The War on Terror: (un)justified?

As the War on Terror starts slowly grinding to a halt, American counterterrorism operations, and all the brutality they entail, will continue. On November 4th, the Military Times, an American news outlet, ran a piece titled “Playing on the edges of empire: Special Forces Operations face uncertain future”. In it, retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel David Maxwell says “Joint Special Operations Command’s mission of counterterror is never going away. It is necessary. We’ve raised our counterterror capability to an exquisite level. We’re going to sustain and protect that…”. As the front-facing facets of the War on Terror fade out, it will become easier to forget the human cost of sustaining the American empire. Certain commentators will refer to the American empire with other names: American hegemony or the liberal international order, but the people tasked with maintaining it via force call it for what it is.

In 2010, two U.S Army soldiers walked through a poppy field near La Mohammad Kalay, a farming village in Afghanistan. Corporal Jeremy Morlock and Private First Class Andrew Holmes were looking for an Afghan to kill, and they found their target in a young Afghan farmer, about 15 years old, named Gul Mudin. There were no other Afghani people around to witness the execution. Morlock and Holmes ordered the boy to stop (in Pashto), and he complied; then they knelt behind a mud brick wall before Morlock tossed a grenade at Gul Mudin. After it exploded, Morlock and Holmes shot the child repeatedly at close range. After the kill, U.S. soldiers, including Morlock and Holmes, enlisted the help of a village elder to identify the body. The village elder turned out to be Gul Mudin’s father- the official Army report blandly states: “The father was very upset.”

When Morlock was interviewed by army interviewers, he was questioned about what had led him to killing innocent Afghani people. He said: “None of us in the platoon- the platoon leader, the platoon sergeant- no one gives a fuck about these people.” On August 29th of 2021, just over 10 years after the murder in La Mohammad Kalay, as U.S forces withdrew from Afghanistan, an American drone strike targeted a Toyota Corolla in Kabul. It killed Zemerai Ahmadi and nine of his family members, including seven children. Despite Air Force Lieutenant General Sami Said observing from reviews of video footage that there was evidence of a child in the strike zone, he concluded in his review for the Pentagon that the strike was not caused by misconduct or negligence and recommended no disciplinary action.

The justifying narrative of the United States military is that it serves to protect the nation. President Joe Biden addressed veterans saying: “You’ve done it for America — to defend and serve American values, to protect our country and our Constitution against all enemies, and to lay a stronger, more secure foundation on which future generations can continue to build a more perfect union.” The deeds of the American military are tragically absurd if they are supposed to protect America as America understands itself. How could Gul Mudin or Zemerai Ahmadi or 71,000 Afghani civilians who have died since 2001 or the 184,382 Iraqi civilians who have died since 2003 attest “that all men are created equal”? How did Gul Mudin threaten American civilians? He wasn’t even a threat to the soldiers in a war zone who killed him.

The actions of the U.S military only become comprehensible if they are understood as the coldly strategic actions of an empire expanding and enforcing its domination. Certainly, there are soldiers who enlist in the American military for noble reasons and certainly not every soldier commits war crimes. But whatever the intentions of individual soldiers are, it does not diminish the cost that sustaining the American empire wrings out of the world. We can indeed remember Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt’s words to an Iraqi journalist, saying that the Iraqi people should tell their terrified children the sounds of American helicopters flying over Baghdad were the “sounds of freedom”.

As the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan formally end, top U.S. military leaders consider the goals of the military in the future. Retired Admiral Bob Harward says “And all the services and everyone else wants to focus on China.” An intelligence sergeant says “You’re not going to take China in China. You’ll take China on in Africa, Afghanistan, and in Iran and Syria.” The War on Terror is getting replaced with new threats and new enemies which demand the deployment of American military force around the world. Whatever the new face of war is, it will not be worth the human cost of sustaining the American Empire. It never was, and it would be a great moral injustice to prolong the project into the future.

References:

Boal, Mark. “The Kill Team: How U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan Murdered Innocent Civilians” Rolling Stone, 28.3.2011

Baldor, Lolita C. “Watchdog finds no misconduct in mistaken Afghan airstrike” AP News, 3.11.2021

Maurer, Kevin. “Playing on the edges of empire: Special Operations Forces face uncertain future” The Military Times, 4.11.2021

Biden, Joe. “Remarks by President Biden at the Veterans Day Observance” The White House, 11.11.2021

Poole, Oliver. The Red Zone: Five Bloody Years in Baghdad, Reportage Press, 2008.

Casualty counts from Brown University’s Watson Institute Costs of War Project