Supreme clichés: the War on Terror

On 20 September 2001, George W. Bush named the enemy in two successive sentences: first a network and states, then a method.

Two years later, his Secretary of Defense wrote that he had no way of knowing whether he was winning or losing against these enemies. The phrase was launched. « War on terror » became the mantra of the twenty-five years that followed.

France took up the formula in the Sahel, from Operation Serval to the end of Barkhane. With more than mixed results.

On 16 October 2003, Donald Rumsfeld sent a memo to four of his closest collaborators, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its subject was the « global war on terrorism ». In it, the American Secretary of Defense wrote a sentence that USA Today would reveal six days later: « Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. » Two years after the launch of operations in Afghanistan, the man conducting them did not know where he stood. The flaw did not lie in the measuring instruments; it lay in the object named.

The naming dates from 20 September 2001, before a Congress convened after the 11 September attacks. George Bush first pronounced a precise sentence: « Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them. » A network, governments: entities with a name, leaders, an address. Then came the sentence that would remain in the analysis: « Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated. » In a few seconds, the enemy had changed its nature: it had been an identified adversary; it became a method. The United States was no longer waging war on a state or a group, but on « terror ». That is far more fluid and far harder to define. The French translation aggravated the slide by rendering as « terrorisme » an English word that designated « terror » — that is, an emotional state.

A means to an end

Raymond Aron had given, in 1962, in Peace and War among Nations, the definition that still serves as a foundation: « An action is called terrorist when its psychological effects are out of all proportion to its purely physical results. » The definition bears on a type of action, not a type of actor. It describes a manner of striking, characterised by the ratio between the material cost of the attack and the effect obtained on people’s minds.

Daniel Dory, a member of the scientific committee of Conflits, has taken up and refined this work of definition. Terrorism, he writes, consists « in the carrying out (and/or the threat) of acts of violence (most often political in nature and belonging to the repertoire of war) intended to transmit an emotionally impactful message to audiences other than the immediate victims ». He draws the direct consequence: « terrorism thus understood is not an enemy (on which one ‘wages war’), nor an ideology, but a mere technique that can be placed at the service of any cause and be employed by a multitude of actors ».

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The distinction can be seen in the choice of victims. Political assassination targets a personal identity: a king, a minister, a senior official, designated as such. Guerrilla warfare targets a functional identity: the soldier, the policeman, the state agent, struck for what he does. Terrorism targets a vectorial identity: the victim is struck for the message he carries to those who remain alive. These are three ways of selecting a target. They are three techniques, all three belonging to the repertoire of war.

Clausewitz defines war as « an act of violence intended to compel the adversary to carry out our will ». The definition presupposes an adversary endowed with a will, capable of yielding, of negotiating, of renouncing. A method has no will. It has nothing to concede, nothing to sign, nothing to give up. It can neither win nor lose. In speaking of a « war on terror », one condemned oneself from the start to losing it, so impossible is it to put an end to a method.

« In speaking of a ‘war on terror’, one condemned oneself from the start to losing it, so impossible is it to put an end to a method. »

One does not wage war on a tank; still less on a drone, an ambush or a blockade. These are means, employed by someone, in view of something. War is waged on that someone, to prevent him from obtaining that something. A destroyed tank tells nothing of the outcome as long as the army that fields it and the political objective it serves survive. Terrorism is of this order. It is the instrument of actors who have no army, or who cannot yet field one, or who judge the psychological effect more profitable than the military one. Nothing, moreover, prevents a state from resorting to it, and many have done so.

The objection is contemporary with the formula

The expression belongs first to an American political genre. Lyndon Johnson declared, in January 1964, « unconditional war on poverty ». Richard Nixon launched, in June 1971, a « total offensive » against drugs, which the press would christen the « war on drugs ». In this register, the word « war » designates a national mobilisation, a budget, a priority. It does not designate an enemy. Applied in 2001 to real armies, the metaphor produced real deployments.

The objection was formulated at once. Michael Howard, historian of strategy, presented it at the Royal United Services Institute on 30 October 2001, then in Foreign Affairs in January 2002: « To declare war on terrorists, or even more illiterately on terrorism, is at once to accord the terrorists a status and a dignity that they seek and that they do not deserve. » Howard recalled that the British, in Malaya as in Northern Ireland, had always refused the word « war » and spoken of a « state of emergency ». The police and intelligence services received exceptional powers, the army came in support when necessary, and the objective remained to isolate the perpetrators from the rest of the population. The vocabulary was not a precaution of language: it set the war aim.

