Individuals can't wage war, silly, that's the prerogative of states. You can murder a lot of people for some dumb reason, become an international outlaw, and get blown up by a cruise missile when you step outside your safehouse to take a leak, but criminal acts by nonstate actors are no more warfare in a legal sense than your house is the sovereign embassy of Under Lankonia. All that bullshit about declaring war on/being warred on by individuals, ideas, and wildlife you hear all the fucking time now is just meaningless noise that sounds real hot and dramatic on TV.
If the 'side' behind the terror attacks was the state of Afghanistan that would have been one thing, but al Qaeda is a stateless entity that was never under their control. If they had been the war would be a whole lot simpler and over by now; we fought a few like that as one of our first acts as a nation, on the shores of Tripoli.
This isn't just a legalistic distinction. Large-scale conventional warfare against an enemy that is not hierarchical, bound to one location, clearly delineated, and structured more or less as international convention demands a country be does not work. Even CI warfare is a toolkit developed exclusively for longterm colonial domination of regional guerrillas following a specific configuration, it does nothing to stop a global stateless entity that can just send its vulnerable components to go chill out a hundred miles over any border you choose no problem. Whose keeps, exactly, do you think you're playing for? Whose hearts and minds are being won? Al Qaeda doesn't have to stick around and play power-struggle on first-world-nation terms in Karbala, the entire Islamic world is their oyster, they don't need to be based somewhere to hit us there, and we can't invade everywhere trying to keep them out.
no subject
If the 'side' behind the terror attacks was the state of Afghanistan that would have been one thing, but al Qaeda is a stateless entity that was never under their control. If they had been the war would be a whole lot simpler and over by now; we fought a few like that as one of our first acts as a nation, on the shores of Tripoli.
This isn't just a legalistic distinction. Large-scale conventional warfare against an enemy that is not hierarchical, bound to one location, clearly delineated, and structured more or less as international convention demands a country be does not work. Even CI warfare is a toolkit developed exclusively for longterm colonial domination of regional guerrillas following a specific configuration, it does nothing to stop a global stateless entity that can just send its vulnerable components to go chill out a hundred miles over any border you choose no problem. Whose keeps, exactly, do you think you're playing for? Whose hearts and minds are being won? Al Qaeda doesn't have to stick around and play power-struggle on first-world-nation terms in Karbala, the entire Islamic world is their oyster, they don't need to be based somewhere to hit us there, and we can't invade everywhere trying to keep them out.