TEHRAN- In the 21st century, the U.S. learnt the hard way of its catastrophic foreign military policy in West Asia: From boots on the ground to so-called precision strikes.

Washington's success in destabilizing a continent with terror and destruction over two decades came at the expense of mass civilian casualties?, dead U.S. soldiers, expensive price tags for American taxpayers to pick up and embarrassing defeats.

The U.S. began its West Asia war campaign in 2001 with soldiers on the ground, along the figures of hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as casualties among American service members rose significantly, the wars became deeply unpopular at home. Yet Washington had to pursue them to expand its hegemony. In order to accomplish that it resorted to what the Pentagon defines as precision strikes from the skies with warplanes and much more increasingly, armed drones. 

The U.S. says it uses precision strikes with pinpoint accuracy. Rights groups have slammed such accuracy that has slaughtered so many civilians. 

The Western media have played the role of the Pentagon's propaganda machine by beating the drums of war to the American public. Footage of soldiers setting out tried to project a sense of necessity and sympathy among the American public, many of whom unaware that these military missions were illegal. 

Mainstream Western media also played a sinister role by, for example, only publishing videos of U.S. missile salvos being fired but failed to display any footage of where those missiles landed. Has there ever been any footage of the moments before U.S. missiles drop on their screaming victims? Or several days later when women and children are being pulled out of the rubble?

The goal of Washington's military adventurism in West Asia, apart from serving the industrial military complex, was to serve its number one proxy, Israel, in the region. Serving Tel Aviv's interests came at a time when the region grew in power and the U.S. sought to undermine West Asia's influence by bringing instability, violence and terror as well as sowing division. 

Among the countries subject to the U.S.'s so-called "war on terror" in West Asia and its bordering regions are the following. 

AFGHANISTAN: Defeated by men with flip-flops

The most "sophisticated, advanced military and weapons" were unable to defeat men with flip-flops, loose turbans, and trousers armed with Kalashnikovs and RPGs.

The so-called evacuation and the scenes that came with it were an embarrassment for the Biden administration.

20-years of U.S. occupation saw at least 70,000 U.S. trained Afghan security forces killed. Hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by the U.S. and terrorism. A million others injured with some think tanks saying that's an undercount. And perhaps not a market in Kabul that wasn't blown up to pieces.

Ultimately the U.S. trained Afghan army collapsed and so did Kabul to the Taliban who took power again.

At least 2,440 U.S. troops killed, another 21,000 injured. No goal achieved, no mission accomplished, only 20 years of terror for Afghan civilians.

The cost of the war and occupation of the country for American taxpayers varies. The Costs of War project at Brown University puts it at $2.3 trillion, which doesn't include the shambolic evacuation. An estimation by Forbes summed it up at $300 million dollars per day for two decades. And the same Taliban restrictions are slowly creeping back again.

There is also humanitarian crisis now, mainly because the U.S. has seized upwards of $7 billion dollars of Afghan assets.

IRAQ: A sea of blood for oil barrels

The Bush administration used fake intelligence at the UN, claiming Iraq had hidden weapons of mass destruction. And proceeded to invade with the infamous shock and awe bombardment, lighting up the Baghdad skyline in March 2003.

The anti-U.S. resistance factions grew as the months and years stretched on. Nobody wanted Saddam, but none of the locals wanted U.S. tanks on their streets either. Iraq had been on the receiving end of harsh U.S. sanctions before Saddam was toppled and that brought extreme hardship for the Iraqis. 

Some officials later said the U.S. war on Iraq was about oil. In 2007 Alan Greenspan wrote "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil."

Different organizations have concluded that as many as 1.2 million Iraqis died as a consequence of the invasion, which saw the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The terror group had no presence there before the invasion.

Terrorist bombings became the norm and occur to this day despite a significant decrease. At times, during the U.S. occupation, explosions were killing hundreds of civilians.

While U.S. troops awaited flowers from the locals, they were waiting for the U.S. military with armed resistance. The deeply unpopular war on Iraq had bitter consequences for the U.S. military.

4,491 U.S. soldiers died. Around 1,000 U.S. contractors and another 32,000 soldiers sustained injuries. Data shows hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered from mental issues, including traumatic brain injuries in both Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The war also came with another massive price tag for American taxpayers. Academics differ on the exact price as many hidden costs, not represented by official estimates, are accounted for. In early 2008, before U.S. forces were forced to withdraw, Harvard University put the Iraq invasion at $3 trillion.

The U.S. was humiliated by the Iraqi resistance and kicked out of the country in 2011.  

