Will the war on terrorism ever end?

A decade after U.S. troops returned to Iraq to fight the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate, Washington, D.C., and Baghdad are nearing the end of monthslong negotiations on a U.S. military withdrawal. According to a Sept. 6 Reuters report , U.S. and Iraqi defense officials have come to a preliminary arrangement in which U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq will withdraw by the end of 2026, with the first few hundred troops to make their way out by September 2025.

The news comes days after U.S. special operations forces teamed up with Iraqi army commandos to flush out ISIS militants in the mountainous far-Western Iraq, where a senior ISIS figure was the primary target. Seven Americans were wounded in the operation, one of 250 joint missions Washington and Baghdad have executed together since October.

As expected, rumors of an impending U.S. drawdown are getting Beltway foreign policy analysts nervous. The Hudson Institute's Luke Coffey wrote that leaving Iraq in the rearview mirror is ill-advised since the Iraqi army still isn’t up to its full capabilities.

"[ISIS] is hard to keep down — a task made all the more difficult if the United States winds up removing its remaining troops from Syria and Iraq prematurely,” said the Washington Post 's Max Boot, agreeing with Coffey.

If you’re surprised by the fire-breathing, doomsday prognostications, you shouldn’t be. Whenever even pontifications of a U.S. withdrawal are on the horizon, the same analysts take to the same op-ed pages and write the same arguments about how Iraq will again be inundated by a wave of jihadist violence the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since 2013-2014, when ISIS routed the Iraqi army and took advantage of Syria’s civil war to claim territory about the size of the United Kingdom.

Yet the situation is different today. While the counter-ISIS coalition states that ISIS is on pace to double its number of attacks in Iraq and Syria this year compared to last, the question is less about quantity than quality. Thus far, ISIS’s operations in both countries have been low-grade and unsophisticated, focused largely on hitting Iraqi army and Syrian Kurdish checkpoints and patrols and seeking to spring ISIS detainees out of prison, not exactly a sign of a group on the upswing. Then there’s the question of whether ISIS’s pace of attacks can be sustained over a longer period of time, which is no sure thing given the fact that the Iraqi security apparatus has had a decade to learn from its previous boneheaded mistakes.

Critics of a pullout will argue that Washington hasn’t defeated ISIS yet. In the traditional military sense of the term, that’s a correct statement. ISIS fighters still have a presence in both Iraq and Syria, with a United Nations report earlier this year assessing there are still 3,000 to 5,000 of them left. Ideally, all of them would either be dead or in prison.

But just as Israel is never going to kill or capture every last Hamas terrorist in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon , the U.S. isn’t going to kill or capture every last terrorist in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, Somalia, or wherever else they happen to be at any given time. This is why Washington’s persistent “enduring defeat of ISIS” language is so peculiar: It implies the U.S. counterterrorism machine can both extinguish the terrorist group and keep it extinguished for eternity, in which case then and only then can Washington begin to pull out forces. And even at that point, there would still be people making the argument that the troops couldn’t leave because success needs to be maintained indefinitely. As long as the U.S. insists on taking on the counterterrorism version of climbing Mount Everest with its shirt off, it will continue to set itself up for failure.

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There’s one other thing to consider: Nobody in the Middle East has an interest in seeing a resurrection of ISIS’s territorial caliphate. Iraqis, Syrians, states with a stake in the region’s stability, and even U.S. adversaries such as Russia and Iran remember the ugly years of 2013 and 2014 when it looked as if this super-jihadist army was an unstoppable force prone to expansionism. The U.S., Iran, Russia, Turkey, Iranian-linked militias, Syrian Kurdish forces, the Iraqi Peshmerga, and the Assad regime all did their part in containing and then squashing the caliphate. It took a while and it wasn’t pretty, but the job was done. Remove the U.S. from that equation and all of these local actors still have the same common self-interest in keeping ISIS under the boot.

Hopefully whoever succeeds President Joe Biden in the White House will keep to the schedule.

Daniel DePetris ( @DanDePetris ) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.