By Trenton Smith Posted December 10, 2011
Since September 11, 2001, the United States, United Kingdom, and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and even non-NATO countries have been fighting known terrorist organizations and regimes believed to aid terrorist groups.
The war has been 10 long years. This war has spanned most of North Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and even parts of Pakistan. Former U.S. President George W. Bush and other high-ranking U.S. officials first used the term “War on Terror” to define the global military, political, legal, and ideological struggle against organizations known to have terrorist affiliations.
The George W. Bush Administration laid down some objectives for the US military to achieve before the end of the war. These are my personal opinion on which ones are done and/or can’t be done:
Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi both have been killed but their organizations are still going strong. You can never find AND destroy ALL the terrorists in the world. As a leader of the U.S., you must know that there will ALWAYS be a country (or two, or three…) that hate us and are willing to support a terrorist group (or two, or three…) every once in a while to attack us. And unless we can get Russia, China, and India or other countries with armies like them, we can never achieve.
And if we are supposed to have “enabled [ALL the] weak states,” which is one of the objectives that was set, why are countries like Somalia, who has been under the control of 12 different rival clans and sub-clans since September of 1991, still in short supply of a government? Terrorists are sneaky and skilled, so they will always be able to find a way to get weapons to their forces everywhere. And terrorists are using Muslim mosques and other religious sites in Iraq (and Afghanistan, probably) to hide because U.S. troops are not allowed to enter religious sites in other countries (even though we used to use the Iraqi version of the Vietnam Memorial to sleep at and hang out). Therefore, the U.S. government wants our troops to train the Iraqi and Afghan troops to do it themselves. No wonder they still hide in places like that; they have almost nothing to fear from quickly trained and inexperienced security forces…
One of the objectives said that the US has to re-establish the governments of countries that were previously controlled by known terrorist groups (like Afghanistan being ruled by the Taliban from 1996 to 2001) and keeping them out. That’s obviously not achieved yet, because the Taliban are still operating in Afghanistan. They never really left Afghanistan. You can’t prevent something from coming back if it never technically left. I may know what the “war of ideals” (another objective) is…it may mean trying to keep people from becoming terrorists. If so, then again, it can never be achieved. There will always be a reason for people to do stuff like that. There will always be evil in the world.
Attain domain awareness (5b) means to know about what’s going on in our world. That can never be achieved because crime and terrorism will always be able to maintain secrecy. 5e means to make sure we are always ready for another terrorist attack like 9/11. That can never be achieved because we won’t ever know every single attack that comes our way (5b) and be prepared for every single attack that comes our way (5e).
My personal opinion on the war is that we have already gone in and screwed up things in Iraq enough. Thank god we have started pulling out now. Iraq is and probably always be a lost cause. In Afghanistan, we’ve actually made some progress. They have a government that isn’t the Taliban or some other terrorist group. Overall: We have killed Osama bin Laden. That was the point of the war for the United States. To kill him, get revenge for the 9/11 attacks, and annihilate a few terrorists and their organizations along the way. We have killed bin Laden, gotten revenge, and crippled at least two terrorist groups. We’re done. Why haven’t we pulled out yet?
