Michael Hirsh was national editor for Politico Magazine from 2014–2016.

Fifteen years ago, Americans given a glimpse of the future wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the nation was still observing a day of remembrance for 9/11. But they would likely have been shocked to know the country is still enmeshed in the farther-reaching historical tragedy that 9/11 spawned. Today, in large part through our own strategic and tactical errors, a conflict that started as a contained, focused campaign—an attempt to root out a small band of terrorists who had one lucky day—has grown exponentially. First it became the Global War on Terror, or GWOT. Now we have begun to call it the Forever War. It is already, by many years, America’s longest war ever (if war it is, as opposed to a mere violent global muddle). And 15 years after 9/11, it is not close to being over.

What makes the observance of this 9/11 anniversary so enervating and even shameful is an acute sense of what might have been. According to some experts, the main conflict against Al Qaeda could have effectively ended in as little six months, by mid-to-late 2002, had the right decisions been made by our elected and appointed officials.


No one knows this better than Gary Berntsen, the CIA officer in charge of the operation at Tora Bora who, with the Afghan forces he commanded, had managed to trap the chief perpetrator of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, and his fellow terrorists in their mountain redoubt in mid-December of 2001, only two months after 9/11. With a Delta Force officer standing by his side, Berntsen drafted a message to his superiors back in Washington that he told me ended with this line: “Let’s kill this baby in the crib.” Berntsen wanted to send in troops—fewer than 1,000 Army Rangers—who could have closed the noose (his position was backed by Marine Gen. James Mattis, who wanted to send in his own troops), but George W. Bush, on the advice of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, turned him down, believing that Pakistani forces would trap bin Laden as the Afghans forced him southward into Pakistan. (In fact, the Pakistanis were likely helping bin Laden to escape.) Other opportunities presented themselves in the months that followed, in places like Shahikot. But rather than send troops into Afghanistan to eliminate Al Qaeda, the Bush administration began to massively shift men and resources to Iraq, where Al Qaeda didn’t then exist.

“The war could have been over pretty quickly,” Berntsen told me on Friday. “We could have had the entire Al Qaeda command structure had we done that. Also the terrorism that metastasized into Pakistan might not have happened. It’s impossible to prove any of this. It’s a what-if. But, sadly, we lost the opportunity.”

Instead, in the subsequent decade and a half the war has taken the lives of more Americans than died on 9/11 itself, and created new kinds of enemies we are still figuring out how to fight.

Barack Obama, the unhappy heir to those earlier decisions, has himself suffered no greater personal setback as president than his failure to make any real headway toward ending the global conflict against radical Islamists that he desperately wanted to end. “I do not believe America’s interests are served by endless war, and by remaining on a perpetual war footing,” the president said last year, almost pleadingly.

And yet that is precisely what he will leave his successor on Jan. 20, 2017.

Obama’s personal tragedy is only a small part of our national tragedy. From his first big public moment, when, as a state senator, he called Iraq a “dumb war,” Obama indicated that he believed that George W. Bush and his advisers had badly misconceived the challenge of 9/11—wrongly conflating America’s necessary fight against Al Qaeda with an optional and unnecessary war against Saddam and Iraqi insurgents. As president, Obama sought to reorient the war back to where he thought it always belonged. Portraying himself as a president “elected to end wars, not start them” (a phrase he’s deployed several times), Obama discarded the idea of a GWOT that lumped together all terror threats, and replaced it with a covert, laser-like focus on “core” Al Qaeda and its spawn. He more than tripled the number of drone strikes to get it done, and he set his administration lawyers about finding ways to spell out how we could finally declare victory, reducing the “war” into a policing matter that would merely take out or arrest occasional lone terrorists, like the Boston Marathon bombers.

Obama’s vision never worked. Even as he spent his presidency trying to define down the global war on terror to something manageable, and possibly even finish its proxy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Al Qaeda spawned new affiliates, and ISIS was born in the chaos of Iraq and Syria. Across trouble spots like Yemen and North Africa, the Forever War expanded like an invisible toxic gas; today, it remains utterly ill-defined, and Obama’s efforts to close Guantánamo and install legal and constitutional justifications for the spreading secret war against Islamists everywhere have yielded near total failure. While it is true that the president has prevented another mass-casualty attack in the United States on the scale of 9/11, his war legacy will be, for the most part, a multi-dimensional mess—strategically, legally, constitutionally and definitionally. “I’m sure he’s frustrated,” Harold Koh, Obama’s former State Department chief counsel, told me last week.

