The farce of ‘war on terror’: How US military-industrial complex systematically bred terrorism after 9/11

By Syed Zafar Mehdi

Twenty-five years ago, the United States launched its military invasion of Afghanistan with a devastating display of aerial firepower – B-52 heavy bombers and gunships carpet-bombing a landlocked country that had never attacked America.

That disastrously misjudged and wildly disproportionate response to the events of 9/11 found its expression in the so-called "global war on terror" – an unprovoked, unjustified and illegal war that has since consumed millions of lives from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond.

The nasty, brutish, and endless “war on terror” has done the opposite of what it promised: it has spawned more terrorism, even as successive American administrations and their Western allies have consistently and wickedly tried to conceal this inconvenient truth.

Twenty-five years since the events of 9/11, the region and the world at large continue to be at the crossroads due to US military adventures. In Afghanistan, the ragtag fighters the US war machine had vowed to obliterate 25 years ago are back in power. Al-Qaeda remains alive and thriving. And the Daesh terrorist group has quietly and stunningly made its way from Iraq and Syria into Afghanistan.

This is how America's ominous presence breeds terrorism rather than annihilating it.

Promises made, promises broken

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Americans vowed to crush every terrorist group of global reach, including Al-Qaeda. Then-US President George W. Bush famously declared on September 20, 2001, that the so-called US war on terror "begins with Al-Qaeda, but it does not end there." He didn’t know what he was saying.

The brutal invasion of Afghanistan – launched less than a month after four hijacked American planes crashed into landmark buildings in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, killing 2,977 people – was reckless, poorly planned, and shoddily executed.

As the US dispatched long-range B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers, AC-130 Specter gunships, and MQ-9 Reaper drones to flatten the Tora Bora cave complex in eastern Afghanistan – where Osama Bin Laden was reported to be hiding – Barbara Lee stood alone.

She was the only US Congresswoman at the time to vote against authorizing what would become America's longest and disastrous war in history.

Barbara was labeled a traitor by those who championed the reckless military invasion, an invasion that incurred an astronomically high cost, with innocent Afghan civilians bearing the brunt. The mindless war found support among both Republicans and Democrats, as they rallied behind Bush and his hawkish Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to exact their "revenge."

The real objectives behind the invasion

The no-holds-barred bombing campaign was launched on October 7, 2001, on the pretext of decimating the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and capturing the 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden – the former CIA ally and founder of Al-Qaeda – who was apparently hosted by the Taliban.

The core objective of the three-week bombing campaign, dubbed "Operation Enduring Freedom," was achieved in less than three months. But the Americans decided against quitting.

There was certainly more to it than the bluff and bluster of fighting terrorism.

If eliminating Al-Qaeda and the Taliban or taking out Osama Bin Laden were the prime objectives of the military invasion, the US-led allied troops would have called it quits long ago. But the aim was to occupy Afghanistan – to make the mineral-rich country, strategically located between Central and South Asia, completely subservient to the West.

It was clear from the way Bush and Rumsfeld snubbed the Taliban's offer of truce to avoid confrontation. Before the bombardment began, the group offered to hand over Bin Laden to a third country for trial and even agreed to lay down arms and recognize the US-backed government in Kabul led by Hamid Karzai.

The offers were spurned, leading to a 20-year military adventure that ended in the worst US military and strategic debacle and the triumphant return of their adversary.

A nation grows weary

The American public, who initially supported the idea of military action against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, eventually became its fierce opponents as the futile war dragged on, metamorphosing into the worst US foreign policy disaster.

For 20 years, the war in Afghanistan remained an enigma for successive US administrations, from Bush to Joe Biden. Each of them was clueless about the war and its objectives.

After invading the country and destroying it beyond recognition, Bush abandoned Afghanistan and launched another costly military adventure in neighboring Iraq in 2003. Both experiments proved counter-productive and utterly disastrous for people in the two countries.

His successor, Barack Obama, refocused on Afghanistan, killing Bin Laden ten years after the 9/11 attacks – not in the mountains of Afghanistan but in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, a short jog from a Pakistani military base. Obama then began the drawdown but stopped short of complete military withdrawal.

Years later, his successor Donald Trump – a megalomaniac president – signed a deal with the Taliban, pledging to withdraw American forces. It was the same militant group his fellow Republican president Bush once vowed to decimate.

