The decision by both the Trump and the Biden administration to quit Afghanistan after twenty years of conflict against Islamic jihadis has been accompanied by lots of talk of avoiding "forever wars." The assumption is that it's not in our interest to fight wars that seem to have no definite terminus and that it's foolish to do so. Superficially, this seems sensible, but it belies an ignorance of the history between Islam and the West.
Our popular media often condenses this history into several Crusades scattered over the space of several centuries and which they depict as acts of European aggression against Muslims living peacefully in the Middle East. For example, Wikipedia states that the Crusades were "a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period."
This is very misleading.
The Crusades were actually part of an effort to defend Christian Europe against the "forever war" waged by Islam from the time of its founding in the 7th century until the present day. Shortly after the prophet Muhammad rose to prominence in the 600s A.D. his followers went to war, first against pagans and Jews in the region and then against Christians in Egypt and North Africa.
Their conquests extended over a period of a thousand years and took them all the way across the African coast of the Mediterranean, through Spain and into southern France. They eventually also took what is modern day Turkey and advanced into eastern Europe and much of Russia.
These conquests were wars of aggression, primarily against Christianity, in which the conquered people were tortured, flayed alive, impaled on poles driven through their rectums, burned to death or buried alive, suspended by their ankles upside down and sawn in half from their crotch to their head, decapitated and otherwise massacred by the hundreds of thousands.
This is the fate that befell untold thousands of Christian males at the hands of the Muslims. Those women and children who weren't killed were taken as sex slaves, young boys being especially prized for the purpose. Others who survived were forced to become dhimmis, second class citizens made to pay the jizya, a tax that essentially bought them their lives.
Many others, depending upon circumstances, were given the choice of renouncing their Christianity and embracing Islam or being beheaded.
This is the horror Christians and others faced for a thousand years until roughly the early 1700s and still face today in those lands where Islam is ascendant. Every battle in this "forever war" was essentially an act of self-defense on the part of Christians motivated by appeals from their leaders to fight to protect their wives and children.
The Muslim aggressors were exhorted, on the other hand, to fight hard because if they prevailed they'd get plunder and slaves and be able to rape Christian women and boys. If they died in the effort they'd gain Allah's favor in heaven and experience perpetual sexual bliss from the houris - supernatural, celestial women, "wide-eyed and "big-bosomed," according to the Koran.
We bury our heads in the sand if we think we can avoid the "forever war." Wherever Islamists have the strength their war against the West will continue. Their prophet declared, "I have been commanded [by Allah] to wage war against mankind until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah."
There is indeed a forever war being fought against the West, and the aggressors are those Muslims who follow the words of Muhammad. It will never end as long as there are people who adhere to his teaching or as long as there are those who don't.
When Muslim armies are strong the war is fought militarily with rape, torture and plunder. When they are weak the war is fought via acts of terror, but it is always being fought.
It's a mistake to think that the various conflicts we've witnessed in the last fifty years - Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, etc. - and the various acts of terrorism - 9/11, and all the others - are discrete or isolated acts. They're all the ongoing expression of a single fourteen hundred year struggle by committed Muslims, seeking to follow the commands and example of Mohammad, to convert the world to the pure Islam of their Prophet.
We, like so many Europeans and Africans since the 7th century, delude ourselves if we think we can somehow retreat from the conflict, live in peace and security behind our oceans, and avoid those who demand that we convert or die. It's not an option that the Islamists, to the extent they are able, leave open to us.
For an excellent guide to the history of the conflict between Islam and the West I highly recommend Raymond Ibrahim's very readable account of eight decisive battles between Muslims and the West titled Sword and Scimitar.
His book reads like a novel and will be an eye-opener for those who have only a vague idea of the history of the last millenium and a half and will disabuse the reader of several myths, chief among which is that we can opt out of fighting a "forever war."