I’ll admit that I have mixed feelings about the American presence in Afghanistan. My inclination is to support a complete withdrawal of our troops on the theory that things won’t get better and the status quo isn’t good enough to justify the effort. But I’m also mindful of what happened the last time we abandoned Afghanistan and how that led to a lethal national security threat. The 9/11 attacks cost us the lives of nearly 3,000 people that day, but it also caused incredible amounts of property damage, crippled the airline industry, and sent the economy into a tailspin that cost me and many other Americans their jobs. It led to an immediate increase in the surveillance state, an erosion of civil liberties, a spate of hate crimes, and an ill-advised and catastrophically expensive (in lives, treasure, and moral authority) war on terrorism.
I always weigh the downsides of being in Afghanistan against the downsides of getting attacked again on a scale like 9/11, and the complicating factor is really that I can’t be certain that we’re really preventing another 9/11 by being there. For all I know, we could be making another massive terror attack more likely.
However you come down on that question, it should be clear by now that if we’re only focused on the loss of life, we have bigger terror threats to worry about than al-Qaeda or ISIS.
When you think of a terrorist, what do you see? For more than a generation, the image lurking in Americans’ nightmares has resembled the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks: an Islamic jihadist. Not a 21-year-old white supremacist from a prosperous Dallas suburb.
But long before that young man drove to El Paso, Texas, on Aug. 3 and allegedly murdered at least 22 people at a Walmart crammed with back-to-school shoppers, it was clear that white nationalists have become the face of terrorism in America. Since 9/11, white supremacists and other far-right extremists have been responsible for almost three times as many attacks on U.S. soil as Islamic terrorists, the government reported. From 2009 through 2018, the far right has been responsible for 73% of domestic extremist-related fatalities, according to a 2019 study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). And the toll is growing. More people–49–were murdered by far-right extremists in the U.S. last year than in any other year since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in July that a majority of the bureau’s domestic-terrorism investigations since October were linked to white supremacy.
Our real problem is that we have a president who is the Usama bin-Laden of white supremacist terror. The good side of that is that we’re not at risk of going overboard like we did in response to 9/11. The bad side is obvious. The fox is in the henhouse, and there’s no prospect of fighting this security threat effectively so long as he remains in charge.
