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I started this website in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the launching of what President George W. Bush quickly labeled "the Global War on Terror." And here we are, 22 years after Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stood in the ruins of the Pentagon and told an aide, "Near term target needs go massive sweep it all up, things related and not." In retrospect, that "and not" proved almost beyond imagining. The invaluable Costs of War Project has estimated, for instance, that, thanks directly to the war on terror, nearly one million people on this planet have died and at least 3.6 million deaths were related, however indirectly, to it.
So, it's worth asking: Did anyone or any institution benefit from all that war-making (other than some still spreading terror groups)? Well, you could certainly say that the U.S. military did. Forget that it proved truly victorious nowhere in the more than two decades that followed 9/11, and just consider that it's now the most well-financed military on the planet by a country mile. Within the next few years, its annual budget could reach a trillion dollars, no small thing for a military that, in this century, has proven capable of winning so little. Just imagine that, after so many years of failure, this country now accounts for nearly 40% of all military expenditures on Planet Earth, more than the next 10 countries combined. Wouldn't you call that a victory of the first order?
Stranger yet, after so many years despite disasters from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond as TomDispatch regular and managing editor Nick Turse makes strikingly clear in his latest piece, that all-too-well-funded military is still fighting the war President Bush launched against terror groups, even if now on a continent that few Americans think about: Africa. Let Turse, who has followed this country's African (mis)adventures in a way no other reporter has, fill you in on its never-ending set of conflicts there and the terror groups that help it go on, and on, and on, and on. Tom
The Pentagon Proclaims Failure in its War on Terror in Africa
America's Forever Wars Yield a 75,000% Increase in Terror Attacks
By Nick Turse
America's Global War on Terror has seen its share of stalemates, disasters, and outright defeats. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, the United States has watched its efforts implode in spectacular fashion, from Iraq in 2014 to Afghanistan in 2021. The greatest failure of its "Forever Wars," however, may not be in the Middle East, but in Africa.
"Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated," President George W. Bush told the American people in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, noting specifically that such militants had designs on "vast regions" of Africa.
To shore up that front, the U.S. began a decades-long effort to provide copious amounts of security assistance, train many thousands of African military officers, set up dozens of outposts, dispatch its own commandos on all manner of missions, create proxy forces, launch drone strikes, and even engage in direct ground combat with militants in Africa. Most Americans, including members of Congress, are unaware of the extent of these operations. As a result, few realize how dramatically America's shadow war there has failed.
The raw numbers alone speak to the depths of the disaster. As the United States was beginning its Forever Wars in 2002 and 2003, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in Africa. This year, militant Islamist groups on that continent have, according to the Pentagon, already conducted 6,756 attacks. In other words, since the United States ramped up its counterterrorism operations in Africa, terrorism has spiked 75,000%.
Let that sink in for a moment.
75,000%.
A Conflict that Will Live in Infamy
The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq opened to military successes in 2001 and 2003 that quickly devolved into sputtering occupations. In both countries, Washington's plans hinged on its ability to create national armies that could assist and eventually take over the fight against enemy forces. Both U.S.-created militaries would, in the end, crumble. In Afghanistan, a two-decade-long war ended in 2021 with the rout of an American-built, -funded, -trained, and -armed military as the Taliban recaptured the country. In Iraq, the Islamic State nearly triumphed over a U.S.-created Iraqi army in 2014, forcing Washington to reenter the conflict. U.S. troops remain embattled in Iraq and neighboring Syria to this very day.
In Africa, the U.S. launched a parallel campaign in the early 2000s, supporting and training African troops from Mali in the west to Somalia in the east and creating proxy forces that would fight alongside American commandos. To carry out its missions, the U.S. military set up a network of outposts across the northern tier of the continent, including significant drone bases - from Camp Lemonnier and its satellite outpost Chabelley Airfield in the sun-bleached nation of Djibouti to Air Base 201 in Agadez, Niger and tiny facilities with small contingents of American special operations troops in nations ranging from Libya and Niger to the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
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