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100 Foreign Aff. 66 (2021)
Winning Ugly: What the War on Terror Cost America

handle is hein.journals/fora100 and id is 932 raw text is: 66 FOREIGN AFFAIRS Winning Ugly What the War on Terror Cost America Elliot Ackerman My first mission as a paramili- tary officer with the CIA was against a top-ten al Qaeda target. It was the autumn of 2009, and I had been deployed in my new job for a total of two days. But I was no stranger to Afghanistan, having already fought there (as well as in Iraq) as a Marine Corps officer over the previous six years. On this mission, I was joined by the Afghan counterterrorism unit I advised and a handful of members from SEAL Team Six. Our plan was to conduct a raid to capture or kill our target, who was coming across the border from Pakistan for a meeting in the Korengal Valley. The night was moonless as we slipped into the valley. The 70-odd members of our raid force hiked under night-vision goggles for a couple of hours, taking on hundreds of feet of elevation in silence until we arrived at a village on a rocky outcropping where the meeting was being held. As surveil- lance and strike aircraft orbited the starry sky, a subset of our force sprinted toward the house where an informant had told us the target was staying. There was a brief and sharp gunfight; none of our men were hurt, and several ELLIOT ACKERMAN is a former U.S. marine and intelligence officer and a co-author, with James Stavridis, of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. of our adversaries were killed. But the target was taken alive. Then we slipped out of the valley as expeditiously as we had arrived. By early morning, we had made it safely to the U.S. Army out- post, where our prisoner would soon be transferred to Bagram Air Base. The sun was breaking over the jagged ridgeline as we filled out the paperwork transferring custody. The mood among our raid force, which had been tense all night, suddenly eased. We lounged in a small dirt parking lot, helmets off, laughing and recounting the details of our mission. A convoy would soon arrive to usher us back to our base, where we would get some much-needed rest and a decent meal. We would then await our next target, continuing what was proving to be a successful U.S. campaign to decapitate al Qaeda's leadership. We were feeling, in short, victorious. While we waited, a column of scrag- gly American soldiers, little older than teenagers, filed past. They lived at the outpost, and their plight was well known to us. For the past several years, they had been waging a quixotic and largely unsuccessful counterinsurgency in the valley. Many of their friends had been killed there, and their expressions were haggard, a mix of defeat and defiance. Our triumphant banter must have sounded to them like a foreign language. They gave us hard, resentful looks, treat- ing us as interlopers. It occurred to me that although our counterterrorism unit was standing on the same battlefield as these soldiers, we were in fact fighting in two very different wars. At a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush announced a new type

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