The Cost of War
Examining the consequences of U.S. government choices in foreign conflict
On September 11th, 2001, war photographer James Nachtwey had expected a day off from work. Having just returned to New York from a trip overseas, he was still drinking his morning coffee when he witnessed his next assignment unfolding before his very eyes. Smoke and ash billowed from the North Tower as he peered through the window of his Lower Manhattan loft.
Nachtwey immediately packed up his equipment and rushed to the World Trade Center, where he would nearly lose his life documenting the deadliest terror attack in American history. He exhausted twenty-seven rolls of film, capturing the collapse of the South Tower, scenes of firefighters pulling survivors from the rubble, and soot-covered New Yorkers navigating the mangled steel remains of the buildings.
In a TED talk, Nachtwey remarked:
In the midst of the wreckage at ground zero, I had a realization. I’d been photographing in the Islamic world since 1981, not only in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, and Europe. At the time I was photographing in these different places, I thought I was covering separate stories, but on 9/11, history crystallized. And I understood I’d actually been covering a single story for more than twenty years, and the attack on New York was its latest manifestation.
Although Al-Qaeda had only been founded thirteen years prior, the Islamic extremist ideologies that motivated the terrorist organization had been on the rise for decades. The beliefs of Islamic fundamentalism — marked by a return to traditional and conservative values — combined with a fervent disdain for the United States had erupted in violence before, such as during the deadly 1979 riots at U.S. embassies in Pakistan and Iran.
Furthermore, the United States and the Soviet Union had unintentionally fueled the fire of militant Islamic extremist groups by fighting a proxy war in Afghanistan beginning in the late 1970s. The repercussions of this war would become evident on 9/11, which catapulted the United States into decades of additional conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ten years into America’s war on terror, President Obama announced that the military had finally assassinated Osama bin Laden.
Obama reflected on the assassination in his memoir A Promised Land, saying:
The public instinctively seemed to seize on bin Laden’s death as the closest we'd likely ever get to a V-Day — and at a time of economic hardship and partisan rancor, people took some satisfaction in seeing their government deliver a victory. … With these thoughts came another: was the unity effort, that sense of common purpose, only possible when the goal involved killing a terrorist?
This question of achieving national unity has resurfaced this year, especially bearing in mind that America’s foreign policy has become one of the most polarizing issues of the election — particularly the country’s involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While only a small minority of Americans say that it is one of the top issues facing the country today, it is a top issue among certain demographics including Muslim Americans, many of whom reside in swing states.
Many Muslim Americans desire concrete foreign policy changes from the next administration, such as negotiations for a ceasefire and an end to foreign aid for Israel. Polls have suggested an even split between their support for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, meaning that the recent campaigning efforts by both candidates to secure their votes could be the deciding factor in an extremely tight race.
Although the president plays a key role in determining America’s involvement in conflict as the commander-in-chief, these decisions ultimately involve thousands of people from all corners of the government, from senators in Congress to special agents in the CIA and FBI. Reflecting on America’s previous decisions in wars abroad — specifically in the Middle East — can provide an inkling as to what the future of international conflict might look like after this year’s election.
The road to 9/11
Looking at Afghanistan’s history through a geopolitical lens can help us understand how it became a hotbed for Islamic extremist groups like Al-Qaeda in the late 20th century. Sandwiched between China and Iran, control over Afghanistan had long been sought after because of its crucial role in international trade. Its pathways through rough and mountainous terrain enabled merchants to travel freely across Central Asia as far back as the days of the Silk Road.
Whoever controlled the region could grow their wealth by imposing taxes on those who passed through and could exercise heavy influence on the flow of goods, inciting fierce competition amongst rulers seeking to fortify their empires. This cycle of conflict went on for centuries and culminated in a brutal decades-long fight between Britain and Russia for control over Afghanistan during the 1800s.
At the time, Britain and Russia were both keen on expanding their territories as two of the most powerful empires in the world. Inching closer and closer together across the Middle East and Central Asia, the British approached from the south while Russia crept forward from the north. If no buffer zone was established in the middle, their inevitable meeting would likely result in a catastrophic war.
Both empires foresaw this, prompting Britain to invade Afghanistan in hopes of installing a pro-British ruler and converting the region into a buffer state — effectively putting some breathing room in between two gigantic empires who were now shoulder-to-shoulder. The Afghans revolted immediately. Years of armed conflict ensued as the British and Russians tried to capture Afghanistan as well as its surrounding territories, resulting in multiple wars, countless failed negotiations, treaties, and ultimately the death of thousands from all sides.
Dost Mohammed Khan, the ruler of Afghanistan in the early 1800s, said:
I have been struck by the magnitude of your resources, your ships, your arsenals, but what I cannot understand is why the rulers of so vast and flourishing an empire should have gone across the Indus to deprive me of my poor and barren country.
Khan’s words foreshadowed years of war throughout the late 1900s that would further devastate Afghanistan’s economy and infrastructure. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan with similar motives to the British who had invaded over a hundred years before: maintaining power and keeping western powers at bay. Unsurprisingly, the Afghans revolted.
In response, the United States funded anti-Communist Islamist insurgents known as the mujahideen to stop the Soviet Union from expanding into Afghanistan. This thirteen-year-long multibillion dollar CIA operation was code-named Operation Cyclone. At its helm during various administrations were presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Once again, Afghanistan had been reduced to a pawn in a game of geopolitical chess — but the consequences of this proxy war would be far more than any single participant could have predicted.
