American Counterterrorism: The Stronger the Opposition, the Stronger the Response?

September 11 happened 13 years ago today, completely changing the American concept of security and making the war on terror America’s top priority. With strong public support, the Bush administration defined a counterterrorism strategy that used the military to drive out and overthrow the Taliban, only to find out later that Saddam Hussein’s regime had no affiliation with al-Qaida. While the United States succeeded in crippling the source of al-Qaida’s 9/11 attacks, it was unable to extricate itself from the post-war reconstruction quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama’s criticism of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism strategy won him the presidential election. Henceforth, his rise to power focused on enacting policies to completely withdraw U.S. armed forces from Iraq starting in 2011, and from Afghanistan by 2014. The Obama administration originally hoped that withdrawing troops from the Middle East would ease the domestic political and economic predicament.

The Islamic State beheaded two American reporters last month in appalling videos and took control of a majority of the region, including the eastern part of Syria and the northern part of Iraq, which is forcing the Obama administration to reconsider its counterterrorism strategy in the Middle East. The return of U.S. armed forces to Iraq essentially throws Obama’s five-year effort to withdrawal U.S. troops from the region down the drain, paying no heed to America’s 10-year presence in the Middle East and the complete failure of U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the region. Obama is sitting on the fence, caught in a difficult dilemma. To demonstrate a renewed resolve to fight terrorism and prevent domestic criticism, the Obama administration declared a “proxy war” through the creation of three key initiatives intended to block the Islamic State’s tactics: carrying out air raids to cripple their power, backing Iraqi and Kurd troops to encircle and annihilate them, and supporting the Syrian opposition in getting rid of the Islamic State within Syria’s borders. However, don’t America’s initiatives to defeat the Islamic State have the clear-cut characteristics of extreme terrorism in and of themselves?

In fact, as if to reopen Pandora’s box, the United States is likely to re-enter the fight against terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa as if enchanted by a spell: U.S. armed forces will overthrow or cripple anti-American powers, only to have even more anti-American factions emerge soon after. After Saddam Hussein was overthrown, various extremist groups, including the Islamic State, treated Iraq as a haven to recharge their batteries; after the fall of the Gadhafi regime, a variety of anti-American extremist forces emerged in North Africa; and after Assad was weakened, entrenching Syria in a civil war, the Islamic State overtook a large area of the eastern part of the country. American efforts to counter terrorism in the Middle East are genuine, but always result in more chaos in the region. The Obama administration’s desire to finally break the curse in the Middle East and defeat the Islamic State is worth a further look.

Most importantly, it will take time to put all three stages of the strategy into place, as he will run into numerous domestic political, economic and social issues, making the outlook for the plan’s successful implementation during the remaining two years of his term not very optimistic. If Obama is unable to completely eradicate the Islamic State during his term, then there is a high degree of uncertainty whether it will be possible for the next president to continue to carry out these policies. If Obama focuses all of his international security strategy from here on out on coming up with a response to the Islamic State, then his repeated advertisement of the importance of engineering diplomacy and rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific is likely to be reduced to nothing, eventually becoming a mockery. Regardless of how he handles it, he is bound to leave his successor with a mess.

Over the past five years, the Obama administration’s international security strategy has been defined by the following characteristics: a clumsy display of “soft power” at the diplomatic level and the withdrawal of U.S. armed forces at the military level. The Obama administration never anticipated the challenge brought about by the Islamic State, and the necessity to deploy the use of military force on a large scale, which is why Obama remarked, “We don’t have a strategy yet to combat ISIS” in an interview last month. Constrained by domestic pressure, the Obama administration may be planning future air raids as a means of restoring military presence in Iraq and Syria, reviving strong criticism of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies in the Middle East. Of course, the Obama administration insists the military will not become involved in fighting a war on the ground, but this is just a far-fetched excuse to justify his decision to withdraw U.S. armed forces from the region. However, with such reluctance to involve the U.S. military, how will he manage to defeat the Islamic State?

It must be said that the Obama administration’s vow to build a global coalition against the Islamic State is a solid resolution, but whether or not it will actually succeed in defeating the Islamic State’s tactics remains to be seen. What is more clear is that in response to the Middle East’s extreme anti-American acts of terrorism, America is likely to return to the use of large-scale military force, but this time spread even more unchecked.