TEN YEARS HAVE passed since terrorists hijacked airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  In that period, America has fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, carried out hundreds armed drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen (among other locations), and conducted covert operations around the world, all in the name of what President George W.  Bush termed the “Global War on Terror.”  Terror plots and attempted attacks have been foiled, terrorist leaders have been killed or captured in massive numbers – including the world’s most wanted terrorist himself, Osama bin Laden.  All of this has combined, in the words of President Barack Obama, to “put al Qaeda on the path to defeat.”

Given all this, is it possible that America is actually losing the war on terror? In Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argues not only that we are losing, but that we as a nation still fail to understand what kind of a war we are fighting, and what our enemies’ actual goals are.  This is a powerful indictment, and Gartenstein-Ross painstakingly lays it out in a book that is both sharply analytical and accessible to any audience.

A KEY PROBLEM with America’s attempt to wage a War on Terror while safeguarding itself from future attack, Gartenstein-Ross writes, is that our ignorance of the enemy we are facing has allowed us to pursue both goals in a profligate fashion that plays right into the hands of an enemy that sees America’s economy as the long-term target.  To understand the reasoning behind this, we must look to the Soviet Union.  Though myriad factors contributed to the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., its collapse so shortly after its withdrawal from a decade-long quagmire in Afghanistan helped convince Osama bin Laden and other former mujahedeen that they had been the cause of its ultimate defeat.

Now, al Qaeda has taken this strategy of embroiling a much larger and wealthier enemy in a long and costly war of economic attrition and has aimed it at the United States, with no small measure of success gained over the last decade.  “Even though it has lost Osama bin Laden and its safe haven in Afghanistan,” the author writes, al Qaeda’s “fight against America is broader, and al Qaeda and its affiliates are key players in more regions than they were engaged in a decade ago…Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is shattered, it faces an almost unthinkable debt burden, and its policy makers have largely been consigned to arguing with each other on the sidelines while the country’s traditional allies…are overthrown or see their power erode” (p. 200).

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TEN YEARS HAVE passed since terrorists hijacked airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  In that period, America has fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, carried out hundreds armed drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen (among other locations), and conducted covert operations around the world, all in the name of what President George W.  Bush termed the “Global War on Terror.”  Terror plots and attempted attacks have been foiled, terrorist leaders have been killed or captured in massive numbers – including the world’s most wanted terrorist himself, Osama bin Laden.  All of this has combined, in the words of President Barack Obama, to “put al Qaeda on the path to defeat.”

Given all this, is it possible that America is actually losing the war on terror? In Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argues not only that we are losing, but that we as a nation still fail to understand what kind of a war we are fighting, and what our enemies’ actual goals are.  This is a powerful indictment, and Gartenstein-Ross painstakingly lays it out in a book that is both sharply analytical and accessible to any audience.

A KEY PROBLEM with America’s attempt to wage a War on Terror while safeguarding itself from future attack, Gartenstein-Ross writes, is that our ignorance of the enemy we are facing has allowed us to pursue both goals in a profligate fashion that plays right into the hands of an enemy that sees America’s economy as the long-term target.  To understand the reasoning behind this, we must look to the Soviet Union.  Though myriad factors contributed to the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., its collapse so shortly after its withdrawal from a decade-long quagmire in Afghanistan helped convince Osama bin Laden and other former mujahedeen that they had been the cause of its ultimate defeat.

Now, al Qaeda has taken this strategy of embroiling a much larger and wealthier enemy in a long and costly war of economic attrition and has aimed it at the United States, with no small measure of success gained over the last decade.  “Even though it has lost Osama bin Laden and its safe haven in Afghanistan,” the author writes, al Qaeda’s “fight against America is broader, and al Qaeda and its affiliates are key players in more regions than they were engaged in a decade ago…Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is shattered, it faces an almost unthinkable debt burden, and its policy makers have largely been consigned to arguing with each other on the sidelines while the country’s traditional allies…are overthrown or see their power erode” (p. 200).

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