justify his Afghan surge of 2009-2012, which moved some 60,000 extra troops into the country and brought the U.S. military contingent to nearly 100,000. He invoked it also to justify his decision to keep nearly 10,000 there through his presidency, thus reversing his promise to end the war. The conventional wisdom insists that Obama’s decision to temporarily pull troops out of Iraq led to the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) and its short-lived “caliphate” in western Iraq and eastern Syria. But in fact a much greater factor was the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in the first place and Obama’s later support for the violent uprisings in Libya and Syria. In Yemen, the war against al Qaeda and the eventual regime change and war against al Qaeda’s enemies, the Houthis, have likewise increased the bin Ladenites’ power and influence there.

But leaders of both U.S. political parties and major media outlets have supported these policies, and to justify that position they ignore the role of Iraq and Obama’s post-Iraq interventions in exacerbating the situation. Instead, they say, the ceasing of intervention in any area  causes matters to become worse.

But because of the Bush and Obama interventions since the 2001 Afghan invasion, the al Qaeda and ISIS safe havens are now all far from Afghanistan, in the U.S.-created “failed states” of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya. Furthermore, terrorists don’t need safe havens from which to strike. As we’ve seen in recent attacks in the United States and Europe, one or two men with rifles or a truck can do plenty of damage with no more preparation space than a rented apartment. Trump invoked the recent attack in Barcelona in his Afghanistan escalation speech. But none of those attackers had any direct tie to Afghanistan or any of the other major al Qaeda battle zones of the past few years.

The few dozen core al Qaeda members who survived the initial Air Force bombing campaign in Afghanistan fled the country by the end of 2001. They were a non-factor in the war against the Taliban regime, and at no point did they have major influence in the insurgency against the occupation that grew up in later years. If any did come back they would be irrelevant. Afghanistan is exile, as far as anyone can get from anywhere. It provides no special access to any Western target.

The September 11 hijackers, none of whom were Afghans, gained entry to the United States under regular tourist and student visas. The terrorists launched the attacks from Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey. They had planned them in Malaysia, Germany, Spain, California, Florida, and Maryland. True, Afghanistan benefited our enemies in its distance from the United States, making it somewhat difficult for America to hit back against targets there. But by 2002 there were no targets left in Afghanistan to bomb. Al Qaeda’s surviving members had fled to the neighboring state of Pakistan, an American ally.

Most of them spread from Pakistan to other parts of the region, planning further attacks in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, and Syria. According to former FBI counterterrorism expert Ali Soufan, those left hiding in Pakistan tried to set an example for others in the region, changing from “Chief Operators” to “Chief Motivators” for others seeking to join the war against America.

And yet the Bush and Obama administrations went to extensive lengths in pushing the ridiculous safe haven myth. They argued essentially that America could never leave Afghanistan because then the Afghan state would fail, the Taliban would regain power, and al Qaeda would be invited back into the country. Indeed, in the early years of the war it was common to hear the terms “al Qaeda” and “Taliban” used interchangeably as the government worked hard to conflate Osama bin Laden’s group with Mullah Omar’s government. But as Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn demonstrate in their book, An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, the former Taliban leader couldn’t stand bin Laden and resented the radical terrorist’s threat to his fledgling regime, putting it in the crosshairs of the American superpower.

When the Washington Times’s Arnaud de Borchgrave interviewed Omar in summer 2001 he complained that bin Laden was like a “chicken bone stuck in his throat, that he can’t swallow or spit out.” An Army War College study said that bin Laden had refused to swear loyalty to Omar other than through a deniable proxy.

When the war came, the Taliban progressively loosened its conditions for extradition. First, it offered to surrender bin Laden and his men to an impartial Muslim state upon receiving evidence of bin Laden’s role in the attacks; next, it offered to turn bin Laden over to Pakistan upon being presented with evidence; and finally, once U.S. bombs started falling, the Taliban agreed to hand bin Laden over to any third country, even without evidence of his guilt. By then it was too late for the Taliban—but not for the lesson of the differences in the motives of these groups and the nature of their formerly uncomfortable, now non-existent alliance.

It bears repeating that fewer than 200 al Qaeda members escaped to Pakistan at the start of the war and thus could return to Afghanistan. Many of those have been arrested by police and spies, gone back home to pick up the revolution there, or were killed in the CIA’s Obama-era Pakistan drone war. Iran also apprehended a significant number of Arabs who had crossed their border during the initial invasion; most of those eventually were deported back to their home countries.

To justify continuing the Afghan mission, the U.S. government invoked the safe haven myth to obscure the fact that, though a handful of al Qaeda’s leaders had escaped, America had won the war. This small group of terrorists who had never managed to control their own county or district, much less any province or nation-state, were already dead, imprisoned, or had been driven out of the country, into further exile.

