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The United States’ oft-claimed unlimited objectives of destroying AQAP and al-Qaeda are likely impossible to achieve. The Obama administration initially believed that it could pursue unlimited objectives with limited means, but this rested on an overly optimistic assessment of AQAP’s weakness and the stability of the Middle East. Greater commitment to unlimited objectives is likely to escalate the broader crisis in Yemen while failing to end the war.

Some U.S. limited objectives may be achievable. However, the citation of unlimited objectives has stymied strategic analysis of whether they are achievable and of potential tradeoffs. Visions of sustainable counterterrorism underestimate the dangers of continuing the war and risk a return to the failed approach of the Obama administration.

The alternation between unlimited and limited objectives, identified in the prior section, was derived in part from an overly optimistic assessment of al-Qaeda’s weakness. The Obama administration did not view the use of limited means alongside unlimited objectives as a problem because it believed that al-Qaeda was weak and separable from the broader contested politics of the Middle East.¹

The Arab Spring and its aftermath revealed the problems with this view. The Obama administration’s restrictions regarding the importance of imminence and the existence of a threat to U.S. persons to justify strikes began to fall by the wayside within a year of their development. Luke Hartig and Stephen Tankel, write, “The ink had barely dried on President Barack Obama’s 2013 Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG) establishing a separate set of operating procedures for direct military action against terrorist targets outside of areas of active hostilities, when the distinctions between those and areas where active hostilities were taking place began to blur even more than in the text itself.”²

At the time of the PPG’s publication, the United States was coming off a wave of seeming successes including the decline in the threat posed by AQAP, the disruption of the external plot apparatus operating out of Pakistan, and the assassination of significant figures including Bin Laden and Awlaki.³ These successes likely contributed to the willingness to maintain—or at least not clearly renounce—unlimited objectives.

However, by late 2013 and early 2014 jihadist insurgencies were demonstrating their resilience and making advances.⁴ This occurred in Yemen, where the Arab Spring and Houthi advances enabled AQAP to gain territory for a time. It was also the period that saw al Shabaab in Somalia conduct the deadly attack on the Westgate Mall as the campaign against the group stumbled, and AQIM (Al-Qa'ida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb) made gains in Mali.⁵ Over the summer and fall of 2014, the counter-ISIS war began, furthering the already existent shift in which “the United States ratcheted up air strikes and expanded its deployments of embedded advisors in response” to these threats in regions previously understood as being outside areas of active hostilities.⁶ Hartig and Tankel write, “The differences between the use of force in traditional and non-traditional battlefields were less and less oriented around a bright line. Rather they existed on a continuum informed by the intensity of the threat, the operating environment, and the capabilities of partners, with U.S. efforts throttled up or down accordingly.”⁷

The Obama administration often portrayed AQAP as an instance of al-Qaeda’s core in Pakistan reaching out and developing weak and early structures in Yemen. This interpretation held out the possibility that al-Qaeda in Yemen might require only limited military action because the accomplishment of unlimited objectives of defeating the core in Afghanistan and Pakistan would also destroy the network’s outlying tentacles. In this vision, eliminating the al-Qaeda presence in Yemen would require only minimal military action aimed at limited objectives of disrupting specific threats.

The counterinsurgency theorist David Kilcullen, who helped develop this overall strategy, which he terms “disaggregation” writes, “We did focus on destroying the core of al-Qaeda (AQ) in Afghanistan-Pakistan… the goal was to dismantle AQ, breaking it apart into a series of smaller, regional groups that could then be dealt with by local governments, assisted by the international community through training, equipment, advisory efforts and targeted strikes.”⁸ This strategy, which maintained an unlimited objective, rested on the assumption that “to succeed, bin Laden’s people had to inject themselves into others’ conflicts on a global scale, twist local grievances and exploit them for their own transnational ends… Take away its ability to aggregate the effects of such groups, and AQ’s threat would be hugely diminished.”⁹

As Kilcullen explains it, the strategy envisioned an unlimited objective regarding al-Qaeda as a whole and groups beyond its core in South Asia but maintained that if the core were to be destroyed, the outlying aspects would be defeated by local powers with American assistance that was short of direct U.S. military intervention beyond the pursuit of limited objectives of preventing the groups from posing threats beyond their localities. Kilcullen, for example, writes, “It was an attempt to… target the central players’ ability to control their franchises, and partner with local governments to defeat threats in their own jurisdictions.”¹⁰