The National Commission on the Terrorist Attacks of 11 September 2001 took up the argument in its report of July 2004: « But the enemy is not just ‘terrorism’, some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism, especially the al-Qaeda network, its affiliates and its ideology. » The commission was not debating semantics. It observed that a strategy without a designated enemy cannot be evaluated, and that Rumsfeld had been right to write that he lacked metrics.

The second question in his October 2003 memo shows it: « Are we capturing, killing or deterring more terrorists every day than the madrasas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us? » This is the only question that remains when the enemy is a method. For lack of an attainable political objective, strategy is reduced to a rate of attrition. One counts the cadres neutralised, one compares them to the recruits, and one hopes that the subtraction will in the end turn in one’s favour.

The American state apparatus itself tried to escape the formula. On 25 July 2005, General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained to the National Press Club that « the real enemy is violent extremism, and terror the method it employs ». His services then promoted a new label: « global struggle against violent extremism ». On 3 August, in a speech in Texas, the president used the old formula ten times. It had lasted nine days. It survived until 2009, when the following administration substituted for it, in budgetary documents and then in the Pentagon’s internal directives, the expression « overseas contingency operation ». In the meantime, in January 2007, the British Director of Public Prosecutions Ken Macdonald had ruled before the Bar: « On the streets of London, there is no ‘war on terror’, any more than there can be a ‘war on drugs’. »

A war that cannot end

A war ends in one of two ways. By the destruction of the adversary, or by an agreement with him. Both outcomes presuppose an interlocutor. Against a method, neither is available. Terrorism does not capitulate, since it has no government. Nor does it disappear, since it is a manner of striking that remains available to anyone who decides to employ it. A war declared on a means is a war whose condition of ending has been removed in advance.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force voted by Congress on 14 and 15 September 2001, signed on the 18th, targeted the nations, organisations or persons who had prepared or supported the attacks. Twenty-five years later, it is still in force. The authorisations relating to Iraq, of 1991 and 2002, were repealed in December 2025; that of 2001 remains. Brown University’s Costs of War project recorded its invocation, between 2001 and 2021, for military operations in at least twenty-two countries. A text of circumstance, voted in four days against the perpetrators of an identified attack, became the permanent legal basis of a state of war without term.

The same vagueness produced a regime of detention. The category of « unlawful combatant » was not invented in 2001: the US Supreme Court had already employed it in 1942, for German saboteurs. What dates from after 11 September 2001 is its erection into a durable status, at Guantánamo, for men who were neither prisoners of war nor defendants under ordinary law. The jurist Marco Sassòli formulated, as early as 2001, the objection of principle — « there is no intermediate status; no person in the hands of the enemy can be outside the law » — and the practical objection, which has since been verified: « How can we prevent every belligerent from now on regarding its adversary as a ‘terrorist’ and qualifying the prisoners it holds as ‘unlawful combatants’? »

The cost of the whole was established in 2021 by the same Brown team: 8 trillion dollars committed or provisioned since 2001, including 2.2 trillion for the care owed to veterans until 2050. The count of direct deaths from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan exceeds 940,000 people between 2001 and 2023, including more than 430,000 civilians.

What was actually defeated

The demonstration is verified by its opposite. The coalition won one clear military victory, and one only: the destruction of the territorial caliphate. It was possible because the Islamic State had ceased to be a network. At its height it held some 90,000 square kilometres and administered nearly eight million inhabitants. It levied taxes, held courts, fielded constituted units, defended lines. It had taken the form of a political entity, with a territory to lose. One could therefore wage war on it, and win: on 23 March 2019, at Baghouz, the Syrian Democratic Forces announced the end of its territorial hold.

« We defeated the Islamic State the day it had ceased to be a method to become a political entity. »

François Hollande had formulated it before Congress convened at Versailles, on 16 November 2015: « We are facing an organisation, Daesh, possessing a territorial base, financial resources and military capabilities. » And he drew from it a war aim: « It is therefore a matter not of containing, but of destroying this organisation. » A named organisation, three verifiable attributes, a defined end state. This is a definition of an enemy, and it produced a strategy. The same speech nevertheless retained the competing formula — « we are in a war against jihadist terrorism » — and the two vocabularies have coexisted to this day.

The Sahel, or the formula taken up again

France committed the same error in its turn, and for ten years. On 11 January 2013, announcing the engagement in Mali, François Hollande declared that the country « is facing an aggression by terrorist elements, coming from the North ». The rest of the vocabulary quickly set in: « terrorist groups », then « armed terrorist groups », which military and parliamentary documentation would reduce to the acronym « GAT ».

