Is there a magic nicotine patch that could help the U.S. kick its habit of disastrous "anti-terror" campaigns? http://t.co/BEYz8gMI52
— Chase Madar (@ChMadar) March 31, 2015
Even the Very Serious People seem to be sidling towards the exits. Stephen M. Walt, in Foreign Policy:
Pardon my cynicism, but the “war on terror” (aka “war on violent extremism”) is reminding me more and more of the disastrous U.S. “war on drugs.” That latter campaign, we now know, has been a costly and counterproductive debacle. The United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to interdict drug shipments, eradicate poppy and coca fields in foreign countries, and round up drug dealers and users here at home, with hardly any lasting or meaningful successes. Narcotics producers just relocate to new areas or develop new products, and smugglers find new routes to bring drugs into the United States, leaving the level of drug abuse largely unchanged. After four decades, the main achievement of the war on drugs was giving the “Land of the Free” the world’s largest prison population.
Similarly, the broad U.S. effort to address the threat from al Qaeda and its like-minded successors seems to be lurching from failure to failure. Indeed, the entire U.S. approach to the greater Middle East has been a costly series of missteps, which is why some of us have called for a fundamental rethinking of the whole U.S. approach. The GOP would like to blame the current mess on U.S. President Barack Obama, but U.S. Middle East policy is a bipartisan cock-up going back more than 20 years…
…[P]ost-Qaddafi Libya is a chaotic failed state, and likely to be a source of trouble for some time to come. Yemen is well on its way to the same status, and more than 15 years of U.S. counterterrorism operations now appear to have been for naught. The Syrian tragedy grinds on, reminding us that the only thing worse than a despotic government is no government at all. (And no, the situation in Syria would not be better if the United States had intervened earlier; this would merely have hastened the onset of anarchy and ensured that the warring factions had even more weaponry to use against each other.)
If one steps back and takes the long view, in short, it is clear that two-plus decades of U.S. policy — much of it focused on combating extremism — has not worked. In 1990, al Qaeda was in its infancy and most Middle East radicals were preoccupied with local concerns. Today, the entire region faces a rapidly morphing array of extremist groups whose message finds sympathetic audiences in many countries. The danger of direct terrorist attacks here in the United States remains very low — fortunately — because the United States is a long way away and because our law enforcement agencies have made it more difficult for large-scale plots to take place here. The rest of the counterterrorism agenda — and in particular, the various interventions the United States have waged overseas — has been mostly a bust.
In short, when historians a few decades from now look back on U.S. policy, they will no doubt regard this record as a massive, collective failure of the entire U.S. foreign-policy establishment…