The growing threat regionally in 2013 and 2014 revealed major problems with this assessment of al-Qaeda and the achievability of defeat as an objective, let alone one achievable with limited means, just as it undermined the PPG’s restrictions. Kilcullen writes, “The first part of Disaggregation (dismantle core AQ) was working, the second (help regional partners defeat the local threat and address its causes) was not. If anything, we’d become addicted to killing terrorist leaders, using drones and unilateral special forces raids, as a tacit recognition that partnerships with local governments were not ���ܳ������徱�Բ�.”¹¹

It might be argued that the stated unlimited objective of defeating and destroying al-Qaeda as part of a disaggregation strategy was merely a rhetorical flourish upon a transformative but limited objective of destroying al-Qaeda’s ability to threaten the United States. Even if this is true, it reveals how using the rhetoric of unlimited objectives opens policymakers up to criticism for having not actually destroyed the group in question. This increases the risk of re-escalation or continuation of war and enables jihadist groups to portray even minimal evidence of staying power as a victory.

The unlimited defeat of AQAP constituted a near impossible objective to achieve. AQAP is characterized by factors that make it difficult to defeat: a long history of activity on the part of the organization and other jihadists, decentralization, and a rootedness in societal factors.

AQAP was not a recent and or easily defeated extension of al-Qaeda’s core. It built upon a pre-existing Yemeni hub of the network and a long history of Yemeni involvement in the jihadist movement more broadly. These continuities should not be overemphasized—there have been changes over time in the character of the jihadist networks active in Yemen. However, the long history of activity suggests significant constraints upon unlimited objectives of extirpating AQAP or other movements from the country.

During the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Yemen encouraged its young men to fight against the Soviets—in contrast to the more circumspect support of other Arab states at the time.¹² When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, many of these fighters returned to Yemen and became part of its political environment, playing a role in Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s unification of the country under one government and his rule.¹³ As Yemen scholar Elisabeth Kendall notes, these ties between jihadists and the Yemeni political structure have not disappeared and partially explain recent signs that there may be “possible tacit alliances between AQAP and parts of the Saudi backed Yemeni military fighting in the current war against Houthi rebels.”¹⁴

As foreign fighters were returning to Yemen and taking up roles in the country’s political structure, Bin Laden funded efforts in Yemen against the communist rulers of South Yemen.¹⁵ During this period, al-Qaeda financed what is generally considered its first attack against U.S. interests in the Middle East with a failed set of bombings targeting U.S. military personnel in the country.¹⁶ In the late 1990s al-Qaeda continued to pursue the goal of implanting itself in Yemen in a context marked by a wide variety of Islamist and jihadist politics, some of which embraced violence and some of which did not.¹⁷ Former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine, for example, stated, “When I got there in 1997, there was already an Al Qaeda presence. We knew about it. The Yemenis knew about it. Everyone knew about it,” though she notes that the presence was mostly low-level personnel.¹⁸

In the 2000s, al-Qaeda struck repeatedly against Western interests in Yemen notably carrying out the USS Cole bombing that killed 17 sailors in October 2000 along with two other attacks on ships off of the coast of Yemen: the failed targeting of the USS The Sullivans prior to the Cole bombing and the bombing of the MV Limburg in 2002.¹⁹

The strength of jihadism generally and in particular of al-Qaeda in Yemen during this period should not be exaggerated. In the mid-2000s, there was a short period where it looked like al-Qaeda’s network in Yemen might have been defeated, but it was never destroyed, and kept organizing in Yemen’s prisons until a 2006 prison break helped resuscitate the network, setting the stage for the January 2009 declaration of the formation of AQAP merging al-Qaeda’s hubs in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.²⁰

Meanwhile, the Iraq war supercharged al-Qaeda and jihadist influence across the Middle East, including in Yemen. ²¹ The importance of this dynamic in Yemen may have been underestimated because the Yemeni government arrested many supporters of jihadist causes making it appear that the threat was low, but radicalization and organization continued in Yemen’s prisons, setting the groundwork for what is often represented as a sudden surge of strength following a prison break in 2006.²² As the terrorism scholar Audrey Kurth Cronin writes, “Those of us pleading in 2002 that the invasion was a boneheaded counterterrorism move, that it would unite our enemies and alter the regional balance in favour of Iran, were basically stuck with it afterwards. A strategy must take current facts into account and proceed from there.”²³ AQAP’s reemergence following the supposed counterterrorism victory of the early/mid 2000s warns against dreams of achieving a lasting defeat against AQAP let alone jihadism more broadly in Yemen.

