Has Anyone Told the Terrorists That the War on Terror is Over?

I don’t know about you, but I’m relieved that the War on Terror is finally over.  All those travel restrictions, security shakedowns, toothpaste confiscations and coded-color warnings.  And the nerve-wracking hesitations about getting too close to iconic landmarks: Statue of Liberty, Washington Monument, Sears (now Willis) Tower, and the Space Needle.

We can now concentrate on more immediate survivalist concerns, like distinguishing between an N95 and KN95 mask.  Yes, the CDC, the Biden administration and local authorities are still introducing mixed-messaging about mask-wearing and viral loads, but at least super-spreaders aren’t wearing suicide vests.

Not yet anyway.

Until just the past few days, it was possible to delude oneself into forgetting why the United States invaded Afghanistan.  The country was a haven for al-Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for 9/11, and the Taliban was its faithful Islamic terrorists in arms.

The United States began to withdraw from Afghanistan in early July.  Almost immediately, the Taliban mounted a blistering campaign to recapture control over the country.  Within the past few weeks alone, the Taliban has retaken multiple cities. As I write this, it is encircling the capital of Kabul. It had already secured the vast expanse of rural districts throughout the country.  Afghanistan’s security forces, despite all that American training, are woefully overmatched.

We come upon the 20^th anniversary of 9/11 with these worsening conditions requiring U.S. troops to double back to evacuate its embassy and remaining civilians. It’s worth remembering that while arguably forgotten, the War on Terror never concluded with a declared winner.  Global terror outfits did not suddenly empty their backpacks—scattering nails, ball-bearings and detonation devices—and fill them with books.  The United States never set the terms for surrender because it was a war without end.  We simply allowed complacency to reshuffle our priorities.

Much has happened in the intervening two decades since jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center causing two skyscrapers to fall from the sky.  Over the next several years other foreign cities became targets: Madrid, Glasgow, London, Bali, Paris, Brussels, Nice, and Copenhagen. For many, the Boston Marathon Bombing was just a one-off secondary attack never to repeat itself.  We let down of our guard, on Patriot’s Day, of all days.

Meanwhile, America’s attention gravitated to other problems, each terrifying in their own right: a financial crisis in 2008; the Iran nuclear threat and Nuclear Deal in 2015; a pandemic and two Senate Impeachment trials in 2020; a border crisis to our south, right now.  The news cycles of each day never failed to disappoint in their variety and commotion.  Terrorism began to feel like a faraway bad dream, more trivia question than immediate peril.

But the actual terrorists had their own dreams, all culminating in caliphates.  They think in terms of centuries, not news cycles.  While we drifted, they remained wide awake.  How else to explain the speed with which the Taliban reconquered the country and freed 5,000 al-Qaeda operatives from prison?

Terrorists think in terms of centuries, not news cycles.  While we drifted, they remained wide awake.  How else to explain the speed with which the Taliban reconquered the country and freed 5,000 al-Qaeda operatives from prison?

Meanwhile, while our sworn enemies joyously rearm, we’re fighting over pronoun usage, bathroom protocols, signature verification on election ballots, mask-wearing and whether our democratic ally, Israel, is really an Apartheid state.  President Biden has repeatedly stated that the biggest crisis America faces today is white supremacy.

Seriously?  Where are these white supremacist factions taking control of American cities like the Taliban has already done in Afghanistan?

The United States withdrew from Afghanistan under cover of night without leaving a note or forwarding address. All that wasted blood and treasure, and the weaponry we left behind for Afghan security forces, which barely fired a shot before handing all that hardware over to terrorists who will undoubtedly deploy it against us.  And, of course, our humiliation in negotiating a “peaceful transfer of power” only to be reminded, as if further reminders were necessary, that terrorists are not statesmen.  The Taliban, like its sadistic fellow travelers, are not dealmakers acting in good faith and following the rules of diplomacy. They are theocratic thugs.

The Taliban, like its sadistic fellow travelers, are not dealmakers acting in good faith and following the rules of diplomacy.  They are theocratic thugs.

President Biden’s foreign policy experts, not unlike the Obama administration, love to imagine terrorists as statesmen.  Just speak to them as if they are fellow Ivy League academics in the faculty lounge.  President Obama had such faith in his charisma and Iran’s intentions.  I am quite certain that the Taliban tittered with laughter while the Biden administration tweeted its diplomatic achievement.

The consequences of this faulty thinking, and the revival of global terror, is grave.  Afghanistan will once again return to the Stone Age—and I am not talking about its mountainous terrain.  Strict Islamist adherence to Sharia law means that women will stop learning how to read– but who can concentrate on literacy when beheadings and stoning can happen at any moment?  And God help any homosexual or Christian who happens to be out and about in Kabul.

American feminists, for some reason, never seem to care about their Muslim sisters.  The LGBTQ community ignores the gruesome sight of gays being torched and thrown from rooftops or hung from cranes.  Even PETA looks the other way.  In Lawrence Wright’s, “The Looming Tower,” he conveyed a chilling anecdote about the Taliban killing all the animals in the Kabul Zoo, except for a lion, who one barbarian blinded with a grenade, and a bear whose nose he had cut off.

The Taliban follows the same Islamist playbook as al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Boko Haram. We may have forgotten them, but they remained fixated on us.  They were merely taking a timeout, hiding in plain sight. Now they will all feel emboldened by the Taliban’s bold return to its theocratic home turf.  And, Iran, the chief sponsor of these practitioners of terrorism, is readying itself to sucker the Biden administration into yet another one-sided nuclear fiasco that will endanger the United States and Israel.

As a new generation of terror masterminds plan unimagined mischief of the murderous kind, it’s not clear whether the United States is prepared.  Are we even tracking them anymore?  We faltered once, and that fateful mistake ended horribly for runners and spectators at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

Now we’re acting as though the War on Terror itself had long crossed the finish line, signaling the cessation of hostilities.  But did anyone bother to tell the terrorists?

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro College, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself.”