If a country suffers a very serious terrorist attack, how should it respond? Clearly it should investigate the attack very, very carefully and thereby finding out the culprits and any collaborators, also double checking that they have been identified correctly, then should take very strong action against them and in addition, if there are also some foreign culprits, call upon the international community to take suitable strict actions against such culprits so that a clear message against terrorism can be conveyed, the culprits can be punished suitably while ensuring that any innocent persons are not harmed in the process. In addition the affected country should ask non-partisan scholars to investigate if there are any real grievances among certain sections of people, local or foreign, motivating such violence, and if there are, then such genuine grievances should also be removed, so that the root causes of violence are also removed.
There can be a fair degree of consensus that this should be the proper response to any major terrorist attack in any country. Now let us compare this proper response with the actual response of the USA and Israel to the biggest and extremely tragic terrorist attacks suffered by them.
The USA suffered the biggest terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, often called the 9/11 attack, in which about 3000 people were killed. The sympathies of almost the entire world immediately were with these victims and the USA. Unfortunately the USA badly muddled up the response so that in the War on Terror that it launched soon after, at least 4.5 million persons (including soldiers of the USA and its allies) have died in an incomplete count up to May 2023. In other words, 1500 times the number killed in the original act of violence have perished in the course of the response, and over 90 per cent of these are innocent persons. What is more, this huge War on Terror was launched without a credible, reliable investigation of the original 9/11 attack. A very large number of people within the USA have serious doubts about the official explanation of what exactly happened on 9/11. There are strong reasons for this and a summary of these can be found in my article in Countercurrents.org dated 17 January 2024 titled ‘Truth must prevail in controversial issues of historical importance to enable system reform’. What is more, the basic causes that lead to terrorism have increased , not deceased, in the course of this War on Terror, and in fact several terrorist, sectarian groups have been supported and created in the course, ironically, of pursuing this War on Terror.
Israel suffered its biggest and very tragic, distressing terror attack on 7 October, 2023 in which about 1250 people died and at that time sympathies of a very large number of people were with these victims and with Israel. Unfortunately Israel did not properly investigate this attack to bring out the entire truth, and many people in Israel also do not believe the official version. A summary of several of the reasons for this can be found in my article published in Countercurrents.org on January 3 2024 titled ‘Why getting to the bottom of the October 7 attack is important for peace’. The response of Israel has already led to the death of over 300,000 persons or about 250 times the number of people killed in the original attack, still counting, and over 90% of these are innocent persons.
Now let us look at the data, sources and facts in some greater detail.
The terrible 9/11 attacks led the USA military and foreign policy establishment to launch a prolonged series of military actions in many countries with the stated aim of curbing terrorism and terror. These have been collectively called the war on terror or terrorism, the global war on terror and the 9/11 wars. Although there have been criticisms and debates linked to these names, for practical purposes the short description of war on terror has been frequently used to collectively describe the US military actions mainly in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere. Till 2023, the counter-terrorism operations had in fact extended to about 78 countries.
Countries were attacked and punished under the War on Terror in very arbitrary ways without evidence of their involvement in 9/11 or any other big terrorist attack. There are reports of US President Bush Jr. asking his leading security advisor to submit a report linking 9/11 with Iraq and its president Saddam Husain, and when he submitted a reported that there is zero such evidence, he was asked to revise his report and re-submit. General Wesley Clarke has spoken regarding his visit to Pentagon in those days and a friendly official showing him a memo from the office of the Defence Secretary stating that the USA intends to attack seven countries (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan. Somalia, Libya and Iran) in the next five years, all pre-planned and decided without any transparency or evidence-based approach.
This war on terror has proved extremely costly in terms of loss of human life and displacement of people. According to the Costs of War data base prepared by the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, Brown University, USA ( briefly referred to as Brown University estimates which were also cited, although selectively, by President Biden in one of his national addresses), these costs from 2001 to now have been unacceptably high.