The prospect that AQAP might be defeated as a whole, rather than simply disrupted or denied specific capabilities or objectives, has become more remote over time. AQAP has restructured in important ways, increasingly taking the form of an insurgency capable of holding territory for at least short periods during crises. As it has done so, it has also proliferated front groups and intertwined itself with other militias.²⁴

Some analysts have raised the specter of AQAP’s defeat as a possibility given the right circumstances. Gregory Johnsen, for example, wrote in March 2020, “AQAP is on the verge of defeat for the first time since the group was founded in 2009. Should Batarfi’s time in charge prove short, or should he turn out to be an ineffective leader in the mold of Raymi, AQAP will most likely fragment into regional pieces that are more criminal than terrorist. However, if he is given time and space to rebuild the organization, AQAP could once again emerge as an international threat.”²⁵ It is conceivable that if the United States holds out long enough, and if AQAP fails to either increase its capabilities or rejuvenate its ideological brand, the group could eventually fade away. However, other analysts view AQAP’s recent troubles as more in line with a strategic decision to limit its activity, and do not see recent leadership troubles as presaging an organizational collapse. ²⁶

Not only does a vision of potential defeat require the right set of circumstances, but the understanding of defeat includes groups that continue to exist albeit in more fragmented form. Viewing such a situation as a lasting defeat in the sense that U.S. statements about objectives seem to use is questionable. As Johnsen emphasized in his 2010 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during the 2004 – 2006 period, al-Qaeda in Yemen “appeared as though al-Qaeda had largely been defeated in Yemen” but “both the US and Yemeni governments treated the victory as absolute, failing to realize that a defeated enemy is not a vanquished one.”²⁷

Fragmentation is best analyzed in terms of what specific American objectives and desired end states are rather than utilizing the slippery language of defeat, a language that replicates the issues with the disaggregation strategy broadly when events enable groups to reorganize. As Yemen scholar Elizabeth Kendall notes, “The gradual decentralization and/or fragmentation of Yemen’s jihad movements have made the labels AQAP and ISY no longer as relevant. This does not mean the terrorist threat is diminishing, but rather that it is evolving.”²⁸

AQAP also built upon a tradition of jihadism in Saudi Arabia. That history includes pan-Islamist militancy dating to at least the 1970s; transnational but not global revolutionary jihadism dating to the mid-1980s; a significant global, revolutionary jihadist movement along the lines of Bin Laden’s ideology dating from the mid-1990s; and an actual al-Qaeda organization that carried out a terrorist campaign in the 2000s.²⁹

It is important not to overstate the extent of continuity between the prior group named al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that carried out the terror campaign in Saudi Arabia and today’s AQAP. To some extent, the merger was a propagandistic effort to cover for the demise of the group in Saudi Arabia.³⁰ Whatever the extent of continuity, the merger shows that, because of its propagandistic attempt to demonstrate continuity, al-Qaeda had already taken on a decentralized form that allowed it to resist defeat. Thomas Hegghammer, a critic of theories of continuity, writes, “By adopting the name AQAP in 2009, Yemeni militants sought to create an impression of continuity where there was none. It was an attempt to gloss over the very real defeat suffered by al-Qa’ida in Saudi Arabia in the mid 2000s. Judging by the media coverage following the 2009 Detroit incident, this public-relations ploy largely succeeded.”³¹

Al-Qaeda’s history in Saudi Arabia—and the history of Saudi jihadism more broadly—is relevant as the 2019 attack in Pensacola, while coordinated and claimed by AQAP, was also rooted in the continuing traditions of jihadism in Saudi Arabia, where the perpetrator came from. Arguments that military action can destroy the external capability that gave rise to the Pensacola attack by destroying the organization have to wrestle with the rootedness of jihadism in Saudi society and not just the dynamics in Yemen.