A limited mission, focused on Osama bin Laden and his few hundred men, could have been over by the end of 2001. Even Gary Berntsen, the second CIA officer in charge of the initial invasion, has conceded the likelihood of this. “The war could have been over pretty quickly,” he told reporter Michael Hirsh in 2016, lamenting Bush’s refusal to allow the Rangers and Marines to reinforce the CIA and Delta Force in their attempt to kill bin Laden at Tora Bora in December 2001. “We could have had the entire al Qaeda command structure had we done that. Also, the terrorism that metastasized into Pakistan might not have happened. It’s impossible to prove any of this. It’s a what-if. But, sadly, we lost the opportunity.”

General Anthony Zinni, former commander of Central Command, agrees. Al Qaeda in 2001, he says, “was a band of maybe a thousand radicals. Yet we created an investment in this that was on a level of what we do for existential threats. Obviously, we were traumatized by 9/11. I don’t mean to play that down. But this was not communism or fascism.”

Instead of declaring victory and coming home, the United States expanded its occupation strategy—and its list of enemies. The former Taliban government, initially acquiescent in defeat, has been fighting America and its NATO allies for almost 15 years, adding allies in the Haqqani Network and other groups. These forces have fought America and its allies to a stalemate.

If there’s a safe haven in the situation, it’s Pakistan. But, aside from the mysterious longevity of al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri on Pakistani soil, the sanctuary provided by that country is for the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network—in other words, local Pashtun tribal fighters, not international al Qaeda terrorists.

During the debate over Afghan strategy at the beginning of the Obama administration, when the president wanted to focus on killing the last of the leaders of the old “core” al Qaeda in Pakistan with CIA drones, the military insisted on escalation. One story leaked to the McClatchy news organization emphasized the safe haven myth and accused the White House of “minimizing warnings” that if the Afghan Taliban retook parts of Afghanistan it would invite al Qaeda back in. In fact, there was no new intelligence estimate on that point. This was simply spin and conjecture by those who wanted to expand the war. Osama bin Laden was still alive and at large then, making the alleged threat of the return of old core al Qaeda to Afghanistan seem more urgent, though the danger was not any more real than it had been since 2002.

After Trump became president, he seemed reluctant to escalate the war. He repeatedly delayed his decision on the new Afghan strategy and forced his National Security Council repeatedly to refine it. The president reportedly displayed his skepticism by invoking the failure of the Macedonians under Alexander the Great, as well as the Soviet Union more recently, to pacify the local Afghan population. This indicates an ability on the president’s part to differentiate between local tribal insurgents, fighting because our troops are on their front lawns, and international Arab terrorists intending to hit civilian targets inside the United States. In Afghanistan, the United States is fighting only the former.

But war proponents can always invoke the safe haven myth: we still must never fully cut and run, or who knows what might happen? What if al Qaeda attacks us again? In reality, there is no reason to think al Qaeda would come back to Afghanistan were the Taliban to return to power, especially considering the trouble they generated the last time around. When van Linschoten and Kuehn contacted representatives of the Taliban’s Quetta Shura after bin Laden was killed in May 2011, the Taliban figures didn’t seem to care in the slightest that he was dead or how he had died. “We are fighting for Mullah Muhammad Omar. He is our emir. We have never fought for Osama bin Laden. His death does not matter to us. We will continue with our struggle.” In fact, al Qaeda did not have a single representative on the Taliban leadership’s Quetta Shura council. Even before Obama launched his surge, a number of administration officials conceded there was no reason to believe that a Taliban victory would mean a return of al Qaeda to Afghanistan. These included Vice President Biden; Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special representative to the region; and John Brennan, then head of counterterrorism, later CIA director.

As the late war reporter Michael Hastings revealed, when Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and their allies were pushing for the “surge” escalation in 2009, McChrystal neglected to even mention al Qaeda in his initial report. It wasn’t until Republican Senator Lindsey Graham reminded him of the importance of the safe haven argument that he began to frame the war in that way. It then became a major talking point until Obama finally relented and agreed to the surge.

Six months into it, CIA Director Leon Panetta conceded to ABC News that al Qaeda represented no serious threat in Afghanistan. “I think at most, we’re looking at 50 to 100, maybe less,” he said, adding that al Qaeda’s main location was in the tribal areas of Pakistan. In fact, Panetta could not prove that there had been any Saudi or Egyptian mujahideen fighters left in the country for years, much less any real associates of bin Laden. But his concession should have been enough to cause a scandal: If “maybe less than 50” illusory al Qaeda fighters can keep us in the country indefinitely, is there any possible future context in which the government could declare victory over al Qaeda there, much less the Taliban? And if their presence was the reason for the war, why was eliminating them not the focus of the Obama escalation instead of the broader, obviously impossible, anti-Taliban, Pashtun-pacification counterinsurgency effort?

In December 2009, following Obama’s surge announcement, journalist Patrick Cockburn explained that the Afghan occupation, far from preventing terrorist attacks by denying our antagonists safe-haven, actually increased the likelihood of attacks in Western countries. Just a month before, a U.S. Army major named Nidal Hasan, set to deploy to Afghanistan and upset about reports of U.S. war crimes against civilians there and the prospect of having to kill fellow Muslims, killed 13 soldiers and wounded more than 30 in a massacre at Fort Hood, Texas. It was later revealed that Hasan had been in contact with prominent American al Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki.

