Houthi rebels have turned a crucial shipping route in the Red Sea into a zone of terror. WSJ goes inside the operations of a U.K. unit handling distress calls from besieged vessels. Photo Illustration: Eve Hartley

Deaths from terrorism in Africa have skyrocketed more than 100,000 percent during the U.S. war on terror according to a new study by Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. These findings contradict claims by U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) that it is thwarting terrorist threats on the continent and promoting security and stability.

Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003, resulting in a combined 23 casualties. At that time, the U.S. was just beginning a decades-long effort to provide billions of dollars in security assistance, train many thousands of African military personnel, set up dozens of outposts, dispatch its own commandos on a wide range of missions, create proxy forces, launch drone strikes, and even engage in ground combat with militants in Africa.

Most Americans, including members of Congress, are unaware of the extent of these operations — or how little they have done to protect African lives. (...)

U.S. Africa Command touts that it “counters transnational threats and malign actors” and promotes “regional security, stability and prosperity” helping its African partners to ensure the “security and safety” of their people. The fact that civilian deaths from militant Islamist violence have reached record levels, according to the Africa Center, and spiked 101,300 percent during the war on terror demonstrates the opposite. (...)

It couldn’t be stranger when you think about it. This country has been at war nonstop since September 12, 2001. It’s poured our taxpayer dollars — an estimated $8 trillion of them — down the sinkhole of those disastrous wars. The two biggest ones in Afghanistan and Iraq are officially over, though the U.S. still has 2,500 troops in Iraq and hundreds more (as well as private contractors) in neighboring Syria. Still, though we hear far less about it, the war on terror is ongoing. As Nick Turse has been reporting for years, for instance, the U.S. military continues to pour money and effort into war-on-terror-style military campaigns across significant parts of Africa, while terror groups only grow larger and more violent there, and yet who in this country even notices anymore?

Here, I suspect, is the reality of the situation: most Americans not connected to the U.S. military undoubtedly stopped thinking about the war on terror and its toll years ago — except at rare moments like during the disastrous collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government in August 2021 as this country was trying to withdraw its troops after two decades of failed war there. As has been true so often in these years, we generally neither pay significant attention to the damage we’re causing in distant lands nor to the damage we’ve caused ourselves in the process. Otherwise, how could it be possible that, during the recent debt-ceiling crisis, cuts were made to domestic programs, but the Pentagon budget, already larger than those of the next 10 countries combined, only continued to rise?

And yet, don’t think that, in the process, we haven’t damaged ourselves in all sorts of ways. Today, TomDispatch regular, co-founder of the Costs of War Project, therapist, and military spouse Andrea Mazzarino considers just what we did to ourselves in what might be considered a hidden campaign of… yes… self-inflicted terror. (...)

The security situation in the African Sahel — where U.S. commandos have trained, fought, and died in a “shadow war” for the past 20 years — is a nightmare, according to a Pentagon report quietly released late last month. It’s just the latest evidence of systemic American military failures across the continent, including two decades of deployments, drone strikes, and commando raids in Somalia that have resulted in a wheel-spinning stalemate and an ongoing spate of coups by U.S.-trained officers across West Africa that the chief of U.S. commandos on the continent said was due to U.S. alliances with repressive regimes.

“The western Sahel has seen a quadrupling in the number of militant Islamist group events since 2019,” reads the new analysis by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, the Pentagon’s foremost research institution devoted to the continent. “The 2,800 violent events projected for 2022 represent a doubling in the past year. This violence has expanded in intensity and geographic reach.” (...)

“The U.S. government consistently lacks transparency in disclosing the scope and locations of its military operations across Africa. The Department of Defense does not acknowledge the full extent of its ‘training’ and ‘cooperation’ activities — oftentimes euphemisms for operations that look very much like combat,” Stephanie Savell, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, tells Rolling Stone. (...)

There were also things he was not proud of locked behind those doors — things his family believes eventually left him cornered in the mountains, gripping a rifle.

In the Air Force, drone pilots did not pick the targets. That was the job of someone pilots called “the customer.” The customer might be a conventional ground force commander, the C.I.A. or a classified Special Operations strike cell. It did not matter. The customer got what the customer wanted.

