Reflections on the anniversary of 9/11

The 9/11 anniversary is a traditional time for taking stock of the war on terror, and the conventional wisdom has issued its verdict: the United States "over-reacted." The evidence the pundits offer includes the following: (a) the United States spent a great deal of money; (b) thousands of U.S. soldiers lost their lives; (c) the anti-terror bureaucracy is much larger than it was before; (d) policy favored the national security end of the long-standing continuum running from unfettered civil-liberties to absolute national security; and (e) al Qaeda has not launched another successful 9/11 sized attack on U.S. soil. Indeed, Osama Bin Laden is on the run and has become a marginalized figure.

The conventional wisdom would be more persuasive if the pundits engaged systematically and critically with the hypothesis that (a) plus (b) plus (c) plus (d) contributed to (e). As far as I can tell, they simply ignore that possibility.

However, the conventional wisdom does get one thing right: With a national security challenge of the magnitude posed by the 9/11 attacks, it is likely that U.S. strategists got some things wrong (and some things right… that part seems to have eluded the pundits). Strategy has an unavoidable trial-and-error element to it, and anniversaries are good moments for stock-taking.

I won’t pretend to offer a complete list, but here are two I would flag in each column.

Two things we got wrong in the weeks immediately following 9/11:

• Mismatching goals and capabilities of U.S. ground forces. The Bush administration entered office with a clear national security vision of transforming the military. There were a number of elements to this: redressing a decade of drift on weapons procurement and readiness; investing in generation-skipping technologies to extend America’s military advantage into the out-years; reforming wasteful Pentagon practices; creating a more agile and lethal force; and downsizing the extremely expensive ground forces (expensive not only because of up-front operational costs but even more because of downstream personnel costs). This transformation agenda was premised on the notion that we were in a period of strategic pause — we would not need to deploy the military in combat in the near future, certainly not for a lengthy ground combat operation, so we could afford to take some near-term risk to invest in long-term improvements. After 9/11, that premise was less plausible, though the Afghanistan operation arguably was sustainable under the old assumptions. Iraq clearly was not. The error was a strategy gap combining a decision to confront Iraq with a decision not to expand the size of the ground forces. By the time the administration had closed this gap in 2007, the strains to the All-Volunteer Force were acute.
• Missing the opportunity to "nationalize the burden" through some sort of broad-based measure like a gas tax. I understand why the administration was leery about raising taxes. They had inherited an economy heading into a recession and the psychological shock of the 9/11 attacks threatened to impose severe economic pain out of proportion to the actual physical damage of the attacks. The president’s call for the public to resume normal economic activity was sound (but could have been worded more carefully so as to avoid the tendentious parodies that followed it). A gas tax would have had some economic downsides, but in retrospect probably not as great as was feared at the time. It would also, however, have brought some symbolic upsides, making clear that every American was paying for the security we valued. Ever since, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have struggled against the perception that the burdens of the war are disproportionately born by a few Americans. Some of this is inevitable with an All-Volunteer Army. But the failure to find a persuasive rebuttal to that perception has been unfortunate and, in retrospect, avoidable.

Two things we got right in the weeks immediately following 9/11:

• Recognition that confronting Bin Laden would require all elements of national power. The Bush administration arrived in office believing that the Clinton approach to terrorism in general and to Bin Laden in particular was unstrategic and artificially truncated. But they were slow to act on this insight until the 9/11 attacks. After that, they showed extraordinary resourcefulness in tapping all of government, not just law enforcement and the military. The conventional critique from "anti-militarists" that the Bush administration only used military power is self-evidently wrong. Instead, there were remarkable innovations in law enforcement techniques, intelligence operations, diplomatic initiatives, and soft-power campaigns. Not all of these new measures proved effective, but it seems clear that none of them would have worked at all if they were complemented only with a few salvos of stand-off airstrikes — the only military tool Bin Laden saw the United States use against him since he launched his war in the 1990s. The decision to utilize a robust military effort with other instruments of statecraft put al Qaeda on the run and, pace the conventional wisdom pundits, is probably why al Qaeda poses less of a threat today than it did when we confronted them in the aftermath of 9/11.
• Determination to confront the ideological roots of al Qaeda terrorism without falling into a religious war. The events of the past month stand in sharp contrast to the months immediately following the 9/11 attacks. It is ironic that our society has had a tougher time dealing with the religious issue almost a decade later than we had dealing with it when the passions and wounds were so fresh. The handling of this issue by the Bush administration looks rather deft in retrospect and in comparison with recent events. And, of course, the American people deserve enormous credit. Critics say that Americans should be held to a higher standard than other societies, where persecution of  religious minorities is rife and where attempts to stir up religious violence are often successful. We met that higher standard after 9/11 and political leaders on both sides of the aisle deserve some credit.  

In sum, the record is mixed, but hardly as negative as the conventional wisdom paints.