Even Sen. Tim Kaine—for whom the president is avidly campaigning as the successor to Vice President Joe Biden—appears to fault Obama and his former top diplomat, Hillary Clinton, over this issue. Before Clinton named Kaine as her running mate, he told the Armed Services Committee in late April: “I think we have made a complete hash of the—and that’s a diplomatic phrase—of the doctrines of war, both domestic and international. … At the end of this administration, with the complicity of this Congress, we have basically come up with a war doctrine that says ‘wherever and whenever,’ as long as the president feels it’s a good idea — without Congress even needing to do anything about it.”

The failure lies at the feet of Congress, as well, for neglecting its constitutional duties. Permission for the war lies in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which was passed a few days after 9/11 and targeted “core” Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and their Taliban hosts; the language reads: “[T]hose nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” The enemy has long since changed. But for most of his presidency Obama failed to update the AUMF to deal with new al Qaeda affiliates that had nothing to do with 9/11, and then more recently with ISIS. Since he finally did offer language a year and a half ago, Congress has not responded, effectively abdicating its duty to declare war.

That stalemate shows no sign of ending, especially under a President Hillary Clinton. Obama sent a proposal for a new AUMF to Congress a year and a half ago, but Republicans haven’t acted on it; according to some congressional sources, they simply wanted to deny Obama a victory—any victory—and they’re likely to do the same to Clinton. “I can’t envision, based on my own experience, a Republican majority wrestling with and passing an AUMF under a Clinton administration,” says Republican Rep. Scott Rigell of Virginia, who has partnered with Kaine to push through a bill. Even Rigell concedes that in the year and a half since Obama finally proposed revised AUMF language, it’s been the fault of Republicans in Congress to take it up. (Asked whether they were on the same page on the need for a new AUMF, a Kaine spokeswoman said yes, that Clinton and Kaine “share the view that we are much better off if Congress does its job and provides a new authorization.”)

Strikingly, the Senate has also failed to confirm Adam Szubin, who was nominated by Obama nearly a year and half ago to be undersecretary of the Treasury for financial Intelligence and terrorism—the key post for combating terrorist financing.

The bottom line is that America is fighting a diffuse war that most Americans don’t understand or know much about, and which Congress will have little do with—and Obama, the president who lamented fighting the Forever War, has become the man who institutionalized it. “At the moment, the United States itself—as the globe’s only military superpower—is judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one,” Rosa Brooks writes in her new book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything. And outside of ISIS, our government won’t even tell us whom it’s executing. That’s because the Obama administration has classified the list of so-called “associated forces” of Al Qaeda that it is authorized to kill. The United States is now at war with an enemy that it will not officially acknowledge or identify to the American public.

Do we have any prospect of getting out of this? Perhaps. But first we should frankly confront how we got here.

***

“I don’t do quagmires,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once declared, in the early days of the GWOT when he was known as “Rumstud” and people still thought he knew what he was doing. In fact, Rumsfeld and his boss, George W. Bush, were leading the nation into the biggest quagmire in American history, a global one. Most of today’s problems go back to what Harold Koh, now of Yale Law School, calls the “original sin” of the so-called war on terror after 9/11. “Which is that if we hadn’t invaded Iraq and had we used the resources elsewhere and correctly assessed the situation initially, a lot of this would not have happened,” he says.

That decision amounted to what retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni— who in early 2002, while serving as a Bush envoy to the Middle East, spoke against the Iraq war—has called perhaps the worst strategic mistake ever made by an American president: Bush mistook a singular if horribly tragic event, 9/11, for an existential threat. And he mistook a nonstate actor that was in fact fairly small and weak for a giant state-sponsored terrorist menace.

Because of these errors, George W. Bush has to be considered one of the most catastrophically consequential presidents in American history. Arthur Schlesinger, in a famous 1948 survey of historians, concluded that what characterized most great presidents is that they had to deal with a major turning point in history, among them George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Jefferson. Average presidents didn’t have such historic decisions to make, diminishing their prospects for greatness (a problem Bill Clinton used to complain about to his aides in the ’90s, though Teddy Roosevelt managed to overcome that obstacle and achieve greatness without a great testing crisis). Previous poorly ranked presidents often have been those who handled such turning points badly—like James Buchanan in the run-up to the Civil War.

