{"id":104644,"date":"2018-01-08T12:00:17","date_gmt":"2018-01-08T12:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=104644"},"modified":"2018-01-07T15:12:57","modified_gmt":"2018-01-07T15:12:57","slug":"mapping-a-world-from-hell-76-countries-are-now-involved-in-washingtons-war-on-terror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/01\/mapping-a-world-from-hell-76-countries-are-now-involved-in-washingtons-war-on-terror\/","title":{"rendered":"Mapping a World from Hell: 76 Countries Are Now Involved in Washington\u2019s War on Terror"},"content":{"rendered":"
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America\u2019s war on terror across the globe. Map produced by the Costs of War Project at Brown University\u2019s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.<\/p><\/div>\n

4 Jan 2018 – <\/em>He left Air Force Two behind and, unannounced, \u201cshrouded in secrecy<\/a>,\u201d flew on an unmarked C-17<\/a> transport plane into Bagram Air Base, the largest American garrison in Afghanistan. All news of his visit was embargoed<\/a> until an hour before he was to depart the country.<\/p>\n

More than 16 years after an American invasion \u201cliberated\u201d Afghanistan, he was there to offer some good news to a U.S. troop contingent once again on the rise<\/a>. Before a 40-foot American flag, addressing 500 American troops, Vice President Mike Pence praised them as \u201cthe world\u2019s greatest force for good,\u201d boasted that American air strikes had recently been \u201cdramatically increased,\u201d swore that their country was \u201chere to stay,\u201d and insisted<\/a> that \u201cvictory is closer than ever before.\u201d As an observer noted<\/a>, however, the response of his audience was \u201csubdued.\u201d\u00a0 (\u201cSeveral troops stood with their arms crossed or their hands folded behind their backs and listened, but did not applaud.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Think of this as but the latest episode in an upside down geopolitical fairy tale, a grim, rather than Grimm, story for our age that might begin: Once upon a time — in October 2001, to be exact — Washington launched its war on terror.\u00a0 There was then just one country targeted, the very one where, a little more than a decade earlier, the U.S. had ended a long proxy war<\/a> against the Soviet Union during which it had financed, armed, or backed an extreme set of Islamic fundamentalist groups, including a rich young Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden.<\/p>\n

By 2001, in the wake of that war, which helped send the Soviet Union down the path to implosion, Afghanistan was largely (but not completely) ruled by the Taliban.\u00a0 Osama bin Laden was there, too, with a relatively modest crew of cohorts.\u00a0 By early 2002, he had fled to Pakistan, leaving many of his companions dead and his organization, al-Qaeda, in a state of disarray.\u00a0 The Taliban, defeated, were pleading to be allowed to put down their arms and go back to their villages, an abortive process that Anand Gopal vividly described<\/a> in his book, No Good Men Among the Living<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

It was, it seemed, all over but the cheering and, of course, the planning for yet greater exploits across the region.\u00a0 The top officials in the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were geopolitical dreamers of the first order who couldn\u2019t have had more expansive ideas about how to extend such success to — as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld indicated only days<\/a> after the 9\/11 attacks — terror or insurgent groups in more than 60 countries.\u00a0 It was a point President Bush would reemphasize<\/a> nine months later in a triumphalist graduation speech at West Point.\u00a0 At that moment, the struggle they had quickly, if immodestly, dubbed the Global War on Terror was still a one-country affair.\u00a0 They were, however, already deep into preparations to extend it in ways more radical and devastating than they could ever have imagined with the invasion and occupation of Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraq and the domination of the oil heartlands of the planet that they were sure would follow.\u00a0 (In a comment that caught the moment exactly, Newsweek<\/em> quoted<\/a> a British official “close to the Bush team” as saying, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”)<\/p>\n

So many years later, perhaps it won\u2019t surprise you — as it probably wouldn\u2019t have<\/a> surprised the hundreds of thousands of protesters who turned out in the streets of American cities and towns in early 2003 to oppose the invasion of Iraq — that this was one of those stories to which the adage “be careful what you wish for” applies.<\/p>\n