This data base tells us that a total of 906,000 to 937,000 human lives have been lost in this war on terror in terms of direct war deaths ( people who died from bombs and bullets or directly in conflicts). This figure does not include the deaths caused by infrastructure collapse of water, sewage and health as a result of war, or diseases related to war impacts. However the Brown University base clearly says that “several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of war.”
Regarding the direct war deaths 176,000 took place in Afghanistan, 280,771 to 315,190 in Iraq, 268,816 in the context of Syria/ISIS, 112,000 in Yemen and 67,000 in Pakistan, and the remaining elsewhere.
What is more, 38 million people have been displaced by the post 9/11 wars—5.9 million in Afghanistan, 3.7 million in Pakistan, 4.6 million in Yemen, 4.3 million in Somalia, 1.8 million in the Philippines, 9.2 million in Iraq, 1.2 million in Libya and 7.1 million in Syria.
This estimate has been presented as a conservative estimate and according to this data base, a more realistic number would be somewhere between 49 to 60 million.
What did these interventions achieve? In the case of Afghanistan, the people who faced food insecurity were 62% of the population in 2001 (before the intervention), in 2022 this number had increased to 92%. The percentage of children under 5 suffering from malnutrition increased in a big way. The percentage of people of Afghanistan living in poverty increased from 80% to 97%. Women faced heavy restrictions in 2001, they also faced heavy restrictions in 2022. Since 2001 the US development aid to Afghanistan amounted to $ 36 billion while the US spending on top 5 military contractors amounted to $2.1 trillion or $ 2100 billion.
These statistics collected from many sources by the Brown University data base tell a very sad story of a highly misguided war on terror hijacked to an entirely wrong path. The 9/11 attacks had created sincere and strong sympathy for the USA, on top of an already felt need for strong action against terrorism by many world leaders. Statements of sympathy, cooperation and help were pouring in without asking from several world leaders, including from Russia. This was the right time for mobilizing strong worldwide action against all terrorisms in an unbiased way, based in the UN. Almost everyone would have cooperated and nobody would have been burdened too much by costs by pooling resources. But the hawkish policy makers in the USA concentrated instead on organizing the entire thing around their almost pre-set aggressive agenda, leading to such terrible results.
The financial costs alone for the USA have been 8 trillion or 8000 billion dollars, amounting to about a billion (or 1000 million) dollars a day over a 22 year period, or 42 million dollars an hour, or 700,000 dollars per minute, or 12000 dollars per second.
Compare this with the estimates made by the World Food Program (WFP) of 40 billion dollars a year needed to eliminate world hunger. In 2021 the WFP which is the world’s biggest feeding program had wanted to raise 15 billion dollars but could raise only 10, although it still managed to feed about 100 million people in 120 countries, more or less, according to its data. Compare this with the 365 billion dollars a year spent on a war the most defining feature of which has been the killing of innocent people. All the rich countries together have not been able yet to together raise the promised 100 billion dollars a year grant needed for helping developing and poor countries to fight climate change, but just one of these rich countries could easily find 365 billion dollars a year for a terrible war with only destruction to show. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, USA, 20 billion dollars a year are needed to end homelessness in the USA. Raise this to 36 billion, and it would still be only 10% of what has been spent annually on this futile war. When, in September 2022, President Biden announced a plan to end hunger in the USA, all that his administration could commit in public and private funding was 8 billion dollars, about 2 per cent of the annual spending on this senseless, destructive war.
The USA is supposed to have some of the most capable intellectuals, some of the best universities, its democratic system is supposed to have checks and balances, how then it could continue such a futile and destructive agenda for such a long time? What is going so seriously wrong here? What is the remedial action needed? Answers to these questions have to be sought and only then we can say that the very costly lessons of the war on terror have been learnt.