But what if a president who didn’t have to confront a historical turning point thought he did? What if he turned a one-off event, however terrible and tragic, into a fictitious Great Moment in History that he then mishandled? This is, perhaps, Bush’s most damaging legacy. Sept. 11 "was not an existential threat,” Zinni told me. "It was a band of maybe a thousand radicals. Yet we created an investment in this that was on a level of what we do for existential threats. Obviously, we were traumatized by 9/11. I don't mean to play that down. But this was not communism or fascism.”

Compare the decisions of the 43rd president to one sometimes ranked the worst in American history, James Buchanan, whose laissez-faire approach to slavery and secession was said to have helped precipitate the Civil War. Buchanan may have been inept, but he was dealing with a major intractable issue—slavery—that not even the Founders could address and that Lincoln, perhaps America’s greatest president, could resolve only with the Civil War. The mistakes made by Buchanan during the national debate over slavery, or by Lyndon B. Johnson over Vietnam during the Cold War, came under the pressure of truly existential threats to the union.

Sept. 11 was different. It was as terrible and traumatic as any day in our history, at least since Pearl Harbor. At such moments the job of the president is not just to rally the nation—which Bush did at first, and did well—but also, more importantly in the long run, to weigh the response correctly. That Bush manifestly failed to do. Even as he delivered a responsible message of tolerance toward Muslims and rallied the world around him, Bush’s measured response began to come apart, literally within days, as he turned his attention to Iraq and a mythical global threat that did not then exist. The overreaction of the Bush presidency to 9/11, in fact, fulfilled Osama bin Laden’s fondest hope. The Bush administration convinced itself that terrorism-supporting states were an even bigger problem than Al Qaeda, and needed to be attacked with the full military might of the United States.

But the truth was that Al Qaeda, a small band of Arab men who had been hounded out of their countries into the protection of a crazed Islamist regime in Afghanistan, had no known ties to any other government. Al Qaeda’s goal, according to its own rhetoric, was to “bleed” and “bankrupt” America (bin Laden’s words) by luring it into a long and draining conflict, as the mujahedeen fighters did to the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. “The jihadis expected the United States, like the Soviet Union, to be a clumsy opponent,” reporter Alan Cullison wrote in The Atlantic in September 2004, quoting a revelatory trove of letters he found by accident on an old computer left behind by Al Qaeda's then-second-in-command, Ayman Zawahiri, in Afghanistan.

This is exactly what happened. Bush made bin Laden’s case for him. Although, as Peter Bergen has pointed out, bin Laden failed in his larger goal of driving the United States out of the Middle East and weakening the Arab regimes with which Washington was allied, the terrorist chieftain succeeded in spreading and perpetuating his ideology, thanks to our help. Every piece of evidence we have now, 15 years and trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives later, is that the 9/11 plot was a one-time roll of the dice for Al Qaeda; they had no backup, no bench, no army of any kind. Nor is this hindsight: U.S. intelligence knew it at the time, according to numerous accounts. Indeed, Al Qaeda members couldn’t even agree among themselves internally about their targets and goals on the eve of 9/11. "Perhaps one of the most important insights to emerge from [Zawahiri’s] computer is that 9/11 sprang not so much from Al Qaeda’s strengths as from its weaknesses. The computer did not reveal any links to Iraq or any other deep-pocketed government,” Cullison wrote. “Amid the group’s penury the members fell to bitter infighting. The blow against the United States was meant to put an end to the internal rivalries.”

It did, and America’s reaction could not have been more self-defeating. Bush’s initial response was correct: A devastating air campaign beginning Oct. 7, 2001, sent the Taliban scurrying from the cities and Al Qaeda running for the mountains. Afghanistan fell to the Americans and their small proxy force, the Northern Alliance, in just eight weeks. More important, bin Laden was almost certainly cornered in his Tora Bora fortress. As Berntsen, the CIA officer in charge, told me as far back as 2004—and repeated in his 2005 book, Jawbreaker—bin Laden said to his followers, “Forgive me,” as he apologized for getting them pinned down by the Americans. (Berntsen’s Afghan contacts were listening on radio.) The Al Qaeda leader then asked his men to pray, and a kind of miracle occurred. Rumsfeld, who had made a fetish of his desire to place only a “small footprint” of a few troops in Afghanistan—“When foreigners come in with international solutions to local problems, it can create a dependency,” Rumsfeld explained in a February 2003 speech—refused Berntsen’s request to rush in more troops to encircle the trapped fighters. Bin Laden was allowed to flee while Washington turned its attention to Iraq. Not only did Bush stop talking about the man he’d once said he wanted “dead or alive,” the president also began to shift U.S. Special Forces (in particular, the 5th Group, which had built close relations with its Afghan allies) and Predator drones to the Iraq theater.