Seeing War<\/strong><\/p>\n

And it’s a tale that’s not over yet.\u00a0 Not by a long shot.\u00a0 As a start, in the Trump era, the longest war<\/a> in American history, the one in Afghanistan, is only getting longer.\u00a0 There are those U.S. troop levels on the rise<\/a>; those air strikes ramping up<\/a>; the Taliban in control<\/a> of significant sections of the country; an Islamic State-branded terror group spreading<\/a> ever more successfully in its eastern regions; and, according to the latest report<\/a> from the Pentagon, \u201cmore than 20 terrorist or insurgent groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Think about that: 20 groups.\u00a0 In other words, so many years later, the war on terror should be seen as an endless exercise in the use of multiplication tables — and not just in Afghanistan either.\u00a0 More than a decade and a half after an American president spoke of 60 or more countries as potential targets, thanks to the invaluable work of a single dedicated group, the Costs of War Project<\/a> at Brown University\u2019s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, we finally have a visual representation of the true extent of the war on terror.\u00a0 That we\u2019ve had to wait so long should tell us something about the nature of this era of permanent war.<\/p>\n

The Costs of War Project has produced not just a map of the war on terror, 2015-2017 (released at TomDispatch<\/em> with this article), but the first map of its kind ever.\u00a0 It offers an astounding vision of Washington\u2019s counterterror wars across the globe: their spread, the deployment of U.S. forces, the expanding missions to train foreign counterterror forces, the American bases that make them possible, the drone and other air strikes that are essential to them, and the U.S. combat troops helping to fight them.\u00a0 (Terror groups have, of course, morphed and expanded riotously as part and parcel of the same process.)<\/p>\n

A glance at the map tells you that the war on terror, an increasingly complex set of intertwined conflicts, is now a remarkably global phenomenon.\u00a0 It stretches from the Philippines (with its own ISIS-branded group that just fought an almost five-month-long campaign that devastated<\/a> Marawi, a city of 300,000) through South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and deep into West Africa where, only recently, four Green Berets died<\/a> in an ambush in Niger.<\/p>\n

No less stunning are the number of countries Washington\u2019s war on terror has touched in some fashion.\u00a0 Once, of course, there was only one (or, if you want to include the United States, two).\u00a0 Now, the Costs of War Project identifies no less than 76 countries, 39% of those on the planet, as involved in that global conflict.\u00a0 That means places like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya where U.S. drone or other air strikes are the norm and U.S. ground troops (often Special Operations forces<\/a>) have been either directly or indirectly engaged in combat.\u00a0 It also means countries where U.S. advisers are training local militaries or even militias in counterterror tactics and those with bases crucial to this expanding set of conflicts.\u00a0 As the map makes clear, these categories often overlap.<\/p>\n

Who could be surprised that such a \u201cwar\u201d has been eating American taxpayer dollars at a rate that should stagger the imagination in a country whose infrastructure is now visibly crumbling<\/a>?\u00a0 In a separate study<\/a>, released in November, the Costs of War Project estimated that the price tag on the war on terror (with some future expenses included) had already reached an astronomical $5.6 trillion.\u00a0 Only recently, however, President Trump, now escalating those conflicts, tweeted<\/a> an even more staggering figure: \u201cAfter having foolishly spent $7 trillion in the Middle East, it is time to start rebuilding our country!\u201d (This figure, too, seems to have come in some fashion from the Costs of War estimate<\/a> that “future interest payments on borrowing for the wars will likely add more than $7.9 trillion to the national debt” by mid-century<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

It couldn\u2019t have been a rarer comment from an American politician, as in these years assessments of both the monetary and human costs of war have largely been left<\/a> to small groups<\/a> of scholars and activists.\u00a0 The war on terror has, in fact, spread in the fashion today\u2019s map lays out with almost no serious debate in this country about its costs or results.\u00a0 If the document produced by the Costs of War project is, in fact, a map from hell, it is also, I believe, the first full-scale map of this war ever produced.<\/p>\n

Think about that for a moment.\u00a0 For the last 16 years, we, the American people, funding this complex set of conflicts to the tune of trillions of dollars, have lacked a single map of the war Washington has been fighting.\u00a0 Not one. Yes, parts of that morphing, spreading set of conflicts have been somewhere in the news regularly, though seldom (except when there were \u201clone wolf\u201d terror attacks in the United States or Western Europe) in the headlines.\u00a0 In all those years, however, no American could see an image of this strange, perpetual conflict whose end is nowhere in sight.<\/p>\n

