Narrative History.

• Author: Lieven, Anatol

We can't say that we were not warned. In January 2002, at the start of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, British historian and former soldier Sir Michael Howard published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled, "What's In A Name? How to Fight Terrorism." In it, he warned that defining the U.S. response to 9/11 as a "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) would shape U.S. policies in profoundly negative ways. As he wrote,

[T]o use, or rather to misuse, the term "war" is not simply a matter of legality or pedantic semantics. It has deeper and more dangerous consequences. To declare that one is at war is immediately to create a wat psychosis that may be totally counterproductive for the objective being sought. Like others, Howard pinpointed the tisk that declaring war on such a nebulous enemy as "terror" would make that war unending; that war would only drive populations into support for the terrorists and create a "with us or against us" attitude that would make it impossible to win over people from the other side; and that the longer wars continued the greater these tendencies would become.

He argued instead for the use of intelligence actions, diplomatic pressure, and limited force (of the kind that eventually killed Osama bin Laden and persuaded Pakistani intelligence to help in the capture of other Al Qaeda leaders). The wisdom of Howard's words has been amply demonstrated by the disastrous outcomes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Today, Howard's allocutions about the GWOT should also be placed in a wider context of U.S. foreign and security policy in the past and future: the creation of "meta-narratives," all-encompassing frameworks of thought and analysis into which a wide range of quite different issues are fitted. These narratives are focused on one supposedly monolithic, universal, and overwhelmingly powerful enemy, which it is necessary to confront everywhere. They are fed by American exceptionalist nationalism, with its conviction of America's duty to lead the world to the inevitable triumph of democracy.

This enemy is cast not only as a military and ideological adversary but a force of evil, with the United States of America representing not only freedom and democracy, but good itself. This is how most Americans understood the Cold War; and amid the rain of condemnation that is falling on President Joe Biden over Afghanistan, it is vital to remember that not just the disaster of Iraq, but that of Afghanistan too, had their origins in how the George W. Bush administration turned the pursuit of the small terrorist group actually responsible for 9/11 into a global struggle for freedom and against "evil."

In the case of Afghanistan, this led to the refusal to negotiate with the "terrorist" Taliban either before or after their initial defeat, and the U.S. commitment to democratic nation-building in one of the most inhospitable countries on Earth for such an effort. The GWOT was, however, a bipartisan delusion. A Democratic senator told me in 2002 that the United States should "turn Afghanistan into a beachhead of democracy and progress in the Muslim world." It goes without saying that her knowledge of the terrain of this beachhead was precisely nil.

Key passages of Bush's speech to Congress on September 20, 2001, read as follows:

...they [the Islamist extremists] follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism... How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command--every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war--to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.... Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime. ...[I]n our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom--the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time--now depends on us.... We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. The GWOT has failed; but failure, they say, is a better teacher than success, and if the United States can learn from this failure and how it was generated, it may be able to avoid more disasters in the future. For U.S. strategy towards China is also beginning to be portrayed in Washington, by both parties, as an apocalyptic global struggle between good and evil, with consequences that may dwarf those of the GWOT.

Every significant country in the world has its own variant...