While the seeming success in Saudi Arabia may have suggested to some that al-Qaeda could be defeated, the Saudi case is a weak example. For one thing, Saudi Arabia was and is in a far better position in terms of state capacity while economic and social conditions in Yemen provided strong opportunities for AQAP to grow and resurge even were it disrupted or organizationally destroyed.³²

Even so, Saudi Arabia has shown little capacity to eliminate the jihadist movement and al-Qaeda and ISIS organizing despite its relative success in ending the original Saudi-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s campaign of terror.³³ Saudi Arabia was a major source for fighters traveling to Syria and suffered a campaign of domestic terrorist attacks in 2015 and 2016.³⁴

AQAP’s targeting of the West further reveals the extent to which decentralization had already given rise to a resilient and difficult to defeat threat at the time the United States initiated its direct counterterrorism war in Yemen. This is visible in the story of Anwar Awlaki, who played a major role in hastening the decentralization of global jihadism.³⁵

Awlaki’s role in helping to decentralize jihadism was itself rooted in the continuity of the global jihadist movement on the Arabian Peninsula. Awlaki was heavily influenced by the work of the late Yusuf al-Uyayree, a Saudi who became involved in jihadist organizing in the 1990s, trained in Afghanistan, and was the founding leader of al-Qaeda’s organization in Saudi Arabia. Awlaki translated his Constants on the Path of Jihad into English and praised his work highly.³⁶ The work, which went on to be cited by many who engaged in terrorist activity globally likely would not have been available in English were it not for Awlaki.³⁷

One of the important points made by Uyayree was a theological argument that as Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens describes it in his analysis of Uyayree’s influence on Awlaki, “Jihad was not dependent upon a single individual or organization.”³⁸ As Meleagrou-Hitchens writes, “Because the global jihad is a movement that transcends formal groups and personalities, al-Uyayree also argued that it is not subject to formal understandings of victory and defeat.”³⁹

Similar arguments have appeared in more recent AQAP propaganda. For example, a 2021 AQAP video titled “A Message to the American People” stated, “Even if you eliminate the last man in al-Qaeda and smash it, do not think that you will enjoy peace and security,” adding, “your security is still at risk as long as you fight Islam and Muslims under different names, including ‘counterterrorism.’”⁴⁰

AQAP’s presentation of itself as decentralized and fluid aligns with broader Yemeni interpretations of al-Qaeda’s nature. This decentralization poses a challenge to any objective of defeating AQAP. As Sarah Phillips argues, American counterterrorism policy in Yemen truncates the local, more fluid understanding of what al-Qaeda is (including the view that there are multiple al-Qaedas and it is an appendage of elite politics) in order to make it legible as a rational and bounded organization and thus targetable by counterterrorism methods.⁴¹ As Phillips argues, this dynamic—regardless of whether the claims about al-Qaeda’s nature are true or not—means that strategies focused on disrupting the organization and reducing its appeal among the population cannot provide the type of defeat the United States is seeking. This is because “destroying one of its coexisting meanings will not defeat the group because other opaque relationships inevitably survive it.”⁴² This issue intersects with the problem that the general understanding of unlimited objectives is tied to the defeat of governments in wars between states, and it is arguably not possible to formulate coherent concepts of unlimited objectives when it comes to non-state movements that lack the structure of a state.⁴³

Finally, AQAP’s and the jihadist movement’s resilience in Yemen must be analyzed not just in terms of individual or organizational continuities but also as a symptom of broader conditions in Yemen. A focus on individual stories of continuity can overemphasize the ability of military force to achieve victories by artificially separating individuals from the context that led them to engage in violence and tie it to the jihadist movement in the first place.⁴⁴ It can also situate too much importance in the organizational form while obscuring broader patterns of militancy.

