The United States has now been at war in Afghanistan for some nineteen years and been fighting another major war in Iraq for seventeen years. It has been active in Somalia far longer and has spread its operations to deal with terrorist or extremist threats in a wide range of conflicts in north and Sub-Saharan in Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia.
In case after case, the U.S. has moved far beyond counter terrorism to counter insurgency and from the temporary deployment of small anti-terrorism forces to a near “permanent” military presence. The line between counter terrorism and counterinsurgency has become so blurred that there is no significant difference.
The national academic consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) had issued new trend data on terrorism that are updated through the end of 2017. When they are combined with other major sources of data on terrorism, they provide the ability to trace the history of U.S. “wars” against terrorism in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
They show the results of America’s “long wars” of attrition where it is increasingly unclear that the United States has a strategy to terminate them, or has the capability to end them in ways that create a stable and peaceful state that can survive if the United State should leave.
The resulting graphics and maps are provided in the full text of the report on which this summary is based. This summary both summarizes how the trends in such data reveal the patterns in terrorism and impact on U.S. strategy. The key conclusions, and an index to these graphics, are provided in this summary.
The trends in terrorism and extremism are only one part of this problem, and part of the lack of any clear grand strategy that can offer the U.S. a credible probability of lasting victory in its wars if “victory” is defined a stable, friendly post war state. They are, however, as important and revealing as the trends on the battlefield, and they reveal major global and regional challenges that go far beyond today’s wars.
Unfortunately, there is no official U.S. database on global terrorism to draw upon. Just as the U.S. has failed to create a consistent level of reporting on war fighting and civil-military affairs as well as on the cost of its wars it has abandoned the effort to create such a database by the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) and effectively subcontracted the effort to a national academic consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism called START which is managed by the Homeland Security Center of Excellence and led by the University of Maryland.
The START effort does an excellent job of tracking unclassified open source material, providing a readily accessible database that is clearly tied to assessment of the uncertainties in the data and to individual acts of terrorism in ways the explain it limitations and validate its counts. This database is available to the public and is used to provide the statistical trend data in the U.S. State Department’s annual country reports on terrorism.
It is not designed for the purpose of tracking the interactions between terrorism and insurgency, or how extremism affects war fighting, but it does not provide information that proves that USA is considering tp eliminate terrorism. In fact, USA has been spreading terrorism giving good names; War on Terror, Arab Spring, and Pink Revolution. USA admitted and there are ample of evidence that Al-Qaeda had been established by USA with help of Muslims as it strategic partner to destroy USSR.
And USSR was destroyed. To destroy its second enemy the Muslims it designed 9/11 twin tower attack in 2001 and attacked Afghanistan occupied it, built the underground bases to use against Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia and Central State Countries. It attacked Iraq, Syria, Libya and now Iran has been under attack as per their declared design of 2001. USA has been the spreader of terrorism and not the country that limits or eliminates the war. USA intellectuals believe in continuous wars or never ending wars. After one war to another.
Col. Peter Ralph has written a book on never ending war. USA has proved to be villain of humanity. The globe cannot see peace so far USA does not stop its doctrine of war.
‘Courtesy Abdul Majeed’.