The toll of the war on Afghanistan was enormous. Over two million Afghan civilians died in the crossfire and many more fled the country in search of refuge. Its economy was left in tatters. An Afghan schoolgirl interviewed about her life during the Soviet-Afghan war said:
When they [Soviets] came, they killed my father and four brothers. … I turned against the Soviet invasion. I became a member of a mujahedin group … I forgot my childhood. I forgot a lot of things that a child would dream of or wish for. I became very invested in politics.
Aside from the war’s immediate aftermath, the growing threat of terrorism began to loom in the minds of operatives at American intelligence agencies. In journalist Steve Coll’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars, Coll details how the United States inadvertently armed and funded Afghan warlords and Islamic extremist insurgents, some of whom would later become members of Al-Qaeda.
Coll cites a particularly dangerous weapon that the U.S. shipped en masse to Afghanistan: Stinger missiles. These missiles were described by investigative journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele in 2003 as “the shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft weapons … used with deadly accuracy against Soviet helicopters and that are now in circulation among terrorists who have fired such weapons at commercial airliners”. Barlett and Steele go on to state: “Among the rebel recipients of U.S. arms: Osama bin Laden.”
After realizing that Stinger missiles might have fallen into the wrong hands, the U.S. spent $10 million attempting to buy them back under a program named Operation MIAS (Missing in Action Stingers). It was a losing situation no matter the outcome. If the program was successful, millions of dollars of funding would be funneled directly to Afghan warlords whether or not they harbored malicious intent towards the United States. If it wasn’t, these groups would be left with weapons capable of dealing unimaginable damage in combat.
Operation MIAS was ultimately dubbed a failure, leaving Afghan militant groups with a mix of U.S.-supplied money and weapons. On 9/11, Americans came face-to-face with a terrorist organization that had capitalized on these very foreign policy decisions. In the present day, we can observe a similar pattern of events in Israel’s handling of their adversary Hamas, which ultimately ended in disaster.
The United States, Israel, and Palestine
Much like how the United States funded Afghan warlords to prevent dangerous arms from falling into the hands of terrorists, Israel indirectly funded the terrorist organization Hamas plausibly as a strategic maneuver to weaken the Palestinian Authority and prevent the formal establishment of Palestine as a state.
As widely reported by the Times of Israel, the Haaretz, and the New York Times, a Netanyahu-led administration approved the transfer of millions of dollars in cash to the Gaza Strip via the Qatari government for years. The Gaza Strip is largely controlled by Hamas, while its political rival, the Palestinian Authority, is based in the West Bank. To quote Times of Israel correspondent Tal Schneider:
The various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group. The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
This tactic of gaining an advantage by deepening the wedge between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority was articulated in 2015 by far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who described Hamas as an “asset” and the Palestinian Authority as a “burden”. The official reason provided by Netanyahu for these cash infusions was to “return calm to (Israeli) villages of the south, but also to prevent a humanitarian disaster (in Gaza)”.
However, Israel has frequently blocked humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. According to the U.N., almost all aid was blocked in the first two weeks of October, leaving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians without sufficient food, water, and other resources. Israeli government officials have also openly admitted the failure of this policy. Naftali Bennett, former prime minister of Israel, said:
I stopped the cash suitcases because I believe that horrendous mistake — to allow Hamas to have all these suitcases full of cash, that goes directly to reordering themselves against Israelis. Why would we feed them cash to kill us?
This policy of allowing money into the Gaza Strip has done more harm than good for both Israelis and Palestinians, as it represents the antithesis of Netanyahu’s stated goal of eliminating Hamas. Instead, it likely further enabled Hamas to execute deadly terror attacks against Israel as it did on October 7th of last year. Depending on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, policies like these could either receive more pressure or implicit validation from the American government. In 2014, the U.S. remained neutral when the idea for these cash payments was first originated, which indirectly allowed conflict between Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority to worsen.
The differences in foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine are not immediately obvious when considering a future Trump or Harris administration. While Trump proposed a peace plan for the region in 2020, it appeased Israeli leaders and angered Palestinians due to its favoring of Israel on key issues, such as the designation of Jerusalem’s borders and the legal status of Jewish settlements. His act of moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem also drew outrage from Palestinians.
On the other hand, Harris served as vice president in an administration that has repeatedly approved the sales of billions of dollars of arms to Israel. However, her Jewish outreach director Ilan Goldberg has criticized Netanyahu and was previously a part of the 2013-14 Israeli-Palestinian peace talks during the Obama administration — perhaps indicative of a shift in Harris’s administration towards vying for a peaceful resolution. In a prescient 2018 essay, Goldberg wrote:
With every crisis, the humanitarian situation in Gaza worsens. There will come a moment when basic order collapses altogether, or Israel is forced to invade and retake Gaza. The only way to avoid this terrible outcome in the long-term is a sustainable political arrangement that should include both a long-term ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that includes major economic opening of Gaza combined with a Palestinian reconciliation deal between Fatah and Hamas that slowly brings the Palestinian Authority back into Gaza.
Six years later, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has worsened to a state that many scholars describe as a genocide committed by Israel. Although proposed peace deals have historically had a poor track record, the alternative option of engaging in relentless warfare has destroyed the lives of countless Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Time and time again, we have seen how war slowly but surely exacts its toll on its combatants. Its consequences can be messy, far-reaching, and surprising, even to those who have the direct power to allocate federal funding for war or send thousands of troops into battle. These are the considerations that world leaders have to make, but they are also issues that should be present in the minds of those who vote them into office. In the words of James Nachtwey:
I think that there are things worth fighting for in this life. But I think we should also be aware where war leads: what are the inevitable consequences of war in human terms? … And we must think deeply upon it before ever committing people to fight a war.
View our sources for this piece here.