Islamism and politics generally in Yemen are highly fluid, and important figures often move between or hold simultaneous ties to different movements.⁴⁵ This is particularly true in the current context of ongoing civil war. While many tribal figures and others are wary of AQAP and its broader agenda, Houthi advances have at times generated support for the group as a bulwark against what many perceive as a greater enemy.⁴⁶ Hussam Radman, a researcher fellow with the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and correspondent for Dubai TV, writes, “Local relations with and attitudes toward AQAP in Yemen should thus be understood as complex dynamics largely based on pragmatic considerations. These include developments in local security, political and social circumstances, and shifts in the prevailing balance of power, with unwavering ideological support for AQAP held by few.”⁴⁷ The complex web of relations that do not fully align with Western counterterrorism objectives—particularly unlimited objectives—also extends to the Houthis’ interactions with AQAP.⁴⁸

Under such conditions, assessments of AQAP’s position and resilience that focus on the group’s history or level of activity can miss how the broader war shapes the group’s reach and the decision of individuals to connect with or participate in the movement.⁴⁹ To make matters even more complex, Elisabeth Kendall notes, “It is possible that some of the fighters themselves are unsure precisely whose grand design they are part of, and they may not even care, as long as they are fighting their immediate enemies and earning a wage.”⁵⁰

Yemen also faces multiple socio-economic crises that make it difficult to sustainably defeat jihadists in the country. Even before the current bout of civil war, 47 percent of Yemen’s population lived in poverty—a number that spiked to more than 74 percent by the end of 2019.⁵¹ Yemen’s latest bout of civil war added to the country’s humanitarian and economic problems while generating ever more complex power relations involving an array of military groups and thus challenging the ability of governance institutions to function.⁵² Much of the economic disruption has the potential to persist even if the civil war ends.⁵³ Environmental crises exacerbate Yemen’s political and socio-economic crises, and climate change is likely to increase their salience over time.⁵⁴

Yemen’s many socio-economic crises help generate grievances that jihadists and other armed factions can appeal to while undermining competing political frames, making it unlikely that a group like al-Qaeda can be fully eliminated. A survey of Yemeni religious actors identified by researchers as Salafi, suggested that they “overwhelmingly felt that violence and terrorism in Yemen are more directly related to endemic, structural concerns – including lawlessness, corruption, unemployment, and lack of basic resources – rather than religious, cultural, or ideological factors.”⁵⁵ AQAP’s activities in the past suggest that the group is aware of these crises and seeks to use them to their advantage in recruitment and in gaining support or tolerance from other political powers in Yemen.⁵⁶

Some limited objectives that motivated the U.S. counterterrorism war in Yemen may be achievable. The limited and disruptive objective of killing Anwar Awlaki was achieved with his assassination on September 30, 2011. Former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell similarly argued that a series of drone strikes in 2013 successfully disrupted a plot against U.S. diplomats in Yemen.⁵⁷

The tougher questions involve whether such disruption is sufficient to sate U.S. policymakers’ desires in the absence of broader transformation and whether limited but transformational objectives including the objectives of degrading AQAP’s capability to strike the United States homeland and denying AQAP territory are achievable.

Certain formulations of transformative limited objectives are likely achievable and may already have been achieved. As discussed in the section assessing the threat to the homeland from AQAP, the threat appears to have declined in part due to U.S. strikes. Similarly, AQAP has struggled to hold territory in Yemen, losing its gains in Abyan and Mukalla, in part due to military action by the United States and its partners.

However, caution is required. First, assessments of the degradation of AQAP’s capabilities to carry out external attacks or take territory may be exaggerated. While most analysts agree that AQAP’s capabilities have declined to some extent, and this report assesses that AQAP’s external attack capabilities have markedly declined, there is far more work to be done in studying the group’s capabilities and providing greater transparency on the government’s assessments.

Second, even if limited objectives are achievable, the United States has not defined its limited but transformational objectives in ways that would allow their success to be measured. Instead, the objective has been stated as “degrade” without explanation of what the capabilities should be degraded to—unless the assumed end is 100 percent security from external attack and 100 percent denial of AQAP’s capability to resurge as a territorial power in Yemen, both of which are likely impossible to achieve.

Third, there are potential explanations for the decline in AQAP’s capabilities that do not derive from America’s counterterrorism strikes. These include the rise of ISIS, which may have deprived AQAP of recruits and support.⁵⁸ While ISIS has not developed a strong foothold in Yemen, according to Abderazzaq al-Jamal, who interviewed former AQAP members, ISIS’s rise along with other factors severely damaged AQAP’s legitimacy and brand, an important factor in the group’s recent struggles.⁵⁹ Another possible explanation is that the latest bout of civil war in Yemen collapsed the connections to the West that AQAP relied upon for its external attack capability. Yet another possible explanation is that law enforcement and intelligence efforts short of warfare were the primary factor in the decline in AQAP’s capabilities.

