The 'Forever War' Pattern: From Afghanistan to the Iran Conflict

It’s five years this month since the chaotic retreat of US forces from Kabul. The Nato-backed invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, launched after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC, is now widely regarded as a failure. It cost the lives of more than 2,400 US and 450 British troops, and tens of thousands of civilians (the exact number is unknown). Although al-Qaida terrorists were routed, their Taliban hosts reimposed repressive, misogynistic Islamist rule after regaining power in 2021. Afghanistan became a byword for ill-considered western interventionism and nation-building. It was the archetypal “forever war”, a phrase first coined during Vietnam.

If this cautionary tale had any lasting value, it was as a deterrent to politicians and generals tempted to rashly embark on open-ended conflicts without just cause, defined, achievable aims, and an exit strategy. Dismayingly, the forever war lesson had to be learned all over again in Iraq, which the US and UK invaded in 2003 and departed, having caused huge harm for scant benefit, in 2011. “Never again!” was the passionate cry at the time and since. And yet, it seems, the same disastrous pattern is now repeating after Donald Trump’s incomprehensibly foolish decision to attack Iran. A war he termed a “little excursion” is entering its sixth month and has been escalating rapidly. It, too, has a forever feel.

That this nightmare is happening again defies all reason. How can it be? Immediate causes of the war aside, answers may be found in persistent US exaggerations and misconceptions about the level and extent of external threats, mixed up with political dishonesty, national hubris, naivety and misplaced idealism. Recalling the harrowing US experience in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian, a National War College professor who served as a civilian adviser to US forces in Helmand and Kabul, suggests the basic premise for keeping troops in Afghanistan for 20 years – a belief the country would otherwise revert to being a safe haven for international terrorism – was fatally flawed.

“Nothing of the sort occurred. Over the past five years, not a single act of terrorism against the US was carried out by a group based in Afghanistan,” Malkasian wrote. “Washington spent roughly $1tn on the war. More than 775,000 American service members were deployed … all to defend against a threat that turned out to have been exaggerated.

“Five years on, the greatest danger is not that a terrorist safe haven might once again emerge in Afghanistan. A graver threat comes from the risk of collective forgetting.” In short, “fears of the moment” should not cloud memories of the dreadful long-term costs – human, financial, geopolitical – of endless forever war.

If the Afghan war was prosecuted on the basis of a false assumption, so much more so was the invasion of oil-rich Iraq. George W Bush’s claim in 2002 that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed stockpiles of readily usable chemical and biological weapons and was seeking a nuclear bomb proved untrue. Untrue, too, was the claim from the then vice-president, Dick Cheney, that Iraq “aids and protects” al-Qaida. The subsequent occupation and insurgency became part of an even larger forever war – Bush’s “global war on terror”. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, an estimated 940,000 people were killed in direct post-9/11 violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan between 2001 and 2023. Up to 3.8 million died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones.

It’s easy to second-guess decisions about war and peace taken under the pressure of horrific events. The disingenuous pursuit of political, military and commercial agendas, and the manipulation of intelligence and public opinion, is harder to excuse. Yet was any war ever launched without ulterior motives? The much-discussed new film of Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey, concerns the aftermath of the 10-year-long Trojan war, which was ostensibly triggered by the abduction of the beautiful Helen of Sparta. Yet, prosaically, the war may have been more about fair trade than a fair maiden. The US maintained it fought the Vietnam war to support democracy and halt the spread of communism – the discredited “domino theory”. But it was also very much about US exceptionalism and global hegemony. In that sense, little has changed.

What else makes American politicians risk costly entanglements in foreign wars they can’t control and usually lose? Insecurity – meaning fear – is a common denominator. Like Bush before him, Trump and Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, have greatly and knowingly exaggerated the immediacy and existential nature of the Iranian threat. Like Iraq in 2003, Iran possesses no nuclear weapons and there is zero firm evidence it is trying, or has recently tried, to acquire them. There is a recurring paradox here: it’s the spectacle of the world’s most powerful country once again fearfully tilting at shadows.

Trump’s overbearing hostility to weaker neighbours such as Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Panama and Greenland has a forever aspect, too. It is rooted in the foundational myth that the US has a unique mission – and right – to oversee the western hemisphere, a view it later extended to the rest of the world. Likewise, greed is forever. Abandoning altruistic ideas of democracy promotion, Trump seeks to exercise economic as well as geopolitical dominance. He has tried to monetise the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. His focus on the strait of Hormuz shows how security policy and financial and commercial interests invariably intersect.

Lack of effective UN mediation and peacekeeping, the hollowing out of US diplomacy, which has accelerated under Trump’s lickspittle secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and a stubborn refusal to accept the militarily inevitable all play a role in turning US-led conflicts into intractable quagmires. In Trump’s case, ego is also a factor. It seems he would rather kill thousands more civilians, risk committing war crimes, set the Middle East ablaze and destroy Republicans’ electoral chances than admit he was wrong over Iran. Such extreme behaviour illuminates another pernicious aspect of the forever war phenomenon. Its utter pointlessness is fundamentally immoral. In its sheer un-reason, it offends against the laws of God and man. War without end is the death of hope.

As he frantically twists and turns over Iran, it’s plain that Trump perceives the bottomless pit on the edge of which, thanks to him, the US totters – and has no idea how to avoid it. One day, he talks about talks. The next, he hits out with massive, murderous violence. Careless of their people’s suffering, implacable Iranian hardliners relish his dilemma and turn the screw, mounting widening regional militia attacks and global economy-spooking drone and missile strikes. Lost in a maze of denial, Trump tries in vain to bomb his way out of trouble while desperate for a deal that can somehow be sold as a victory.

Neither option is going to work. This abysmal Iranian catastrophe is already defining Trump’s presidency. The bloody stain, the blame and the shame, if not the war, will last forever.