Obama officials, insisting they had won the terror war and denying that blowback from U.S. policies had spurred this “lone wolf” attack, tried to spin the tragedy as “workplace violence,” as though Hassan had simply “gone postal.” But this was not truly “blowback,” defined as long-term consequences of secret foreign policies returning to haunt the United States, surprising the population and leaving them vulnerable to misinformation about the conflict. A more accurate way to identify this phenomenon would be to call it “backdraft,” when the direct consequences of the government’s openly declared foreign policies blow up right in all of our faces, undeniable to anyone but the most committed war hawks. This is borrowed from the term used by firefighters for when their ax-wielding or door-kicking intervention inadvertently provides oxygen to a heated and fuel-filled room, causing a massive explosion.

In recent years, American domestic terrorists Najibullah Zazi (New York subway plot), Faisal Shahzad (attempted Times Square bomber), Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Boston Marathon bombing), Omar Mateen (Orlando nightclub slaughter), Ahmad Khan Rahami (New York, New Jersey sidewalk bomber), and Amor M. Ftouhi (Flint, Michigan stabbing) have all cited America’s Afghan war as at least partial motivation for their attacks and attempted attacks on U.S. targets.

In 2013, former Marine sergeant Thomas Gibbons-Neff wrote in the Washington Post that, after the Boston Marathon bombing, he rejected the safe haven myth and the concept that we must “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.” He explained: “While I was deployed, I went to bed at night believing that I was protecting the homeland because coming after me and my fellow Marines was a much easier commute for those so hell-bent on killing Americans. But that argument no longer makes sense if my war has inspired enemies at home.”

Osama bin Laden is dead, and the war has been generating backdraft terrorist attacks against the United States. But haven’t you heard? ISIS is now in Afghanistan! Keep in mind, though, that ISIS is just a brand name. In Afghanistan, most of those who embrace the label are actually members of the Pakistani Taliban who fled Obama’s drone war and the Pakistani military’s infantry assaults back in 2010. They have now been joined by a relatively small number of former members of the Afghan Taliban as well—again, local Pashtun tribal fighters resisting rule from Kabul. For now, at least, these ISIS fighters are far outgunned by their Taliban competition, though U.S. Army and Air Force efforts in Nangarhar Province against those claiming ISIS’s name have only made them more powerful over the past few years.

As Dutch reporter Bette Dam lamented, we are seeing the rest of the exact same dynamic play out with them as with the entire insurgency over the years: seeing this new threat, the Army and Air Force have launched a massive response. Since January 2015, the U.S. has bombed the eastern Nangarhar Province in an attempt to fight this small insurgent faction now claiming ISIS’s name. As a result, “they are creating unrest, hopelessness and new enemies.” The anti-occupation violence Dam predicted has continued to escalate.

After a Green Beret was killed fighting ISIS in Nangarhar Province in April 2017, the U.S. Special Operations Command took revenge by dropping a 21,000-pound MOAB, “Massive Ordnance Air Blast,” on an enemy position. Since U.S. B-52s regularly bomb ISIS and Taliban targets—U.S. forces dropped more bombs in April 2017 than any other single month since 2012—the use of the MOAB in this instance seemed to be more about sending a message than anything else, though the military insisted the use of a fuel-air bomb was necessary to reach fighters hiding in tunnels deep underground.

The U.S. military then maintained that there were still hundreds of ISIS fighters left in eastern Afghanistan, giving the safe haven myth a new life. Never mind mythical al Qaeda leaders one day returning from Pakistan; now local Afghan and Pakistani Pashtun tribal fighters resisting the occupation and Kabul-based government, while declaring themselves part of ISIS, provide another enemy to fight into the indefinite future.

However, as expert Borhan Osman wrote shortly afterward in the New York Times:

Having been eclipsed by the Taliban, the Islamic State seems to be focused on marketing itself to potential and active jihadists. For that, it needs publicity. President Trump’s big bomb provided exactly that. The destruction of a network of caves is the perfect advertisement to lure radicals undecided about joining a jihadist group and attract members from other groups.

After the bombing and the subsequent military operations, the Islamic State in Khorasan’s radio station in Nangarhar has been roaring. One preacher called the bomb a blessing from God….This is a message skillfully tailored for young radicals, since for them American hostility is a stamp of a group’s credibility. The more a group is targeted by the United States, the greater its jihadi legitimacy.

Trump says he will achieve victory in Afghanistan, but he embraces the same failed and counterproductive policies that have served to increase the size and strength of the Taliban-based insurgency, Haqqani Network and now ISIS. And, while the government still invokes the hollow safe haven myth and insists it is defending Americans from Afghanistan-based terrorism, its ongoing war in that troubled land, with no end in sight, only puts Americans in greater danger. 

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