In terms of AQAP’s local capabilities, their decline may have more to do with the vagaries of the larger civil war than it does with a relatively low number of American air strikes. If these factors are the primary cause of AQAP’s decline, it is an error for American strategists to cite them to demonstrate that the American strategy made sense and was not an embrace of endless war.

Fourth, even if strikes diminished AQAP’s capabilities, it is possible that such declines are not maintainable without continued application of American military force. AQAP has a history of intentionally withdrawing from territory under pressure and then resurging when the pressure eases.⁶⁰

The question of whether the United States developed plans for war termination and exit options, and the difficulties of turning the Yemen war over to a partner to secure U.S. interests without direct U.S. involvement is examined in the next section. The potential that there are not good options for war termination in Yemen produces a risk that pursuing limited objectives rather than accepting some level of inevitable threat might produce a “mowing the grass” strategy of repeated raiding. Counterterrorism analysts, officials, and drone pilots have all described the U.S. drone war generally—inclusive of that in Yemen—as having already taken on the character of a mowing the grass strategy.⁶¹

By not framing its war in terms of specific limited objectives, the United States has avoided the task of determining whether its limited objectives are just and achievable. It has also avoided resolving questions about tradeoffs between different limited objectives. A similar failure to specify and analyze objectives contributed to the U.S. policy failure in the early phases of the Syrian civil war, even as the United States sought to limit its involvement.⁶² The seeming separation of the strength of AQAP’s external attack apparatus from its domestic strength, and allegations that U.S. partners have negotiated with and relied upon militias with ties to al-Qaeda, suggest that limited objectives in Yemen may pose significant trade offs rather than easily aligning.

The Yemen war’s twists and turns provide a warning against assuming that temporary successes, whether in denying AQAP territory or degrading particular capabilities, will last. War, once started, is unpredictable and destructive. It is one of the reasons that decisions to initiate such wars should involve far greater public deliberation than they have.

Some analysts view jihadist groups as a persistent threat to the United States and its vital interests that requires transformative steps. While acknowledging AQAP’s recent setbacks, they argue that these and the lower level of threat to the United States are the product of ongoing military pressure from the United States.

These analysts thus attribute the seeming endlessness of the war in Yemen (or at least its lack of resolution) to the failure to pursue transformative and unlimited objectives. Daniel Green, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development and was a fellow with the Washington Institute, argued in 2019 that a strategy focused on counterterrorism strikes would fail, advocating instead that the United States should adopt governance-focused counterinsurgency methods with the objective of defeating AQAP.⁶³ The American Enterprise Institute’s Katherine Zimmerman similarly warns that “chasing down terrorist leaders without helping the communities they prey on is a recipe for prolonging, not ending, the war on terror.”⁶⁴ She adds, “The global war on terror has become an endless war because the U.S. has yet to adopt an approach that will defeat the Salafi-jihadi groups at the heart of this terror threat. The cycle of military deployments—costly in both American blood and treasure—will not end so long as the conditions remain.”⁶⁵

Zimmerman argued that a new model was necessary in Yemen. In a September 2015 report, published during the period in which AQAP had seized territory including the port city of Mukalla but before the group withdrew from those holdings, she pointed to the collapse of the Yemeni government as counterterrorism partner and the challenges that presented to argue in favor of a strategy that replaced targeted killing of key figures with a course of action that involves “multiple lines of effort, working with regional and local partners, to defeat AQAP and negotiate a political solution to the Yemen crisis.”⁶⁶ She framed the argument as a case for the pursuit of unlimited and transformational objectives, writing, “The United States has never fully taken on the challenge that Yemen presents. American strategic interests in Yemen remain limited: prevent al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) or any other group from targeting the American homeland, people, and regional infrastructure, and prevent regional instability.”⁶⁷

Such arguments deserve attention. There is a real risk that efforts to end America’s endless war in Yemen by simply halting the use of force could result in not an end to America’s war but in a strategy of repeated raids and wars, each portrayed as a separate war for specific limited objectives, the accomplishment of which never proves satisfying, recreating an endless state of war in another guise.⁶⁸ One of the core lessons that comes from defining endless war is that it is not defined by troop numbers and that pursuing transformative or unlimited objectives with limited means is likely to backfire catastrophically.⁶⁹