Bin Laden disappeared completely from view, and according to U.S. intelligence his trail went cold for years.

***

But that only set the stage for the real disaster. Bush then proceeded to invent a war that we now know—and that was known by him then (as well as by pundits like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who approvingly called it a “war of choice”)—was not imperative or necessary, based on flimsy and concocted intelligence. In doing so, the U.S. president effectively turbocharged radical Islamism; by invading a Muslim nation at the heart of the Arab world, Bush vindicated bin Laden’s once-lonely ideological position, the terrorist’s often-unheeded warnings to his followers about the threat from the “crusaders” of the "far enemy,” as the Al Qaeda chief called the United States. Up until 9/11, many Al Qaeda followers had argued that they should continue their historical strategy of targeting the “near enemy,” their own governments, the autocratic regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Arab nations. By invading and occupying Iraq, Bush quickly displaced these “near” regimes as the main target in the radical Islamist imagination, and he turned bin Laden into a living legend and an inspiration to angry young Arab men across the region.

So passed the next 10 years.

Responsibility for this titanic strategic error also lies with the many leading Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who authorized Bush to go into Iraq out of a mangled sense of patriotism and apparently because they had few strategic ideas of their own; and with media pundits and reporters who became “complicit enablers” by “covering the march to war instead of the necessity of war” in Iraq, as Bush's renegade former press secretary, Scott McClellan, later described it in a confessional 2008 memoir. Many in the media, like Friedman, have to this day failed to acknowledge their error in print, which has muted much of the debate over the choices made 15 years ago. (Others, like Friedman’s colleague on the Times op-ed page, Maureen Dowd, were not as credulous and questioned the turn toward Iraq, but they remained in the minority. As Dowd wrote on the eve of the Iraq invasion: “It still confuses many Americans that, in a world full of vicious slimeballs, we’re about to bomb one that didn’t attack us on Sept. 11 (like Osama); that isn’t intercepting our planes (like North Korea); that isn’t financing Al Qaeda (like Saudi Arabia); that isn’t home to Osama and his lieutenants (like Pakistan).”

Then there were the mistakes of Bush’s subordinates, principally Rumsfeld. Following the initial success in ousting the Taliban in December 2001, Rumsfeld embarked on a series of catastrophic misuses of America’s military. Not only did he fail to follow up on the pursuit of bin Laden and his lieutenants at Tora Bora, which could have ended the entire war against Al Qaeda quickly, he decided that year to minimize stability operations and confine peacekeeping to Kabul, opening the way to the return of the Taliban. At the same time—while in denial about the Taliban’s growing strength—he turned his attention to making war on Iraq without an occupation plan; having gone into Iraq, he then remained in denial of the growing insurgency there. Finally, as Rumsfeld’s inattention to Afghanistan began to have consequences in the mid-2000s, he continued to pretend that the country was stable, giving speeches saying how well Afghanistan was doing under America’s “modest footprint.” All wrong. What happened instead is that the Taliban surged back in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda was reborn in Iraq. By the time Bush finally fired Rumsfeld in 2006, the worst damage had been done.

Had Rumsfeld single-mindedly pursued bin Laden and Zawahiri, the true and sole perpetrators of 9/11, into the mountains of Tora Bora and eliminated them and their lieutenants, rather than being distracted by the red herring of Iraq, Berntsen and other military experts believe, much could have been different. Given that bin Laden and Zawahiri had enough trouble persuading the rest of Al Qaeda to attack America before 9/11, their swift end would have sent an immediate message to every other terrorist: Bin Laden was wrong; you can’t get anywhere by taking on the lone superpower. What happens when you attack the United States of America is very simple: You die quickly and your group is swiftly destroyed.

