{"id":275413,"date":"2024-09-30T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2024-09-30T11:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=275413"},"modified":"2024-09-28T10:54:16","modified_gmt":"2024-09-28T09:54:16","slug":"war-forever-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/09\/war-forever-everywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"War Forever, Everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Unexploded Ordnance and the Weaponry We Leave Behind<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

22 Sep 2024 <\/em>– Count on one thing: armed conflict lasts for decades after battles end and its effects ripple thousands of miles beyond actual battlefields. This has been true of America\u2019s post-9\/11 forever wars that, in some minimalist fashion, continue in all too many<\/a> countries around the world. Yet those wars, which we ignited in Afghanistan<\/a>, Iraq<\/a>, and Pakistan<\/a> in the wake of the 9\/11 attacks, are hardly the first to offer such lessons. Prior wars<\/a> left us plenty to learn from that could have led this country to respond differently after that September day when terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Instead, we ignored history and, as a result, among so many other horrific things, left our weaponry \u2014 explosives, small arms, you name it \u2014 in war zones to kill and maim yet more people there for generations to come.<\/p>\n

Case in point: We Americans tend to disregard the possibility (however modest) that weapons of war could even destroy our own lives here at home, despite how many of us own<\/a> destructive weaponry. A few years ago, my military spouse and I were looking for a house for our family to settle in after over a decade of moving from military post to military post. We very nearly bought an old farmhouse owned by a combat veteran who mentioned his deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. We felt uncertain about the structure of his house, so we arranged to return with our children to take another look after he had moved out. The moment we entered the garage with our two toddlers in tow, we noticed a semi-automatic rifle leaning against the wall, its barrel pointing up. Had we not grabbed our son by the hand, he might have run over to touch it and, had it been loaded, the unthinkable might have occurred. Anyone who has raised young children knows that a single item in an empty room, especially one as storied as a gun (in today\u2019s age of constant school shootings and lockdowns<\/a>) could be a temptation too great to resist.<\/p>\n

That incident haunts me still. The combat vet, who thought to remove every item from his home but a rifle, left on display for us, was at best careless, at worst provocative, and definitely weird<\/a> in the most modern meaning of that word. Given the high rates<\/a> of gun ownership among today\u2019s veterans, it\u2019s not a coincidence that he had one, nor would it have been unknown for a child (in this case mine) to be wounded or die<\/a> from an accidental gunshot. Many times more kids here die that way, whether accidentally or all too often purposely, than do our police or military in combat. Boys and men especially tend to be tactile<\/a> learners. Those of them in our former war zones are also the ones still most likely to fall victim<\/a> to mines and unexploded ordnance left behind, just as they\u2019re more likely<\/a> to die here from accidental wounds.<\/p>\n

Scenes not that different from the one I described have been happening in nearly 70 countries<\/a> on a regular basis, only with deadlier endings. Hundreds of people each year \u2014 many of them kids \u2014 happen upon weapons or explosives left over from wars once fought in their countries and are killed, even though they may have been unaware of the risks they faced just seconds before impact. And for that, you can thank the major warmakers on this planet like the U.S. and Russia that have simply refused to learn the lessons of history.<\/p>\n

A Deadly Glossary<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many kinds<\/a> of explosives linger after battles end. Such unexploded ordnance (UXO) includes shells, grenades, mortars, rockets, air-dropped bombs, and cluster munition bomblets that didn\u2019t explode when first used. Among the most destructive of them are those cluster munitions, which can spread over areas several football fields<\/a> wide, often explode in mid-air, and are designed to set objects on fire on impact. Militaries (ours among them) have been known to leave behind significant stockpiles of such explosive ordnance when conflicts cease. Weapons experts refer to such abandoned ordnance as AXO and it\u2019s not uncommon for militaries to have stored and then abandoned them in places like occupied schools.<\/p>\n

Close cousins of UXO are landmines<\/a> designed to explode and kill indiscriminately upon contact, piercing tanks and other vehicles, as well as what came to be known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), jerry-rigged homemade bombs often buried in the ground, that kill on impact. IEDs gained notoriety during the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they accounted for more than half of reported U.S. troop casualties<\/a>. And both unexploded landmines and IEDs can do terrible damage years later in peacetime.<\/p>\n

