The Forever War

​NIMJ’s Laura Dickinson, Still at War: The Forever War Legal Paradigm in Afghanistan. Just Security, April 14, 2022.

The U.S. legal posture towards Afghanistan, therefore, holds ongoing significance. Specifically, we need to ask the question: Does the United States still consider itself to be waging a forever war against terrorist groups in Afghanistan?
The answer so far appears to be yes, even though U.S. President Biden proclaimed that, with the withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from the territory, “the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan — the longest war in American history.” But while fighting against the Taliban may be over (at least for now), Biden has also signaled that the United States will rely on  “over-the-horizon” capabilities to continue the war against terrorist groups in Afghanistan. Indeed, it seems the Biden administration decidedly has not declared the end of the forever war legal paradigm. To the contrary, the U.S. government continues to take the position that it is engaged in a broad, ongoing, transnational armed conflict against al-Qaeda and terrorist groups, including in Afghanistan, and that the dominant international legal framework governing extraterritorial operations against these groups therefore is the law of war, also known as international humanitarian law (IHL).
Why does it matter whether or not we are formally still at war?