Part of this can be explained by the nature of that \u201cwar.\u201d\u00a0 There are no fronts, no armies advancing on Berlin, no armadas bearing down on the Japanese homeland.\u00a0 There hasn\u2019t been, as in Korea in the early 1950s, even a parallel to cross or fight your way back to.\u00a0 In this war, there have been no obvious retreats and, after the triumphal entry into Baghdad in 2003, few advances either.<\/p>\n

It was hard even to map its component parts and when you did — as in an August New York Times<\/em> map<\/a> of territories controlled by the Taliban in Afghanistan — the imagery was complex and of limited impact.\u00a0 Generally, however, we, the people, have been demobilized<\/a> in almost every imaginable way in these years, even when it comes to simply following the endless set of wars and conflicts that go under the rubric of the war on terror.<\/p>\n

Mapping 2018 and Beyond<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let me repeat this mantra: once, almost seventeen years ago, there was one; now, the count is 76 and rising.\u00a0 Meanwhile, great cities have been turned into rubble<\/a>; tens of millions of human beings have been displaced<\/a> from their homes; refugees by the millions continue to cross borders, unsettling ever more lands; terror groups have become brand names across significant parts of the planet; and our American world continues to be militarized<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This should be thought of as an entirely new kind of perpetual global war.\u00a0 So take one more look at that map. \u00a0Click on it and then enlarge it to consider the map in full-screen mode.\u00a0 It\u2019s important to try to imagine what\u2019s been happening visually, since we\u2019re facing a new kind of disaster, a planetary militarization of a sort we\u2019ve never truly seen before. \u00a0No matter the \u201csuccesses\u201d in Washington\u2019s war, ranging from that invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to the taking of Baghdad in 2003 to the recent destruction of the Islamic State\u2019s \u201ccaliphate\u201d in Syria and Iraq (or most of it anyway, since at this moment American planes are still dropping<\/a> bombs and firing missiles in parts of Syria), the conflicts only seem to morph and tumble on.<\/p>\n

We are now in an era in which the U.S. military is the leading edge — often the only edge — of what used to be called American \u201cforeign policy\u201d and the State Department is being radically downsized<\/a>.\u00a0 American Special Operations forces were deployed to 149 countries<\/a> in 2017 alone and the U.S. has so many troops on so many bases in so many places on Earth that the Pentagon can\u2019t even account for the whereabouts of 44,000<\/a> of them. There may, in fact, be no way to truly map all of this, though the Costs of War Project\u2019s illustration is a triumph of what can be seen.<\/p>\n

Looking into the future, let\u2019s pray for one thing: that the folks at that project have plenty of stamina, since it’s a given that, in the Trump years (and possibly well beyond), the costs of war will only rise.\u00a0 The first Pentagon budget of the Trump era, passed with bipartisan unanimity by Congress and signed by the president, is a staggering $700 billion<\/a>.\u00a0 Meanwhile, America\u2019s leading military men and the president, while escalating the country\u2019s conflicts from Niger<\/a> to Yemen<\/a>, Somalia<\/a> to Afghanistan, seem eternally in search of yet more wars to launch.<\/p>\n

Pointing to Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, for instance, Marine Corps Commandant General Robert Neller recently told<\/a> U.S. troops in Norway to expect a \u201cbigass fight\u201d in the future, adding, \u201cI hope I\u2019m wrong, but there\u2019s a war coming.\u201d \u00a0In December, National Security Adviser Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster similarly suggested<\/a> that the possibility of a war (conceivably nuclear in nature) with Kim Jong-un\u2019s North Korea was \u201cincreasing every day.\u201d\u00a0 Meanwhile, in an administration packed with Iranophobes, President Trump seems to be preparing to tear up<\/a> the Iran nuclear deal, possibly as early as this month.<\/p>\n

In other words, in 2018 and beyond, maps of many creative kinds may be needed simply to begin to take in the latest in America\u2019s wars.\u00a0 Consider, for instance, a recent report<\/a> in the New York Times<\/em> that about 2,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security are already \u201cdeployed to more than 70 countries around the world,\u201d largely to prevent terror attacks.\u00a0 And so it goes in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n

So welcome to 2018, another year of unending war, and while we\u2019re on the subject, a small warning to our leaders: given the last 16 years, be careful what you wish for.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the <\/em>American Empire Project<\/em><\/a> and the author of <\/em>The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, <\/em>The End of Victory Culture<\/a>. He is a fellow of the <\/em>Nation Institute<\/em><\/a> and runs <\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/a>. His latest book is <\/em>Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2018 Tom Engelhardt<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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