As many of us are aware, long before this century\u2019s American-led wars on terror started, militaries had already established just such a deadly legacy through their use of unexploded ordnance and mines. In Cambodia, which the U.S. bombed heavily during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, about 650 square kilometers remain contaminated with cluster-munition remnants from American aerial attacks, while a still larger area contains landmines. It\u2019s estimated, in fact, that leftover landmines and other exploding ordnance killed nearly 20,000<\/a> Cambodians in what passed for \u201cpeacetime\u201d between 1979 and 2022, also giving that country the dubious distinction of having one of the highest<\/a> number of amputees per capita on the planet. Likewise, half a century after the U.S. littered neighboring Laos with cluster bombs, making it, per capita, the most bombed<\/a> country in the world, less than 10% of its affected land has been cleared.<\/p>\n

Similarly, dud bomblets, which failed to detonate in mid-air, are estimated to have killed or maimed somewhere between 56,000 and 86,000 civilians<\/a> globally since Hitler\u2019s air force first tested them out on Spanish towns during that country\u2019s civil war in the 1930s. Despite concerted international advocacy by governments and human rights groups beginning in the 2000s, hundreds<\/a> of new cluster munition casualties are reported yearly. In 2023<\/a>, the most recent year on record globally, 93% of cluster munition casualties were civilians, with 47% of those killed and injured by such remnant explosives children.<\/p>\n

Cluster munitions are known for killing<\/a> broadly on impact, so it\u2019s not easy to get firsthand accounts of just what it\u2019s like to witness such an attack, but a few such unflinching accounts are available to us. Take for instance, a report<\/a> by Human Rights Watch researchers who interviewed survivors of a Russian cluster munitions attack in the eastern Ukrainian village of Hlynske in May 2022. As one man reported, after hearing a rocket strike near his home, \u201cSuddenly I heard my father screaming, \u2018I\u2019ve been hit! I can\u2019t move,\u2019 he said. I ran back and saw that he had fallen on his knees but couldn\u2019t move from the waist down, and there were many metal pieces in him, including one sticking out of his spine and another in his chest. He had these small metal pellets lodged in his hands and legs.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the report, his father died a month later, despite surgery.<\/p>\n

How did a noise outside that survivor\u2019s home so quickly become shrapnel lodged in his father\u2019s body? Maybe someone growing up in America\u2019s poorer neighborhoods, littered with weapons of war<\/a>, can relate, but I read accounts like his and realize how distant people like me normally remain from war\u2019s violence.<\/p>\n

After the international Cluster Munitions Convention<\/a> took effect in 2010, 124 countries committed to retiring their stockpiles. But neither the U.S., Russia, nor Ukraine, among other countries, signed that document, although our government did promise<\/a> to try to replace the Pentagon\u2019s cluster munitions with variants that supposedly have lower \u201cdud\u201d rates. (The U.S. military has not explained how they determined that was so.)<\/p>\n

Our involvement in the Ukraine war marked a turning point. In mid-2023, the Biden administration ordered the transfer of cluster munitions from its outdated stockpile, sidestepping<\/a> federal rules limiting such transfers of weapons with high dud rates. As a result, we added to the barrage<\/a> of Russian cluster-munition attacks on Ukrainian towns. New cluster-munition attacks initiated in Ukraine have created what can only be seen as a deadly kind of time bomb. If it can be said that the U.S. and Russia in any way acted together, it was in placing millions of new time bombs in Ukrainian soil in their quest to take or protect territory there, ensuring a future of mortal danger for so many Ukrainians, no matter who wins the present war.<\/p>\n

Afghanistan, Every Step You Take<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the Costs of War Project, which I helped found at Brown University in 2010, a key goal continues to be to show how armed conflict disrupts human lives, undermining so much of what people need to do to work, travel, study, or even go to the doctor. Afghanistan<\/a> is a case in point: An area roughly 10 times the size of Washington, D.C., is now thoroughly contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance. Prior to the U.S. attack in 2001, Afghans already had to contend with explosives from the Soviet Union\u2019s disastrous war there in the 1980s. And I\u2019m sure you won\u2019t be surprised to learn that casualties from that war\u2019s unexploded ordnance and mines only rose after the U.S.-led invasion further unsettled the country. It\u2019s estimated that well over half of that country\u2019s 20,000 or so injuries and deaths<\/a> between 2001 and 2018 were due to unexploded ordnance, landmines, and other explosive remnants of war like IEDs. Contaminated Afghan land includes<\/a> fields commonly used for growing food and letting livestock graze, schools, roads, tourist sites, and former military bases and training ranges used by the U.S. and its NATO allies.<\/p>\n