Uninvaded, Iraq would never have given birth to Al Qaeda II, and many Islamists would have then arguably turned their attention back to their local and regional squabbles. The Afghans, in stark contrast to the pent-up Iraqis, were so desperately tired of 23 years of civil war that most welcomed the Western presence with open arms, as I saw when I first went there in early 2002; virtually every warlord was on sale to America at knockdown prices. But we ignored their pleas for more help; Bush’s own envoy, Jim Dobbins, called Afghanistan “the most under-resourced nation-building effort in history.”

There is the counter-argument, of course, that much of what we’re seeing now would have happened anyway. Perhaps it is true that the post-Arab Spring states would have been radicalized, Syria would still have erupted into civil war and ISIS would have been born, but that would be far less America’s problem. What made bin Laden’s legend—and spread his radical anti-American Islamist message throughout the Arab world—was his longevity—at least until Obama had him killed in 2011. But again, by then it was far too late; the “far enemy” version of the Islamist message had gone global, and America was Bogeyman No. 1.

We went into Iraq to rid a dictator of weapons of mass destruction he didn’t have, and to impose democracy on a country that plainly wasn’t ready for it. Instead, American troops spent more than a decade in Iraq—at the cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives and limbs—as a recruiting tool. The societal sickness we created in Iraq—whereby nearly a generation of angry young Arab Islamists have grown up in seething resentment of the American military in their backyards—has fed upon itself since that time. The Bush administration inadvertantly promoted this when it turned the Iraqi insurgency into a terrorist threat like Al Qaeda (rather than seeing it for what it was, a backlash against the U.S. occupation), and alienated much of the Iraqi population with often-brutal tactics.

I saw this play out myself when I was embedded with the 4th Infantry Division in the Sunni Triangle town of Samarra in early 2004: As the insurgency grew, ill-trained U.S. troops were pressed into a counterinsurgency role they’d never prepared for, and thousands of Iraqis were unjustly targeted and arrested. “I usually just round up all the military-age men,” one lieutenant in command of a platoon in Samarra told me casually. The roundups were harsh, with a lot of shoving, shouting and flexi-cuffing. Multiply that thousands of times, and you have many more Islamist recruits. This was exacerbated by the Abu Ghraib scandal, when—again thanks to the Bush administration's misbegotten policy of lumping the Iraqi insurgents together with Al Qaeda—Americans were discovered using abusive interrogation techniques against Iraqi detainees that had originally been intended for use against only the worst of Al Qaeda. That policy helped to promote the rise of a whole new terrorist group, Al Qaeda in Iraq.

This sad history is one reason why Obama, rightly or wrongly, was in a rush to get out of Iraq in 2010 and is so reluctant to go into Syria now, his aides say: He wants to stop a cycle in which America intervenes, America gets stuck and America turns into the new enemy for thousands of angry, frustrated people.

What makes the strategic misdirection even more jarring is the stark fact that, based on my own reporting and other accounts, we know that the Bush administration never even held a senior level meeting to debate the fundamental question of whether an invasion of Iraq was the right course of action. By many contemporaneous accounts, the administration apparently believed that America needed to make a larger statement than “merely” taking out Al Qaeda in Afghanistan: America must send a message to the world that it could not be toyed with. A two-day meeting of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board shortly after 9/11 reached a consensus that Iraq should be targeted quickly after Afghanistan because—as Newt Gingrich, one of the participants at the meeting, explained to me at the time—“when the U.S. loses what may be more than 6,000 people, there has to be reaction so that the world clearly knows that things have changed.” In Iraq, through “shock and awe” and other means, we would show the world just how powerful we were.

The Bush team achieved just the opposite, exposing our vulnerabilities on the ground as the era of the IED began.

For all their swagger in the face of the crisis, the Bush advisers were plainly out of their depth. As New Yorker writer George Packer wrote his 2005 book The Assassins’ Gate, Bush and his principals—mainly Rumsfeld, Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz—were Cold War hawks whose vast government experience seemed at first a strength but became one of their greatest drawbacks. “Through the three decades of their public lives, the only thing America had to fear was its own return to weakness,” Packer wrote. “But after the Cold War ended, they sat out the debates of the 1990s [about transnational terror]. ... When September 11 forced the imagination to grapple with something radically new, the president’s foreign-policy advisors reached for what they had always known. The threat, as they saw it, lay in well-armed enemy states.” And their boss didn’t have the wherewithal to question them.