Trump was consigned to the dustbin of history before he could execute the plan. It was Joe Biden, his political rival, who finally pulled the plug on America's longest war.

An ending as chaotic as the beginning

The disastrous war ended in August 2021 the way it started in October 2001 – in a violent, disorderly, shambolic, reckless fashion. Amidst the chaotic evacuation at Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport, a Daesh suicide bomber blew himself up, killing more than 200 people, including 13 US Marines.

The ghastly incident underscored not only the vulnerability of ordinary Afghans but also the US failure to eliminate the perennial threat of terrorism in Afghanistan.

More importantly, it blew the lid off the sinister interventionism and hegemonic ambitions of the US military-industrial complex in foreign lands, from Somalia to Afghanistan.

As reports later revealed, many of those killed at the Kabul airport didn't fall to suicide bombings but to the indiscriminate firefight by American troops. More civilians were to perish hours later in US drone strikes, including women and children.

So, as some pundits would argue, 20 years after the doomed US military mission began in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden won the war posthumously.

American presence in the war-ravaged country – often described as the graveyard of empires – not only failed to wipe out the threat of terrorism but further fanned its flames.

The real face of international terrorism

The fact is that the ominous threat of "international terrorism" does not come from some teeny-weeny, ruthless “jihadist” cluster as Western pundits claim. It comes from the Western nuclear powers that form the core of the NATO alliance, and who keep issuing vile threats against countries that don't subscribe to their warped worldview.

The legacy of Bush and Obama was carried forward by Biden and Trump. They extended the umbrella of their wars from Afghanistan and Iraq to Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran. In the past year alone, two wars were imposed on the Iranian people. A genocide continues to unfold in the besieged Gaza Strip. Yemenis are still reeling under bombings and blockade. Lebanon has been turned into a waste land. All of this with direct or indirect American patronage.

Perhaps Trump and his cohorts need lessons in history – to be reminded of the horrific crimes his country has committed across the world throughout history. And he also needs to be reminded of the fate they eventually met and the ignominy they brought to their country.

The history of US imperialism is replete with stories of unilateral belligerent military strikes, gory massacres, and socio-cultural aggression. At the receiving end have mostly been those who refused to pledge allegiance to American hegemony.

This blatant chauvinism and sinister desire to inflict suffering on others is best explained by these words of American writer Andre Vltchek: "The West has always behaved as if it had an inherited, but undefined, right to profit from the misery of the rest of the world. In many cases, the conquered nations had to give up their own culture, their religions, even their languages, and convert to our set of beliefs and values that we defined as 'civilized.'"

A litany of crimes

Let's briefly recap some of the most horrendous crimes the American war machinery has been directly or indirectly complicit in over the years, even before Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Guatemalan Civil War, which continued from 1960 to 1996, was bitterly fought between the government of Guatemala and various rebel groups, mostly ethnic Mayans. The government committed the worst human rights abuses and engineered genocide of the Mayan population, resulting in the killing and enforced disappearance of about 200,000 people – mostly civilians – with the open support of the CIA.

Direct or indirect support for death squads has been an integral part of CIA operations. The CIA's death squad operations in the Vietnam War, which dominated 30 long years of Vietnam's history from the 1940s to the 1970s, led to the killing of over 35,000 people.

More than 20,000 Vietnamese were killed during the CIA-guided Operation Phoenix, intended to weed out communist "agents" from South Vietnam.

The US role in the violent overthrow of the democratically elected Popular Unity government of Salvador in the 1980s resulted in 70,000 deaths and mass human rights violations. To crush the rebels, the US equipped and trained an army that kidnapped and disappeared more than 30,000 people and presided over large-scale massacres of thousands of old people, women, and children.

In a review of the book ‘Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: US Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile’ by Lubna Qureishi, Howard Doughty makes a pertinent observation: "The United States and its allies have an unseemly history of hostility to democracy abroad that seems to conflict with their expressed political principles and their stated purpose in engaging in military and diplomatic action abroad. Not only in Latin America, but in Africa, Asia, and occasionally in Europe, it has openly and clandestinely supported dictatorships."

The US government's cozy relationship with Israel is no secret. It has overtly and covertly backed Tel Aviv in occupying Palestinian territories, in blatant breach of international law and UN resolutions and bears direct responsibility for the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

In Cuba, America's record is again horrible. It has been involved in attempted assassinations of state heads, bombings, military invasions, crippling sanctions, et al. Even after half a century, the economic blockade remains in force. The country has been wrongly designated a “terrorist state,” figuring prominently on the State Department's list of "State Sponsors of Terrorism."