Worse yet, the damage isn\u2019t only physical. It\u2019s also psychological. As Costs of War researchers Suzanne Fiederlein and SaraJane Rzegocki have written<\/a>, \u201cThe fear of being harmed by these weapons [unexploded ordnance] is magnified by knowing or seeing someone injured or killed.\u201d In her ethnography of Afghan war widows, Anila Daulatzai<\/a> offered a gripping illustration of how loss, death, and psychological terror ripple outward to a family and community after a young boy dies in a bomb blast on his way to school and his parents turn to heroin to cope.<\/p>\n

When I read such accounts, what stands out to me is how long such unexploded ordnance makes the terror of war linger after the wars themselves are in the history books. Think about what life, stressful as it might be in times of peace, would be like if every step you took might be your last because of unseen threats lurking under the ground. That would include threats like certain bomblets<\/a>, attractive with their bell-like appearance, which your young child might pick up, thinking they\u2019re toys.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Arming of Ukraine (\u201cWe Start When It All Ends\u201d)<\/strong><\/p>\n

And we still haven\u2019t learned. Today, with 26,000 square kilometers (an area roughly the size of my home state of Maryland) contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance, Ukraine is the most mined country in the world. I recently spoke with a founding director of the Ukrainian Association for Humanitarian Demining (UAHD)<\/a>, an umbrella organization based in Kyiv and responsible for information-sharing on mines and other unexploded ordnance, as well as future demining, and humanitarian aid based on such an ongoing nightmare.<\/p>\n

From our conversation, what stood out to me was how people\u2019s ordinary lives have come to a halt because of this war. For example, much<\/a> has been written about how interruptions in the Ukrainian grain supply impacted food prices and famine globally, but we pay less attention to how and why. As the UAHD representative told me, \u201cFor two years, most Ukrainian farmers in occupied territory have had to halt their work because of mines and unexploded ordnance. This past Thursday, the Ukrainian government issued their first payment so that one day, these farms might be able to keep doing their work.\u201d If the history of Laos is any marker and if the Ukraine war ever ends, just the cleanup will prove a long slog.<\/p>\n

When I asked how civilian lives in Ukraine were affected by cluster munitions, the response from the UAHD representative was brief: \u201cI don\u2019t know, because war zones are off-limits to us right now. Once the fighting finally ends, we can survey the land and talk to people living there. We start when it all ends.\u201d My interlocutor\u2019s comments reminded me of a superb recent novel on modern warfare, Andrey Kurkov\u2019s Grey Bees<\/em><\/a>. It focuses on a beekeeper who stays behind in his eastern Ukrainian farming village after his neighbors have evacuated to escape the fighting. The novel conveys the poverty and physical danger war brings with it, as well as how isolated from one another civilians in war zones grow, not least because of the dangers of just moving around along once-quiet fields and roads. For instance, the one gift that a Ukrainian soldier offers the beekeeper in passing is a grenade for his own protection, which he ultimately uses to destroy his bees, nearly hurting himself in the process. His other brush with near-death occurs when a traumatized Ukrainian veteran threatens him with an axe during a flashback to combat. War, in other words, returns home, again and again.<\/p>\n

Like the beekeeper, we all need to pay attention to what\u2019s left in the wake of our government\u2019s exploits. We need to ask ourselves what future generations may have to deal with thanks to what our leaders do today in the name of expediency. That\u2019s true when it comes to those horrifying cluster munitions and essentially every other militarized response governments concoct to grapple with complex problems.<\/p>\n

In this context, let me suggest that there are two messages readers should take away from this piece: It couldn\u2019t be more important to bear witness to what\u2019s being done to destroy our world and, when the fighting ends, it\u2019s also vital to pay attention to what has been left behind.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

Andrea Mazzarino co-founded Brown University\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Costs of War Project<\/a>. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with <\/em>Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of\u00a0<\/em>War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Unexploded Ordnance and the Weaponry We Leave Behind \u2013 US military refers to them as AXO, abandoned in places like occupied schools. Close cousins are UXO and landmines designed to explode and kill indiscriminately upon contact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":269935,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[93,867,417,3091,3092,1126,1050,2462,91,112,2159,961,95,70,481],"class_list":["post-275413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-militarism","tag-afghanistan","tag-anglo-america","tag-bullying","tag-cluster-bombs","tag-cluster-weapons-convention","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-military-industrial-media-complex","tag-nato","tag-pentagon","tag-rogue-states","tag-ukraine","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275413"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275418,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275413\/revisions\/275418"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}