The first phase of Serval nevertheless succeeded, and for a precise reason: there was a column marching on Bamako. A physical, visible adversary, moving along a road, which aviation could destroy. François Hollande would claim to have « broken the terrorist column ». Once the column was dispersed, the adversary became a GAT again, and the war lost its object at the same time as its enemy lost its name.

This adversary, however, had one. The Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM/JNIM) was born in March 2017 from the merger of Ansar Dine, the Saharan branch of AQIM, the Macina katiba of Amadou Koufa and al-Mourabitoun, under the authority of the Tuareg Iyad Ag Ghaly. The International Crisis Group sums up its declared objectives: « the withdrawal of foreign forces and the establishment of an Islamic regime, in Mali first of all ». The group administers what it controls. It appoints judges, levies the zakat, regulates rural markets, arbitrates land disputes, negotiates local ceasefires with self-defence militias and relaxes its moral policing when notables complain of it. A movement that governs, taxes and negotiates is not a method; it is a political entity. One that can therefore be defined and fought.

« A movement that governs, taxes and negotiates is not a method; it is a political entity. »

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The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara belongs to another logic. Affiliated with the organisation of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi since 2015, it seeks no compromise, and the two movements have fought intense battles against each other. A single word thus designated two adversaries, who were making war on each other. The Pau summit, on 13 January 2020, partly put an end to this: the joint declaration of the heads of state concentrated the military effort in the region of the three borders « by targeting the ISGS as a priority ». The day the vocabulary became precise, a hierarchy of threats became possible.

The word had meanwhile produced its heaviest effect. In April 2017, the National Reconciliation Conference, convened in Bamako under the authority of the Malian president, recommended opening a dialogue with Iyad Ag Ghaly and Amadou Koufa. The French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Marc Ayrault, went to Mali in the days that followed: « We are engaged in a struggle, and it is a struggle without ambiguity. And against terrorism and those who claim it, there is only one way. There are not two. » The recommendation was abandoned. In October 2020, Mali nevertheless negotiated: the release of Soumaïla Cissé, the opposition leader kidnapped during an electoral campaign, and that of Sophie Pétronin, in exchange for about two hundred detainees. The following month, Emmanuel Macron declared to Jeune Afrique: « With terrorists, one does not talk. One fights. » France held its position to the end. The result: the Sahelian states negotiated without it.

The strategy that remained was that of attrition, with the results that attrition produces against a rooted movement. In November 2018, the Minister of the Armed Forces announced before the deputies the probable neutralisation of Amadou Koufa. He reappeared on video three months later, and the general staff acknowledged in March 2019 that « it is likely that it is him ». The leaders fell, the coalition held.

The toll is heavy. Deaths linked to the violence of jihadist groups in the Sahel, recorded from ACLED data by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, rose from about 225 in 2015 to nearly ten thousand in 2025. The Sahel today concentrates more than half of the world’s terrorism deaths. Nearly four million people are displaced there. 58 French soldiers were killed there — 59 according to the Élysée’s count. The last French serviceman left Mali on 15 August 2022, Burkina Faso in February 2023, Niger in December 2023. Three coups brought to power officers who formed the Alliance of Sahel States and left ECOWAS on 29 January 2025. The Senate report of June 2023 wrote what had been missing: « a political solution that never came », a force that « attacks the symptoms, but not the root causes ». It took time for France to understand it.

Naming the enemy

The designation of the enemy is the first act of strategy. It commands the war aim, the choice of means, the end state sought, the very possibility of an ending. To name the adversary — al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, GSIM, ISGS — makes it possible to know it, to divide it, to rank the threats, to know what one wants to obtain from it and what one can concede to it. To designate it by the method it employs forbids all of that in a single word. Daniel Dory formulates it in one demonstration: individuals or groups are not our enemies because they are « terrorists »; they resort to terrorism because they are our enemies.

« Individuals or groups are not our enemies because they are ‘terrorists’; they resort to terrorism because they are our enemies. »

The International Committee of the Red Cross noted it as early as 2004: « It would be more judicious to speak of the fight against terrorism », for « one can only fight an identifiable party to a conflict ». The nuance is not one of vocabulary. The fight against terrorism is a permanent task of police, intelligence and justice, directed against a method that will not disappear, precisely because it is a method. The war on terror promises a victory that cannot occur, and commits armies to that end. Yet France never settled this dilemma in Africa: it engaged in an operation of policing and pacification, but by using its army. The intellectual and conceptual confusion led to tactical and strategic errors.

France’s principal failure was to wage a war whose object it had badly defined.

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© Photo: The 11 September 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center