And sometimes what the customer wanted did not seem right. There were missile strikes so hasty that they hit women and children, attacks built on such flimsy intelligence that they made targets of ordinary villagers, and classified rules of engagement that allowed the customer to knowingly kill up to 20 civilians when taking out an enemy. Crews had to watch it all in color and high definition.

Captain Larson tried to bury his doubts. (...)

But in December 2016, the Obama administration loosened the rules amid the escalating fight against the Islamic State, pushing the authority to approve airstrikes deep down into the ranks. The next year, the Trump administration secretly loosened them further. Decisions on high-value targets that once had been reserved for generals or even the president were effectively handed off to enlisted Special Operations soldiers. The customer increasingly turned drones on low-level combatants. Strikes once carried out only after rigorous intelligence-gathering and approval processes were often ordered up on the fly, hitting schools, markets and large groups of women and children. (...)

Squadrons did little to address bad strikes if there was no pilot error. It was seen as the customer’s problem. Crews filed civilian casualty reports, but the investigative process was so faulty that they rarely saw any impact; often they would not even get a response. (...)

The Air Force has no requirement to give drone crews the mental health evaluations mandated for deployed troops, but it has surveyed the drone force for more than a decade and consistently found high levels of stress, cynicism and emotional exhaustion. In one study, 20 percent of crew members reported clinical levels of emotional distress — twice the rate among noncombat Air Force personnel. The proportion of crew members reporting post-traumatic stress disorder and thoughts of suicide was higher than in traditional aircrews.

Several factors contribute — workload, constantly changing shifts, leadership issues and combat exposure. But the most damaging, according to Wayne Chappelle, the Air Force psychologist leading the studies, is civilian deaths.

The abiding image of the Iraq war in 2003 was the toppling of a statue of the country’s dictator, Saddam Hussein. It was an image relayed across the world as a symbol of victory for the American-led coalition, and liberation for the Iraqi people. But was that the truth? Putting up a statue is an attempt to create a story about history. During the invasion of Iraq, the pulling down of a statue was also an attempt to create a story about history. The story of Saddam’s statue shows both the possibilities, and the limits, of making a myth.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, as it was called by those running it, began on 20 March 2003. It was led by the US at the head of a “coalition of the willing”, including troops from Australia, Poland and the UK. President George W Bush claimed that the aims of the operation were clear: “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people”. He continued: “The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder … It is a fight for the security of our nation and the peace of the world, and we will accept no outcome but victory.” This justification for war was hotly disputed at the time, and has been ever since.

Invading troops moved quickly through the country. They arrived at Baghdad on 7 April, two and a half weeks into the ground campaign. It was there that the statue of Saddam stood in Firdos Square (firdos meaning paradise), right in the centre of the city. Two days later, it would come crashing down.

In 2020, statues across the world were pulled down in an extraordinary wave of iconoclasm. There had been such waves before – during the English Reformation, the French Revolution, the fall of the Soviet Union and so on – but the 2020 iconoclasm was global. Across former imperial powers and their former colonial possessions, from the US and the UK to Canada, South Africa, the Caribbean, India, Bangladesh and New Zealand, Black Lives Matter protesters defaced and hauled down statues of slaveholders, Confederates and imperialists. (...)

On the face of it, the attacks on statues in 2020 followed a pattern: those who cheered on the protesters pulling them down tended to be younger and more socially liberal, while those who were dismayed by the destruction tended to be older and more conservative.

If you look more deeply into it, though, the issue of statues is far more complicated. When statues of Lenin were pulled down across Ukraine in 2014, and when the Firdos Square statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down in Iraq in 2003, many older western conservatives rejoiced; some younger progressives were less sure about celebrating. When the Islamic State destroyed ancient statues in Palmyra in 2015, there was condemnation across the political spectrum. Many of those responding to these events were the same people who responded very differently later when statues of Confederates and slaveholders were the focus. Statues are not neutral, and do not exist in vacuums. Our reactions to them depend on who they commemorate, who put them up, who defends them, who pulls them down, and why. (...)