forty-five years, had been replaced. Terrorism, particularly when religiously motivated
and devoted to inflicting catastrophic levels of casualties and damage, became the
defining threat of the era, which is to say of the present day and the anticipated future.
Most of the world’s armed forces are not well designed, doctrinally prepared, trained
and equipped to wage war against elusive handfuls of religious fanatics. Rather, they are
raised and maintained to fight regular enemies who would be approximate facsimiles
of themselves. If states prepare primarily for warfare with other states, do they thereby
condemn themselves to impotence in combat against irregular foes? Dare states, espe-
cially the sole superpower, transform their armed forces in a search for excellence against
irregular enemies when there might still be regular interstate warfare to conduct in their
future?
Notwithstanding their elusiveness, even terrorists with no fixed abode must have a
territorial dimension to their existence and preparations. They require safe havens for
training, for rest and recovery, and for planning. Regular armed forces can threaten those
sanctuaries. A popular American metaphor in the wake of 9/11 was that ‘we need to drain
the swamps’ where terrorists lurk. Immediately after 9/11, it appeared as if the United
States could organize a global coalition against Islamic terrorism. Americans talked
about a ‘war on terror’, but that enterprise was as impractical as it was conceptually
impossible. The ‘war’ that America was committed to fight was against al Qaeda, its
franchised branches, its associates and its imitators. There is a rough approximation to a
‘terrorist international’, and that shadowy association (one cannot call it an organization)
has intimate connections with international, even global, criminal syndicates. But the US
focus was, and remains, emphatically upon those who perpetrated 9/11.
Afghanistan was all but self-selected to be the first swamp in need of drainage in the
new master narrative of strategic history. That unfortunate country, which has always
contained ungoverned space to a greater or lesser extent, has had a history of almost
constant warfare. When the USSR departed, defeated, in 1988, the Soviet-nominated
President, Mohammed Najibullah, survived only until 1992. The country essentially
dissolved into a complex civil war, a contest eventually won in large measure by the
Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement in 1996. (One must say ‘in large measure’,
because the Taliban never had control of the north of the country.) Since the Taliban had
provided sanctuary for al Qaeda, and had permitted it to run training camps for aspiring
terrorists and insurgents, probably on the scale of 30,000–50,000 in total, Afghanistan
was uncontroversial as the first target in the ‘war on terror’. This was accomplished with
some dexterity in October–December 2001. US strategic theorists and commentators
proclaimed and celebrated an allegedly ‘new American way of war’, which, appropriately
enough, they called ‘the Afghan model’ (Boot, 2003).
The Taliban was defeated decisively, but, as later history was to show, not by any
means conclusively. The agents of its demise were, on the one hand, a combination of
US air power directed for precision bombardment by handfuls of special forces soldiers
on the ground engaged in target-spotting; and, on the other, old-fashioned ground combat
conducted by the Taliban’s local enemies, and hence allies of the United States, the tribal
warlords of the ‘Northern Alliance’. Unfortunately, although regime change was effected
with relative ease, albeit at the cost of needing to reward its tribal allies of convenience,
the United States was able to do serious damage to al Qaeda only in Afghanistan. Many
of its leaders escaped over the mountains and into the all but independent frontier tribal
236 War, peace and international relations