Ali Abbas/AP Photo
Then-Sen. Joe Biden visiting U.S. officials in the green zone of Baghdad, July 2006
From all appearances, President Biden is making good on his campaign promise to “end the forever wars.” He’s removing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, there’s been a reported decrease in U.S. drone strikes, and the president and Iraqi prime minister announced this week that the U.S. combat mission will end in Iraq by the end of the year.
The president deserves credit for finally ending the United States’ two-decade military occupation of Afghanistan—and for standing by that decision in the face of inevitable backlash from the pro-war Washington foreign-policy establishment. But all of these actions don’t yet appear to reveal a true pivot toward ending this country’s global “counterterrorism” wars.
Unfortunately, recent military action in Somalia, tit-for-tat airstrikes between U.S. forces and anti-U.S. nonstate armed groups in Syria, and reports about [non]changes in the U.S. presence in Iraq and Syria all indicate not an end to endless war, but the export of these conflicts to foreign security partners through opaque train-and-equip military assistance and air support. Even the Pentagon’s over-the-horizon strategy in Afghanistan makes clear that more U.S. drone strikes are in that country’s future, with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin describing the strategy as continuing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and “combat aircraft missions.”
For now, the Biden team appears to have defined a commitment to ending endless war as primarily removing U.S. combat troops from certain countries, but not all, while holding onto the rest of the counterterrorism war architecture and military strategy. Sadly, it’s a prescription for potentially more U.S.-supported conflicts and human rights violations, just further removed from the public’s consciousness. The Biden administration is merely adapting, not abolishing, the United States’ post-9/11 wars.
AS THE U.S. GLOBAL military footprint grew following 9/11, most public attention was on U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But as targeted groups and individuals moved across borders, these wars expanded far beyond what the law permitted through dubious legal opinions and secretive Special Operations raids and remote drone warfare.
Advising foreign militaries to wage their own wars is not an alternative to endless war.
But there’s a lesser-known way the U.S. government expanded its endless war footprint abroad. In the name of counterinsurgency strategy, the United States expanded its use of security cooperation and assistance to train and equip, advise, and accompany foreign militaries.
When the president and defense officials refer to the 2,500 troops currently stationed in Iraq staying in an “advisory” role, it most likely means that U.S. forces will be engaged in these security cooperation and assistance activities (provided primarily under what are referred to as Title 10 and Title 50 authorities that basically allow the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, respectively, to fund, train, and equip foreign militaries). Compared to the large-scale invasion, occupation, and bombing of Iraq, this may seem like a clear shift in policy and remove U.S. and Iraqi troops from harm’s way. In actuality, however, this “advisory” role is one that U.S. officials have said U.S. troops in Iraq have been playing since at least 2019. Moreover, while this week’s high-level agreement may be new, the decision to formally end the combat mission already occurred in the U.S.-Iraq April 2021 Strategic Dialogue statement.
Moreover, it’s important to consider the track record of these counterterrorism programs the U.S. is pivoting toward as the solution to endless war. It was a train-and-equip authority that was the initial basis for the U.S. troop presence in Niger in 2017, when four service members were killed while they were accompanying partner military forces. These authorities, in part, undergird continued U.S. counterterrorism cooperation and assistance to the abusive Duterte government in the Philippines. These are the likely authorities that the U.S. military relied on to train Colombian military members who assassinated the president of Haiti earlier this month, and to train multiple coup d’etat leaders in Mali and Egypt. And the American Green Berets helping to identify and destroy Houthi targets in Yemen with the Saudi military were ostensibly operating under a train-and-equip mission. The evidence indicates these programs make the U.S. more involved and complicit in state violence, armed conflict, and human rights abuses, not less.
Gerry Broome/AP Photo
Then-Vice President Biden, alongside Gen. Lloyd Austin, welcoming home troops from Iraq at Fort Bragg, April 2009
Increasing U.S. reliance on these authorities also threatens to entangle U.S. troops in conflicts the American public has no knowledge of, reinforcing the power of the imperial presidency and limiting opportunities for accountability. Advising foreign militaries to wage their own wars is not an alternative to endless war; it is part and parcel of the endless war framework that has kept the United States in a constant state of perpetual, preventative war for the last two decades.
WHILE THE U.S. MISSION IN IRAQ is changing on paper, unnamed Pentagon and administration officials also affirmed this week that there will be no change to the U.S. presence in eastern Syria, where the U.S. has been advising, training, and assisting the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) since 2015. U.S. troops will remain in Syria to ostensibly continue this mission, with the second-order desire to prevent Russia and the Syrian government from reclaiming Syria’s oil and gas reserves, and limiting Iran’s influence in Iraq, according to reports. Besides the fact that occupying parts of Syria violates both domestic and international law, and that Congress has authorized none of these activities, leaving small contingents of U.S. troops to advise and assist foreign forces, in the vicinity of multiple violent conflicts, skirmishes, escalations, and sleepwalking into more war.