Washington's support for the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua between 1981 and 1990 is one of the most shameful open secrets. By acknowledging the link between the US government and the Contras, the terrorist activities that the Contras engaged in, and the recognition by the International Court of Justice, it is clearly evident that the US engaged in state-sponsored terrorism in its response to the Nicaraguan revolution.

As Noam Chomsky writes in Western State Terrorism, “The guiding principle, it appears, is that the US is a lawless terrorist state and this is right and just, whatever the world may think, whatever international institutions may declare."

On March 8, 1985, in an assassination bid on Sheikh Mohammed Fazlullah by the CIA, a powerful car bomb exploded outside a Beirut mosque in Lebanon, leaving 81 civilians dead. Celebrated investigative reporter Bob Woodward stated that CIA director William Casey had admitted personal culpability in the attack while he lay on his deathbed, which he said was carried out with funding from Saudi Arabia.

Now, as the war continues against Lebanon, the US has fully backed the Israeli regime.

In December 1989, almost 27,000 US soldiers invaded the small Central American country of Panama to arrest General Manuel Noriega, a CIA asset-turned-rebel. In "Operation Just Cause," bombs rained down on three neighborhoods – Colon, San Miguelito, and El Chorrillo. El Chorillo was burnt to the ground and got a new nickname: "Little Hiroshima." According to conservative estimates, between 2,000 and 6,000 people were killed in the events that unfolded.

Congo has been through violent times since its independence. Many observers and activists trace it to the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of independent Congo, which was done at the behest of then-US President Eisenhower.

In Haiti, the US backed the Duvalier family dictatorship for 30 years, during which the CIA worked closely with death squads, executioners, and drug traffickers. The father-son duo's three decades at the helm were marked by brutally crushing dissent with the assistance of secret police and the Haitian army.

The 1983 invasion of Grenada was the first major American military assault since the Vietnam War. The news was blocked as the US government didn't want the world to witness the great superpower bashing up a small island nation and murdering its civilians.

Why did the United States invade Grenada? "Many believe that Grenada was seen as a bad example for other poor Caribbean states," opines Stephen Zunes, author of Tinderbox: US Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.

"Its foreign policy was not subservient to the American government, and it was not open to having its economy dominated by US corporate interests."

In Greece, America supported a coup against an elected leader, George Papandreou, which followed years of murder, torture, and fear in the late 1960s. The tyranny of a fascist-military junta had the backing of the United States and NATO from 1967 to 1974.

As per rough estimates, around 10,000 workers, students, political leaders, and social activists were imprisoned and brutally tortured.

In Cambodia, the US resorted to carpet bombing to overthrow President Prince Sihanouk, who was replaced by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and that led to millions of civilian casualties between the mid-1950s and 1970s.

The breeding ground of terrorism

So, it should be pretty clear which the breeding ground of terrorism is. Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja, who specializes in global security, peace, and conflict resolution, wrote in an article published by the Global Research website: "The US neo-conservative gang helped to rob mankind of its human heritage. The perception of 'radical Islam' was invented and enhanced by the 'fear' of terrorism as if Arabs and Muslims were born in the eye of the storm and terrorism was an exclusive domain of the Islamic religious tenets."

The myth of the "outside enemy" has been the cornerstone of the US military doctrine, used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, writes Michel Chossudovsky, author of The Globalisation of Poverty. And consider the fact that, in the name of fighting their enemies, the US government had directly been supporting Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups for the decade before 9/11 happened.

A majority of high-ranking security experts agree that waging war on the West Asian countries has weakened US national security and increased the threat of terrorism. A top military interrogator remarked that torture by the American military of innocent Iraqis is one of the main reasons that led to Iraqis rising up against the US occupation.

Marjorie Cohn, a widely known professor of international law, in an article written in November 2001, maintained that the bombings of Afghanistan by the United States and the United Kingdom were illegal. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. Indeed, the 19 men charged with the crime were not Afghans. Reports indicated that the US had decided to invade Afghanistan two months before 9/11.

America's involvement in Yemen and Syria has again raised many eyebrows. In Yemen, Washington has extended full support to Riyadh's war crimes, and in Syria, America has been supporting the former Daesh leader who overthrew the Bashar al-Assad government.

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