When the Brown University (USA) based Costs of War project had estimated the direct deaths resulting from violence (actual fighting, bombing etc.) caused by the USA’s post 9/11 War of Terror at about 920,000 (a little less than a million, or 0.9 million) then many people were shocked by this. However even at that time the project researchers had cautioned that this was merely the number of deaths which were directly caused in the conflicts. They had added that if all the indirect deaths related to the war on terror are also counted (for example deaths caused later by diseases resulting from destruction of sanitation and health facilities in the bombings), then the number of these deaths may turn out to be much higher, in fact it may be several times more.
In May 2023, this project also released its estimates of the indirect deaths caused in the War on Terror. These indirectly caused deaths have been estimated at 3.6 to 3.7 million. If these are added to the direct deaths caused earlier, the total number of deaths in the War on Terror goes up to 4.5 million to 4.6 million. So the total number of deaths is about 5 times the number of direct deaths.
The details of reaching this estimate have been provided in a thoroughly researched and thickly referenced paper meaningfully titled ‘How Death Outlives War—the Reverberating Impact of the Post 9/11 Wars on Human Health’. This important paper written by Stephanie Savell is on the one hand a confirmation of past trends (such as in the Korean War) that indirect death continue long after the actual war and can be much higher than the immediate war deaths, and on the other hand this is also very important from the point of view of an assessment of the costs of war which is close to reality in the context of recent wars. Hence this study is of great importance for peace activists and movements all over the world for taking their message of promoting peace and opposing wars among more and more people.
While this study states clearly that the total death toll in the post 9/11 war zones of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen could be at least 4.5 million to 4.6 million, it also says that so many aspects of life are affected by war that very precise estimates may not be possible to obtain and even these estimates are presented in a situation of still counting. As the number of serious malnourished children affected by ‘wasting’ is reported to be very high in these countries, hunger and deprivation are widespread, the tragedy is still continuing.
While the main estimate appears to be concentrated on the five countries mentioned above, the tragic situation in some other countries like Somalia and Libya has also been discussed in this report. In the context of Somalia in particular it is also mentioned that in view of the serious famine-like conditions prevailing here, the counter-terrorism laws could also have adversely affected the relief efforts badly needed by starving people.
An important point made by the study is that while war-devastated countries may lose much of the attention of the world and ‘the international community’ once the actual fighting ends, in many contexts the longer-term effects of war continue to cause more and more deaths, disabilities and distress. What is more, these deaths may even increase with the passage of time. In the case of Iraq, the number of children facing birth defects and disabilities may be very high, although this has been denied by others. There are several such examples of the longer-term health hazards of several extremely dangerous weapons, bombs and ammunitions.
In the contexts of several victim countries but perhaps most clearly in the context of Iraq, there appears to be a very strong case of a very large number of entirely avoidable deaths of entirely innocent persons having been caused, and of other large numbers of entirely innocent people having been exposed to very painful injuries, disabilities and diseases. Hence there is a very strong justice based case for damages in billions of dollars being paid by the main perpetrators of violence to the victims. This process can start by the USA and Britain in particular making these payments to the victims and their families in Iraq, and this can later be extended to other victim countries wherever a strong case for this exists. Such payments cannot undo the great tragedy, the entirely avoidable tragedy of such great distress having been caused to entirely innocent persons just due to the whims and faulty decision making of a small bunch of arrogant persons in positions of powers, but this can help to reduce their distress even if only partially and belatedly. This is the least that can be done at this late stage.
Unfortunately instead of learning from the extremely distressing and tragic mistakes by the USA’s War on Terror, Israel is following the same hugely flawed and dangerous road after October 7, 2023. Its response is not just hugely disproportionate, but in addition it is also linked to a hugely destructive and aggressive wider agenda which looks more like a pre-planned agenda rather than a response to a sudden, unexpected attack. This is why this writer has been emphasizing that it is important to get at the truth of what exactly happened on 9/11 and on 10/7.
Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children, Earth without Borders, Man over Machine and A Day in 2071.