To some extent, the United States appears to have moved towards the approach described by Zimmerman with the result of AQAP being pushed out of its territorial holdings. This was not a small thing. However, that partial success also illustrates the limits of the strategy. Insofar as transformative objectives are tied into the unlimited objective of defeat, the United States is likely to eventually find itself in a situation where it has reduced the threat from AQAP without destroying it.⁷⁰ At that point, the desire to find a permanent solution to the potential challenge of AQAP’s resurgence is a route to preventive war logic and permanent war. There may be reasonable debate over whether the threat from Yemen is sufficiently degraded to halt U.S. activity or about whether gains have been sustainably achieved. But holding to unlimited objectives kicks the can of decision down the road and discourages the needed development of war termination plans.

Because transformative objectives of degrading AQAP and retaking territory were tied to an unlimited objective, it was insufficient to end the U.S. war. Thus in 2019, after AQAP’s withdrawals, Zimmerman warned that recent successes in minimizing the strength of AQAP, particularly via direct U.S. strikes and support for the Emiratis, might be transitory, having been composed of reversing recent AQAP territorial gains rather than uprooting their base of support while contending that in the absence of broader transformation, noting, they are “unlikely to yield permanent success.”⁷¹ This led her to urge a policy approach that “helps shape Emirati operations in Yemen and nests the counterterrorism effort into a larger effort to resolve the underlying drivers of instability in the country.”⁷²

Yet there is little reason to believe that governance efforts provide a real exit out of the conflict or ensure permanent safety from an AQAP resurgence. For some, the emphasis on governance as an alternative may be appealing in part because it speaks to a real need for transformation, but in practice governance-focused military strategies rarely resolve the challenges that face a strategy focused on air strikes. Air strikes and governance focused counterinsurgency, often seen as opposed to each other, can easily co-exist in practice.⁷³ In addition, representations of governance-focused counterinsurgency as separate and effective in the absence of substantial coercion supported by violence can misread the history of cases of counterinsurgent success, as well as the broader history of state-building’s relationship to violence.⁷⁴

Tying U.S. efforts to address systemic issues to a constant war footing in pursuit of an unlimited objective of destroying AQAP is likely to be counterproductive. There is little evidence that the United States is capable of achieving expansive, transformational objectives via military force.⁷⁵ Moreover, pursuing such objectives risks generating new resentments and leading to resistance.⁷⁶ Such resistance may take the form of new social bases for jihadism rooted in the losers of the transformation, or it may take other forms.

Tying state building to U.S. military efforts (particularly when the objective is as far-off and difficult to envision as the total defeat of AQAP) is particularly risky in Yemen because of the ongoing civil war. Attempts at rapid centralization of power are likely to contribute to the conflict, and thus would be self-defeating.⁷⁷ Meanwhile, the limits of the United States’ partners, whose strategic approaches in Yemen and whose own partners are not entirely separable from AQAP, pose the risk that the pursuit of transformative objectives could further splinter partnerships in ways the United States will find hard to control.⁷⁸ There is also a risk that transformative objectives could become further intertwined with the U.S. and Saudi competition with Iran.

For these reasons, the best approach is to clearly define limited objectives for the American counterterrorism war while committing to the importance of transformation in Yemen directed at bringing the civil war to an end, addressing the larger societal crises that face Yemen, and creating infrastructure for counterterrorism cooperation, preferably via non-militarized means but, if need be, via further limited military action with specifically defined authorizations and ends.

Advocates of strategies that maintain unlimited objectives are not wrong to criticize the dangers of the counterterrorism strategy that has long predominated in Yemen and may even be right to emphasize the need for transformative objectives of denying specific territories or degrading AQAP’s organizational capabilities. They are certainly right to warn of the risks of pursuing limited objectives while failing to resolve systemic political crises. However, rather than a route out of the endlessness, the continued connection of such arguments to the mirage of an unlimited defeat of AQAP misses how such a vision was present in the earlier phases of the war. It therefore also misses how unlimited objectives contributed and will likely continue to contribute to policy failure and endlessness.

