Making Sense of the United States' Twenty-First-Century Wars and Their Consequences
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On December 18, 2017, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy. Although early media coverage focused on its attention to Russia, China, and North Korea, the document was also notable for its discussion of the ongoing war in Afghanistan—at seventeen years, the nation's longest—and the legacy of the United States war in Iraq. "We crushed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorists on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq," the document proclaimed, "and will continue pursuing them until they are destroyed," before explaining that "Even after the territorial defeat of ISIS and al-Qa'ida in Syria and Iraq, the threat from jihadist terrorists will persist."1 The document also announced that "[w]e will continue to partner with Afghanistan to promote peace and security in the region" and that "engagement in Afghanistan seeks to prevent the reemergence of terrorist safe havens."2
While the accuracy of the first set of claims and the wisdom of the second deserve debate, these statements reveal how deeply the United States remains engaged in the Middle East and Central Asia. Although there has been no shortage of reportage and scholarship on this nearly two-decade-long entanglement, it nonetheless presents two significant problems for historians. One problem is archival: documents have not been accessioned and made available for research, and so historians must build arguments by mining published sources and publicly available government documents, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, and conducting oral histories. This challenge may be more pernicious than the other problem: the lack of historical perspective and the provisional nature of any conclusions inherent in writing about the present. Any history of ISIS or the Afghanistan War must reckon with the [End Page 465] reality that the outcome of these conflicts lies in the future. Nonetheless, the project of telling their stories remains crucial, as both resolving these conflicts and contemplating potential new ones demands that the consideration of why the United States' twenty-first-century interventions occurred and why they have had such disastrous consequences.
Recent works by Brian Glyn Williams and Fawaz A. Gerges, both scholars with impressive resumes of work on these conflicts, mark two of the latest attempts to explain these conflicts and their consequences. In Counter Jihad: America's Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, Williams provides a sweeping overview, arguing that the rush to war that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks allowed neo-conservative policymakers to begin a disastrous war in Iraq that contributed to the rise of the Islamic State while diverting resources away from the conflict in Afghanistan, resulting, a decade and a half later, in two conflicts that seem disappointingly intractable. Where Williams aims for breadth, Gerges aims for depth, providing a detailed account of the emergence, ideology, and appeal of ISIS. Like Williams, he views ISIS as a outgrowth of the disastrous US intervention in Iraq, but places that organization's rise in a larger context that recognizes the failures of democracy in the Middle East, a problem that demands a political—rather than purely military—solution to the continuing threat of ISIS and similar jihadist groups. Though both books are imperfect, they mark important and accessible contributions to this debate. Reading them, scholars, students, and interested generalists will be forced to confront both the failures of the past two decades of U.S. foreign policy and the challenges of the coming years.
Williams's goal is to "shine a retrospective light on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria in order" and create "one accessible narrative that tells us how we got to the point where ISIS conquered" such a significant swath of territory (p. xii). "Accessible" is the key word in his description of his project. That Williams is writing for a non-specialist, and indeed non-academic, audience...
