After 21 years of the War on Terror, we have to ask what actually has been accomplished? As the Taliban, the governing powers that the United States supposedly ousted in 2001 after it invaded Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, retake the entire nation within a matter of weeks, you have to ask what has been sacrificed on such an obviously failed policy and was it worth it?
This article is dedicated to answering that question and more. Here I chart out the cost in money, material, and men – in human lives – what the cost of the War on Terror has been, why it has been an utter failure, how it has caused lasting harm to American society while devastating millions abroad, how it has actually resulted in more terrorism, and what we can actually do to decrease the threat of terrorism in the world. The War on Terror has been an absolute horror, an international abattoir, and an utter failure. Here is the proof.
The United States
First, lets address what the effects of the War on Terror have been on Americans.
Over 125,000 Americans have died because of the War on Terror, and make no mistake those suicides are people killed by the war just as surely as anyone who died on the battlefield. Those who died by suicide did not kill themselves. They were wounded on the battlefield and it just took them longer to bleed out than it did those who were shot or bombed during open combat.
And of course that doesn’t even discuss the tens of thousands more whose entire lives, hopes, and dreams were destroyed when their children, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, fiancés, and fiancées died. No one has kept accurate records of how many of these people have turned to drugs, alcohol, violence, and self-destruction out of the rage and grief they suffered from the loss of those they loved or the children who fall into poverty, substance abuse, and crime because they grew up in a single parent home or without parents at all.
I would tell you to just think about that number, but you can’t. You have nothing to compare it to in order to understand it. You’ve never seen 6.4 trillion anything, much less dollars. Maybe sands on the beach or in a desert, but that just proves my point as the amount of sand there is so great you can’t comprehend it and what is actually a gathering of trillions of individual crystals just looks like one huge whole to us. And this is the lower end of the estimates. Some estimates push it even higher to $8 trillion!
Think about what society could do with that kind of money. You couldn’t end poverty (as poverty is more of an infrastructure problem today than anything else), but you could certainly make some pretty big strides in that direction. How many people could be educated for that kind of money? How many people could be provided homes for that kind of money? The answer is straightforward. Everyone. You could purchase mansions for every man, woman, child, and pet in the United States and still have trillions left over. Which is not to say some Americans didn’t profit from this massive Socialist redistribution of wealth from the productive private classes to the parasitic – that is government – classes such as the military. In fact, five American companies profited substantially from this robbery of present and future generations.
Tens of thousands of Americans may have died, tens of thousands more crippled, and hundreds of thousands may be suffering form the violent crippling or deaths of their loved ones, but at least military contractors – a.k.a. weapons dealers – profited from everything. This all seems to be according to the plan Osama bin Laden laid out almost two decades ago to explain al-Qaeda’s mission and the reasons behind the 9/11 terror attacks:
All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.
This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.
All Praise is due to Allah.
So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.
Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at American debt spending would have to agree that bin Laden’s plans seem to be working so far, even after his death.
The United States is not going bankrupt. It is bankrupt. Like a drunken fool with a big credit limit (which for a nation is based on its GDP and which you can see above that the US has exceeded) the United States has been spending far more than it can actually pay back. Like a fool who looks around and sees his credit bought goods as personal wealth, most Americans confuse what they see now as wealth. But the signs of illness are everywhere to be seen if you know where to look. For example, look at how often the United States is blasting through its revenues and spending far more than it has.
And that doesn’t even take into account the Covid-19 fiasco spending that has tacked on trillions more in mere months. As that debt grows the temptation to spend even more will likely become irresistible. Debt spending to buy voter support is like heroin, it give a politician a political high that he or she is unable to get any other way. The problem of course being that the crash is worse than anything else. Despite what the apologists who try to dismiss the effects of long term debt spending and the resulting monetary inflation that causes say, these policies are already ravaging the poor. Just look at how they’ve destroyed the value of the dollar, thereby depriving poor people of the buying power their money needs to be able to buy the food, clothing, homes, and other goods that would make their lives better. Poor people are getting more dollars, which are worth less and therefore buy fewer things, and are therefore being robbed by the very government claiming to help them.
Now, I’m sure you’re thinking we can’t blame all that on Osama or even the American military’s response to him. And you’re right, sort of. Bin Laden, having been part of the American efforts to train rebel fighters in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet’s after they invaded the area, well understood the way that military costs had driven American spending over the decades. He knew how that policy had broken the Soviets. He knew that it would be effective with the US government as well, especially as it spent so much money on everything else as well. Bin Laden’s whole goal was to drag America into policies that would break the American economy and make it impossible to continue to carry out the destruction of people in the Middle East and elsewhere. And it has been working. Just look at the national debt. That higher estimate of $8 trillion is one-third of the total national debt and therefore a major contributor to currency value destruction and the impoverishing of the American people. America responded exactly the way Bin Laden wanted and the results have been devastating.
But not just here. The devastation overseas has been far worse.
Internationally
Seven years ago the death tolls from American actions in the Middle East had already slaughtered 2 million people. Three years after this infographic was made it was already out of date, by at least a million deaths, as journalist Nicolas J.S. Davies reports here:
“The Iraq Death Toll 15 Years After the U.S. Invasion” which I co-wrote with Medea Benjamin, estimates the death toll in Iraq as accurately and as honestly as we can in March 2018. Our estimate is that about 2.4 million people have probably been killed in Iraq as a result of the historic act of aggression committed by the U.S. and U.K. in 2003.