Other experts have embraced the emerging frame of sustainable counterterrorism. The Washington Institute’s Matthew Levitt presents one vision of what sustainable counterterrorism might mean. He argues, “Counterterrorism efforts should not be viewed in terms of victory or defeat, but rather as an ongoing effort—short of both war and peace.”⁷⁹ Under Levitt’s strategy, “the U.S. military will still play critical counterterrorism roles, both leading in cases where terrorism threatens the homeland or American interests abroad and supporting partner-led efforts elsewhere around the world.”⁸⁰ The deployments would be restricted to particular situations and small although they could still be “open-ended.”⁸¹ Such military approaches would be combined with greater emphasis on diplomacy and other tools. Levitt suggests the “goal of counterterrorism” in such an approach would be to “to transform the problem from a national security priority to a law enforcement issue.”⁸²

Levitt contends that the few open-ended commitments his approach would allow, would be the “polar opposite of ‘forever wars’ in their size, cost, and risk.”⁸³ This echoes similar arguments about defense in depth from critics of the concept of endless war, including former Secretary of Defense James Mattis.⁸⁴ Levitt is right that not all open-ended military presences necessarily constitute forever wars, but the kinds of offensive missions and support activity the United States is carrying out in places like Yemen certainly meet the bill.

To the extent that Levitt is not just wrongly equating size of commitment with endlessness, it is by making a case that the open-ended commitments are not endless because they would come to an end when the United States succeeds in the global transformative goal he lays out. The wars might be long, and some presence may be permanent, but the war would not be endless.

However, sustainable counterterrorism retains too many of the problems that faced prior approaches and is prone to institutionalizing endless war. When it is framed as continuous pursuit of limited objectives via the ongoing monitoring and military disruption of threats it mirrors the strategic concept of “mowing the grass.”⁸⁵ Such an approach is less a strategy than an admission of strategic incoherence, vulnerable to disruption by systemic shifts in context.⁸⁶ It also risks misdiagnosing the type of endlessness in the wars it continues, presuming the roots of endless war lie mainly in unachievable, expansive objectives—and not also in the unclear and unstable selection of limited objectives that may themselves be unachievable.

The posture of monitoring and disruption even amid degraded threats easily gives rise to preventive war logic. Sustainable counterterrorism thus risks generating preventive war paradoxes that promote further destabilization. This is particularly dangerous if the United States is nesting its open-ended preventive counterterrorism actions within a strategic doctrine of great power competition or with partners engaged in escalating regional rivalries.

Viewing sustainable counterterrorism as a way of transforming the war back into a law enforcement issue is risky. It puts forward a global transformative objective, and thus re-globalizes and re-aggregates the war. It also leaves the details of how much the threat needs to be degraded to justify an end under-addressed, allowing unlimited objectives to fill in as the end point.⁸⁷

Sustainable counterterrorism also downplays the risk that unexpected changes will bring escalation rather than a trend towards reduced threats. The way the 2014 PPG was quickly overtaken by events illustrates this danger. Sustainable counterterrorism risks replaying the failed Obama synthesis of unlimited and limited objectives, which saw the United States become addicted to targeted killing as its broader approach was overwhelmed by changing systemic conditions. The United States failed to resolve the conflicts that it sought to localize and often made them more intractable.

Sustainable counterterrorism also risks a return to unlimited objectives when conditions worsen. Limited objectives can quickly turn into unlimited ones, as the counter-ISIS war showed.⁸⁸ Maintaining multiple open-ended commitments tied to an ongoing state of war increases the chance of such a reversion.

Sustainable counterterrorism’s approach to partners can also further institutionalize endlessness. Rather than handing off responsibility and ending wars, it tends to nest small U.S. forces with restricted rules of engagement within a larger outsourced military effort. Such nesting can lead to an over-identification with and reliance on American partners, limiting the United States’ ability to demand strategically important governance reforms.⁸⁹

Sustainable counterterrorism may prove to be a stepping stone to ending endless counterterrorism war. However, it risks deepening the endlessness. Rather than seeking a sustainable counterterrorism posture with an ongoing military aspect, the United States should prioritize ending its endless wars while acknowledging that immediate disengagement may not be the best approach in all cases.