Endless wars, suffering, loss
US-led military interventions cost about 900,000 lives since 2001, while terrorism continues to flourish
Until two weeks ago, Zemari Ahmadi, an electrician and aid worker in Kabul, had been helping the Americans who in late 2001 invaded Afghanistan, toppled the Taliban government and occupied the country.
On Aug 29, a day before the United States withdrew its last forces from Afghanistan, Ahmadi, 43, had just parked his Toyota at home after getting buckets of drinking water from the office of his US employer for whom he had worked since 2006, and dropping off some friends or workmates.
His family, mostly children, rushed out to greet him, when a drone strike launched by US forces hit them. Ten people, including Ahmadi, were killed by the strike. Among the children who died was one just 2 years old, according to reporting by several media outlets, including New York Magazine and CNN.
US intelligence and the military claimed to have killed two terrorists, likely suicide bomber suspects. The US works hard to avoid civilian casualties, said John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, on Aug 30.
However, facts suggest the opposite. Research by Brown University in the US said by April more than 71,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians were estimated to have died as a direct result of the Afghan war.
And nearly 33,000 children were killed and maimed in Afghanistan during the 20-year war, or one child every five hours, according to the international humanitarian organization Save the Children.
According to the London-based research charity Action on Armed Violence, in 2018 alone, 236 minors were killed by US airstrikes and another 256 were injured. In 2019, the US Air Force was responsible for more than two-thirds of child casualties from airstrikes, AOAV said.
The conditions for the majority of Afghanistan people did not improve in decades. Fridoon, a young Kabul resident, told Xinhua News Agency that “the US, with its allies in Afghanistan, has left the local people miserable. Today, we see that the country and the youth are in a bad situation.”
“In the name of democracy,” said Fazil Rahman Pason, also from Kabul, the Western forces “harmed our religion. They deceived the people.”
The US government’s decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq marked the beginning of a decades-long involvement in both countries, and the “disastrous response” to the 9/11 terrorist attacks 20 years ago has led to dire consequences, said former US state legislator Greg Cusack.
“No doubt, the US-led war on terror in Afghanistan has utterly failed,” Abu Muslim Khorasani, a professor at Rana University in Afghanistan, said on Sept 12.
Among reasons Khorasani listed for Washington’s “humiliating defeat” is “disharmony among the Pentagon, the Department of State and intelligence services” since the early days of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Another is the lack of a comprehensive policy and US double standards towards Afghanistan, he added.
“Under the pretext of destroying terrorists, it invaded Afghanistan. Obviously, Washington attacked Afghanistan to seek its own interests
in the region,” Khorasani said.
“The current situation in Afghanistan — uncertainty, poverty, unemployment and thousands of Afghans rushing to flee their country — clearly demonstrated the outcome of the socalled US war on terror as nothing but turmoil,” he said.
The US “war on terror” waged since the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks has caused senseless and unrecoverable destruction and division, renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs said.
“A lot of societies faced a lot of destruction, millions of lives lost,” as well as utter desolation of infrastructures
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, he said.
Claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, a claim that was later proven false, the US invaded the Middle Eastern country in 2003.
More than 200,000 Iraqi civilians were reported to have been killed by direct violence after the US-led invasion of the country.
In Mosul, northern Iraq, Ali alSaadi found it beyond his imagination that the Sept 11 terrorist attacks in a place so far away would leave his home in ruins, friends dead or injured and his child maimed.
“My house was destroyed, and I have a child who was disabled during the bombardment when my house fell on us,” he said. The bombing, carried out by the US-led coalition in 2016 and 2017, left the city in ruins.
In Syria, the US entered the country in 2014 without the consent of the Syrian government, but its presence has singularly failed to end a civil war.
The so-called war on terror “has been long and complex and horrific and unsuccessful,” said Catherine Lutz, co-director of the Costs of War project and a professor of international and public affairs at Brown University.
The project estimated the toll from the US-led war at 897,000 to 929,000 deaths — from bombs, bullets or fire. They included 375,505 civilians, the university revealed online.
In a rare move to acknowledge any civilian casualties, the Pentagon in early 2010 released a report on a drone strike in southern Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province on Feb 21, 2010, which killed 23 civilians and wounded 12 others, criticizing a drone crew for the deadly mistake.
The following years saw often denials and evasions from the US. On July 19, 2018, US airstrikes on a residential compound in Chahar Dara district, Kunduz province, killed 14 women and children.
The US military initially denied any civilian casualties, and only conducted a probe after “significant protest” from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.
To make its airstrike campaign even more opaque, the US Central Command stopped publishing summaries of airstrikes in Afghanistan from March 2020, leaving no figures for airstrikes after February 2020.
“The deaths we tallied are likely a vast undercount of the true toll these wars have taken on human life,” said Neta Crawford, a co-founder of the project and a professor of political science at Boston University.
“It’s critical we properly account for the vast and varied consequences of the many US wars and counterterror operations since 9/11 as we pause and reflect on all of the lives lost.”
Not all perceived global problems are susceptible to amelioration through the use of military force, which often only deepen the problems, said Tom Plate, a professor and scholar of Asian and Pacific studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, in the US.
Moreover, despite 20 years of wars and military actions by the US and its allies, they have failed to eliminate terrorism. Instead, analysts say, terrorist groups have flourished.
In Afghanistan, three terrorist groups were recorded in 2001, but by the time the US left on Aug 30, more than 20 such groups had emerged.
In Iraq, chaos caused by the US-led invasion not only encouraged terrorism to continue, but also forced it to cross borders and become a regional issue, said Hashim al-Shamma, a political researcher at the Iraqi Center for Legal Development, a nongovernmental organization.
“Under the slogan of combating terrorism, the United States is trying to extend its control all over the world,” al-Shamma said.
Decrying the hypocrisy of the global “war on terror,” George Galloway, a former British member of parliament, pointed out that the West planted the seeds for many terrorist organizations it is dealing with today.
“The presence of this ... ISIS, AlQaida mentality has now spread all over the world. And of course, Britain and America are supporting it in some parts of the world, whilst opposing it in other parts of the world,” said Galloway. “Today’s militants were undoubtedly created by us, by the West.”
Galloway said he believes the brutality of warfare is what creates future enemies. “And that’s what we’ve been doing for the last 20 years.”