Those willing to give up their lives in service of their country deserve better than being left in endless wars as political pawns for defense and fossil fuel interests.
In such situations, the overriding priority of the U.S. military will be “force protection”—taking preventative measures to mitigate the impact of potential “hostile actions”—and understandably so. Indeed, President Biden claimed his constitutional Article II authority allowed him to launch two rounds of airstrikes against groups on the Syria-Iraq border having nothing to do with the purported reasons (ISIS) for the U.S. military presence in the area. Biden cited self-defense, and U.S. troops were ostensibly in the area to advise and train Iraqi troops. As far as the public can tell, targeted U.S. troops were not out on patrol or engaged in active combat. The U.S. presence was advisory, if we are to believe previous defense official comments. That seems to be exactly what the president says the new mission in Iraq will be.
The reality is that so long as U.S. troops remain present in Iraq and Syria, attacks on U.S. personnel are likely to continue, as are U.S. airstrikes in self-defense.
And yet, for years, repeated Iraqi and Iran-linked militia rocket fire has targeted Iraqi military installations housing U.S. troops. The U.S. presence itself continues to risk escalating cycles of violence in these countries for questionable military goals and with no public debate. Continuing business as usual does little to address Iraqi sentiment that the United States military should leave, or to address the underlying reasons for these attacks—retaliation for the U.S. assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and opposition to the U.S. military presence in Iraq.
The reality is that so long as U.S. troops remain present in Iraq and Syria, attacks on U.S. personnel are likely to continue, as are U.S. airstrikes in self-defense. That’s not ending endless war; that’s justifying leaving troops in harm’s way in order to help others fight wars.
THE BUSH, OBAMA, AND TRUMP administrations expanded the war in Afghanistan to anyone they determined to be a so-called “associated” force of the perpetrators of 9/11. Never mind that this legal concept is a term of art invented by the executive branch to justify more military action, this concept soon allowed the post-9/11 wars to cover groups and places never considered by Congress and which, in many cases, didn’t even exist at the time of or have anything to do with 9/11.
Al Shabab, an Islamic, anti-government Somali armed group that emerged as part of the country’s multi-decade civil war, is a case in point. In the name of supporting a weak central government and international shipping lanes, the U.S. has justified using the group’s abuses and religious ideology to conduct seemingly indiscriminate drone strikes that have devastated families, and undermine the legitimacy of the central government—the ostensible goal of the U.S.-supported, international peacekeeping mission in Somalia. And it wasn’t even until 2012 that Al Shabab formally pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda.
Trump’s removal of U.S. combat troops from Somalia in December 2020 did not end U.S. involvement there. Despite the reported pause in U.S. drone strikes in the country, the Pentagon launched airstrikes against Al Shabab in Somalia two weeks ago, which the military claimed fell under the doctrine of “collective self-defense.” A Pentagon spokesperson stated, “U.S. forces are authorized to conduct strikes in support of combatant commander designated partner forces under collective self-defense.”
Does that mean that a military commander—without the president’s sign-off—can launch airstrikes against any enemy to protect a foreign military partner? It’s another dangerous outcome of multiple administrations’ legal gymnastics to give the military even more unilateral power to expand the United States’ endless wars.
This broad power risks allowing the Pentagon to unilaterally expand U.S. wars without even the commander in chief’s say-so.
While this may not be new, it is dangerous. It appears to essentially mean that so long as U.S. regional military commanders (unelected military officials) designate a foreign security force a partner, the U.S. military has a legal right and duty to protect these forces if they come under attack. Despite dogged oversight by members of Congress like Sens. Tim Kaine, Chris Murphy, Bernie Sanders, and Mike Lee, it remains unclear whether there is a formal department-wide or interagency process or requirements for a group to receive this designation. Regardless, this broad power risks allowing the Pentagon to unilaterally expand U.S. wars without even the commander in chief’s say-so.
AS THE “END ENDLESS WAR” TAGLINE has grown in popularity, its moniker has been claimed by policymakers with all kinds of views of how we should resolve, and in most cases continue, the past two decades of global conflict.
The fact that the president wants to replace the 2001 authorization for the use of military force that launched the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan with another, albeit more limited, war authorization only reinforces that we won’t see an end to endless war, but merely an adaptation and legal tinkering with endless war. With the advent of remote and potentially autonomous warfare, and dubious legal opinions within the executive branch about what kind of war requires congressional consent, these wars will only fall further from public view and become more difficult to rein in.
The Biden administration and Congress alike have failed to understand the risks and lessons of advising foreign militaries as means of winning wars. Rather than dismantling current counterterrorism train-and-equip authorities in recognition that they do not work, Congress has duplicated and the Pentagon eagerly accepted a new similar authority to arm foreign forces, but this time for “great-power competition.” Rather than ending endless war, it appears the Biden administration is heading for a Cold War redux.