Think on that. 2.4 million people, in Iraq alone. Saddam Hussein, the dictator the United States invaded destroy, himself ordered the deaths of 500,000 people. If that makes him a monster worthy of destruction, what does it make the US government and American military that they have conspired to murder nearly five times the amount of people?
In terms of Afghanistan, conservative estimates in 2018 place the amount of deaths between 640,000 people and 1.4 million people. In Pakistan, the estimate had risen to between 150,000 and 500,000 Pakistanis murdered by American military strikes.
Altogether, when you include other places the American military has struck and laid waste to in its efforts to fight terrorism since September 11th, the total death toll has become astounding and overwhelming:
After 16 years of war, about 6 million violent deaths, 6 countries utterly destroyed and many more destabilized, it is urgent that the American public come to terms with the true human cost of our country’s wars and how we have been manipulated and misled into turning a blind eye to them – before they go on even longer, destroy more countries, further undermine the rule of international law and kill millions more of our fellow human beings.
Emphasis my own.
For the record, the Holocaust also killed 6 million people. What does it say about the United States government that it has murdered enough people since 9/11 that it can be compared to the Nazis? What does it say about the American people, that they have allowed so many to be slaughtered?
And what about the people of these nations? How do they feel about America’s military actions two decades later? Well, there are two ways to assess the situation and answer the question. The first is simply to ask the people in the countries most impacted by American military action what they think the results have been.
In every measurement these people think their lives are either just as bad as they were before the United States invaded or things are worse, which is a horrendous achievement considering their previous experiences were with authoritarian dictatorships. this does help explain the next graphic though:
The latest numbers I can find go up to 2017, where you can see a dip after ISIS is broken up, but all levels of terrorism and death from terrorism still remain at similarly high numbers as shown here and form the same nations.
Why has terrorism from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and Nigeria increased so dramatically and so steadily? The answer is simple. And it has nothing to do with religion.
Bin Laden’s own moment came in 1983 and his recollection of it is instructive for those trying to understand the absolute skyrocketing growth of terrorism:
I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.
The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.
I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.
The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn’t respond.
In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.
And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.
Source
Let me ask you a question: How would you feel about the nation that slaughters two million of your countrymen and women – perhaps even your mother, father, wife, or children – whose bombs destroy your home and your job, whose soldiers haunt your streets, whose puppet government is just as brutal and incompetent as your previous dictator if not worse, whose actions have destroyed your cities and wrecked a civilization millennia old? How long would you have to hold the broken body of your own child before you would swear vengeance against the monsters that dashed his body to pieces at your feet?
How long after you saw this girl:
Turned into this broken corpse:
Before you too hate with the fire of a million exploding suns the brutal, wicked, cruel, and evil people who did this and who perpetuate such crimes seemingly at will? Before you swear, “upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” and in the name of justice and self-defense strike back at those who have attacked you?
Of course terrorism is growing. How could anything else ever be the result of such brutal, evil, American stupidity?
How To End Terrorism
So, how do we defeat terrorism? If punching people, shooting people, and bombing people is actually creating more terrorism, then what do we need to do to stop terrorism? Here again, bin Laden’s words prove instructive about what terrorists want and how to end the threat of terrorism from them:
In conclusion, I tell you in truth, that your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaida. No.
Your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn’t play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security.
Source
In other words, if you want people form other countries to stop trying to shoot you, bomb you, and kill you then stop doing it to them. “You want to be left alone? Then leave us alone.”
Simple, right? This makes obvious sense to anyone who hasn’t been propagandized into insensibility. But there is even more we could do.
What if instead of dropping bombs form the air we dropped crates of food on starving populations?
What if instead of delivering laser guided Hellfire missiles fired directly at people we delivered medical equipment?
What if instead of deploying hunter-kill units from the American military we deployed the Salvation Army to provide clothes for everyone?
What if instead of denying nations access to basic good through trade embargoes we open trade with all and freely trade with those in need?
What if instead of supporting dictators and arming tyrants to brutally oppress their own people we allowed people to work out their own internal discord and welcomed their chosen leaders to the world’s stage?
What if instead of destroying infrastructure and natural resources we helped build other nations and making mutually beneficial alliances with them?
There is so much good that could be done in the world that would generate love, admiration, and joy between nations and people, that would undermine everything that causes terrorism by removing all of it, and we cold be doing it right now.
In truth, as with many things, the path to peace and the ending of terrorism can be found in the words of the Carpenter of Nazareth from 2,000 years ago:
“Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the law and the prophets.”
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.”
Matt. 7:2 and John 13:34
My favorite example of this comes form the lives of the brothers Lehi and Nephi. Their people had just lost a long and bitter war against their ancestral foes who were taught from birth to hate their enemies. So, what do Nephi and Lehi do when all their armies fail, when all the killing and brutality and bloodshed and death and destruction are finally over and they lose anyway? Do they mount up like some ancient versions of the Navy Seals and assassinate the enemy leader? Do they carry out raids on enemy territory, level cities, and declare their vengeance? Do they even seek to act in self-defense?
No. They do the exact opposite. Abandoning all weapons and armor they walk into the lands of their enemies and begin to preach to them the teachings of Jesus Christ. Facing violence, imprisonment, and death they do not falter. Instead they testify to the truth of their convictions and to their love for their enemies, resulting in the conversions of thousands who, abandoning the hatreds of the past, freely gave up the lands they had seized through war and returned them to their rightful owners, to Lehi and Nephi’s people. Feats which men and arms and rivers of blood could not accomplish were finally won by kindness, charity, and love.
Let that be a lesson to us all. That is how you defeat terrorism and create peace. Then and now.