It is hardly surprising that in 2010 one of the most exhaustive surveys of presidential performance—the polling of more than 230 U.S. historians and political scientists by Siena Research Institute in New York—rated George W. Bush as close to the worst president in American history on both foreign policy and the economy. Bush came in at 42nd out of 43 presidents for his handling of foreign policy, just ahead of the dead-last Lyndon Johnson, the main culprit in the Vietnam debacle.

To be sure, the history contest may not be over; past presidents go up and down in the polls. But it is fair to say that with each passing year, as the quagmire grows, George W. Bush looks worse in the judgment of history.

***

We can’t, of course, unmake these historic mistakes. So, do we give up, or figure a new way out? Here we are, engaged in a war without end, with a new principal enemy, ISIS, and a slew of Al Qaeda affiliates playing whack-a-mole with our drone forces on a global battlefield. And there is no law or declaration to deal with it, or even, now, a congressional discussion of one.

Ironically, no one has been more fearful that this is where we’d end up than Obama himself, who declared in a landmark speech in 2013 that “we must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us … Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers.”

Sadly, rather than developing a “code” for future presidents, as he’s said he wants to do, the president’s policy of dramatically stepped-up and secretly targeted drone killings and special-ops raids—for which there is no real public accountability—could well end up leaving a less principled successor an open-ended license to conduct permanent drone warfare, or to place American boots on the ground anywhere in the world.

Obama has in fact stretched the laws of war—never that clear to begin with—past their intended breaking point in the effort to continue his secret global war without new authorization. There may be no better example than the concept of “elongated imminence”—a new, quasi-Orwellian term for a tactic the Obama administration is using to justify more strikes under Article II of the Constitution, according to which the president has the power to respond on his own to “imminent” threats. Under this new interpretation, according to an account in Daniel Klaidman’s 2012 book, Kill Or Capture, terrorists no longer have to be on the verge of pulling the trigger or boarding a plane, or for an attack to be about to happen. They just have to be in the first stages of planning an attack for the president to order them killed. “It would be enough if they were designing the suicide vests,” Klaidman wrote.

So, how does it all end? Can it end? ISIS does appear to be weakening, as the Obama administration has said, and with U.S. military support, Iraqi forces are preparing for an assault on the ISIS stronghold of Mosul later this fall. Meanwhile U.S. and Russian negotiators came to an agreement in the past few days on a cease-fire in Syria, ISIS’ other base, and on ways to end the civil war there (though any solution will likely keep the odious Bashar Assad in place for some time to come). And, in a series of speeches dating back several years, administration officials have sought to point the way to an eventual finish to the war against what remains of Al Qaeda by distinguishing “core al Qaeda” or “associated groups” that are “organized” and specifically target Americans from other less strategic threats. Among the latter are “lone wolves” along the lines of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers or new extremist elements emerging in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, which may be locally or regionally focused in their aims, rather than organized to target America.

Koh specifically excluded lone terrorists as enemies under the AUMF in a speech at the Oxford Union in 2013. “To be clear, the United States is not at war with any idea or religion, with mere propagandists or journalists, or even with sad individuals—like the recent Boston bombers—who may become radicalized, inspired by Al Qaeda’s ideology, but never actually join or become part of Al Qaeda,” Koh said. “As we have seen, such persons may be exceedingly dangerous, but they should be dealt with through tools of civilian law enforcement, not military action.”

It was Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson who a year earlier set out the clearest criteria yet for how the war will end. Johnson, then the Pentagon’s general counsel, said in a speech that “there will come a tipping point … at which so many of the leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, such that Al Qaeda as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed.” And the war would be expected to end.

Perhaps, someday, it can. Or perhaps we will, one day, simply declare victory. Still, it remains utterly unclear how such a broad criterion should be defined. What does “effectively destroyed” mean? And the administration has been sending mixed signals on how long this might take, as well as who the enemy is. At a congressional hearing in 2013, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of Defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, said U.S. military operations against Al Qaeda and associated forces are "going to go on for quite a while … I think it’s at least 10 to 20 years.”

Among his questioners that day was Sen. Tim Kaine, who if he becomes vice president will plainly push for clearer rules and criteria. Kaine’s running mate, Hillary Clinton, has already forsworn using more ground troops (even as her opponent, Donald Trump, has promised us a “secret” plan to destroy ISIS). Maybe ISIS will die out or be crushed, and perhaps the drones will someday, far into the future, catch up to the proliferating threat around the world. But no one, as yet, has figured out when that will happen.