The U.S. returned to Iraq in 2014 under the pretext of fighting Daesh which critics say Washginton has helped flourish. It continues to violate the country’s sovereignty today, despite a parliamentary bill calling for the expulsion of its forces following the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and the deputy leader of the Popular Mobilization Units Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in Baghdad. 

This time, during the era of Daesh, the U.S. declined to use foot soldiers. Being aware of the consequences, it relied on its air force, which carpet bombed regions, killing tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The drone footage of the U.S. bombing in Mosul in 2017 shows entire residential neighborhoods flattened to the ground.

Nevertheless, Iraq's foreign currency reserves from oil exports are based at the U.S. Federal Reserve, giving the Americans significant control over Baghdad's supply of dollars.

In essence, the country has yet to become fully sovereign, until it controls its own funds and the occupation ends. 

SYRIA: Thieves in uniform

The U.S. military interference in Syria in August 2014 also comes under the pretext of fighting Daesh, despite no invitation from Damascus. 

The U.S. supported, armed and funded groups that Washington labeled as "rebels" wanting to topple the government. 

Unfortunately for the U.S., gruesome videos of the same "rebels" would soon surface and go viral on social media, such as members of the U.S. trained militants cutting out civilian chests and eating their hearts with their decapitated heads laying on their bodies. This is while Western reporters could not enter the areas where the U.S. was supporting militants as they would be decapitated as well.

The Pentagon gave a huge boost in helping terrorist groups prosper in Syria.

Again, the U.S. used its air force to carpet bomb entire cities like Raqqa. According to monitoring groups such as Airwars, tens of thousands of civilians were killed as a result. Other organizations have put the civilian death toll from the U.S. interference in Iraq and Syria at a much higher level, many of them women and children.

The U.S. bombed Iraq and Syria under the pretext of fighting Daesh at least 40,000 times. Where did these tens of thousands of bombs land and who they killed is under heavy scrutiny.

Syria has yet to rebuild its infrastructure or restore vital services for its nationals. The main reason behind this is the ongoing, illegal U.S. occupation of Syria’s eastern oil-rich border with Iraq, where there is an estimated 1,000 – 2,000 troops in heavily fortified bases. The presence of the U.S. forces on both parts of the Syria-Iraq border has a very dark element. Critics say their deployment is aimed at undermining the two countries’ progress while bringing regional insecurity.

Damascus estimates the U.S. military has plundered upwards of $12 billion of the country’s oil reserves to pay for its own illegal presence in the country. These are vital funds that can go a long way to helping the humanitarian crisis in Syria.

Dozens of U.S. soldiers and contractors have been killed in Iraq and Syria during the U.S. occupation of both countries since 2014.

The war on Syria also saw a refugee crisis in the West, the same region that declared it stood by the Syrian people banned them from entering their territory as refugees. 

YEMEN: Bombs and famine

Financially, the U.S. has massively benefited from its role in the war on Yemen. Its role was to support a Saudi-led coalition to crush a popular revolution.

Washington has sold Saudi Arabia and the UAE weapons to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to use in Yemen. It also provided Saudi Arabia with training, refueling of fighter jets, and intelligence on where to strike in Yemen.

Those airstrikes together with the blockade for eight years since 2015, have killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, along with causing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

As ongoing truce talks between Yemeni officials and Saudi Arabia look promising and may likely achieve tangible results, the U.S. goal of preventing Yemen from being a sovereign nation has failed.

LIBYA: Divide and conquer

The U.S.-led NATO interference in March 2011 was publicly declared as aimed at toppling long-time ruler Muammar al-Gaddafi and came in the form of divide and conquer.
This has worked as Libya has witnessed several different governments controlling different regions competing for the right to kill everybody else, amid regular heavy clashes among the warring sides.

NATO resorted to airstrikes in Libya once more, but the result of the interference has been a bloodbath. Death toll figures are difficult to gain as the nation has been divided for so long with different authorities in charge of the East and West.

Adding to the misery of Libyans is that the country, just like everywhere else the U.S. intervened, has seen the terror of Daesh, which had no presence in Libya before the U.S.-led NATO interference.

Libyans have been fighting terrorists without the backing of NATO, which caused the destruction of the country.

PAKISTAN:  Iron birds carrying death

Since 2004 the U.S. has attacked thousands of targets in northwest Pakistan, using drones operated by the U.S. Air Force under the operational control of the CIA’s Special Activities Division. The lethal operations have been dubbed “the drone war”.

Washington alleges to be targeting terrorists from the skies, but again civilians have borne the brunt of the so-called precision strikes. The massacre of civilian families has led to the radicalization of Pakistanis to join terrorist groups.
It’s not easy to get precise civilian death toll figures from this warzone. Monitoring groups say the region being bombarded by the U.S. has a civilian death toll that is underestimated mainly due to lack of transparency on the U.S. side for the number of attacks it commits, let alone the civilians it kills. Also, countries at war with the U.S. as well as terrorism lack the advanced resources to keep track of the casualties or identify the real terrorists from the civilians.

For example, from 2004 to 2018, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that there were at least 430 confirmed U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. These attacks from the skies reportedly killed between 2,515 and 4,026 people. 424 to 969 of those individuals were civilians and to make matters worse, 172 to 207 of those civilians were children.

But these are rural areas with little to no services so how can the international community be sure that more civilians were not killed, in the absence of an international inquiry into precisely what has been occurring.

Perhaps more importantly is that when an evaluation is made on the significance of the drone war, studies find it has had no impact on the militants in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan who continue to kill scores of civilians on a regular basis. 

It can be safely concluded that the U.S. drone war, apart from radicalizing sections of the Pakistani population, has been nothing short of an absolute failure. 

SOMALIA: Iceberg in the Horn of Africa

Referred to by International Rights groups as the “Hidden U.S. War in Somalia”, the latest round of U.S. intervention began in 2007. The case of Somalia receives so little media attention but is one of the biggest causes of regional instability.

U.S. senators have said nearly 1,000 U.S. troops are currently deployed in Somalia. But the White House failed to disclose the actual number in an unclassified portion of the report it submitted to Congress in March.

The U.S. claims to be helping local authorities to counter the al-Qaeda linked Al Shabaab terrorist group, but most studies suggest it is doing the opposite.

While U.S. troops have been subject to attacks with casualties making the headlines every now and again, their presence is strongly believed to be exacerbating the insecurity.

Once again, it is the U.S. air force that has taken the lethal and leading role in the attacks. The U.S. has waged hundreds if not thousands of airstrikes on the country, claiming to target Al-Shabaab.

Just this year in January, the U.S. military claimed it killed 30 Al-Shabaab fighters

Yet there hasn't been a shred of evidence from the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) that those killed on the ground were actually Al-Shabaab militants.

On the contrary, organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross and Amnesty International have documented a countless number of cases where the airstrikes have killed civilians.

AFRICOM has a pattern in Somalia where it is presented with evidence that civilians are being killed in the same cases which the U.S. military claims militants have died but AFRICOM declines to provide a response.

There is zero accountability for Washington's actions in Somalia as civilian casualties continue to mount from the U.S. military's secret air war in the country, with no justice or reparation for the victims.

Women, girls and the elderly are among the many killed by these secret attacks. In one case seven members of the same family were killed, including a new born baby. There are no probes into the massacres, which means the exact number of civilians killed is unknown. Some think tanks say it could be in the thousands.

Monitoring groups have also documented widespread damage to agricultural infrastructure, extensive damage to residential buildings as well as the killing of large numbers of livestock, something the locals live on.

The rising civilian death toll has one serious consequence for the security in the Horn of Africa.

More civilian deaths with no probes, accountability or reparation have, like in Pakistan, resulted in the radicalization of Somalians with more joining Al-Shabaab than before the U.S. interference began, meaning the terrorisms is spreading and becoming more powerful as a direct result of these secret U.S. airstrikes.

On Thursday the U.S. House of Representatives voted against a resolution that would have forced President Biden to withdraw all U.S. troops from the African nation.

Biden reportedly authorized a return of some 500 U.S. forces to Somalia last year after his predecessor, Donald Trump, ordered 700 of them out during his term.

In March 2022 the Wall Street Journal, quoting a U.S. intelligence official, reported that the U.S. military had requested from Biden to deploy several hundred more special forces to Somalia.

On Thursday a damaging report by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute found Washington has spent more than $2.5 billion in Somalia since 2007.

The project says the figure is “just the tip of the iceberg” as the number doesn’t include spending on U.S. military and intelligence operations that have yet to be disclosed by the relevant agencies. The study concluded that “sixteen years after Al-Shabaab’s emergence, the group is still on the rise.”

It added that “U.S. efforts are not merely exacerbating Somalia’s insecurity, but actively impeding stability and conflict resolution, the U.S. portrays itself as an external actor with a supportive role in helping Somalia in conflict resolution efforts. But U.S. policy makes conflict inevitable."

Over the past decade, it has been well documented that Al-Shabaab militants are aware of the threat from the skies. The militants avoid gathering in large groups. They move in units of three or four.

It's safe to say that the U.S. has violated international humanitarian law in Somalia.

“The evidence is stacking up and it’s pretty damning. Not only does AFRICOM utterly fail at its mission to report civilian casualties in Somalia, but it doesn’t seem to care about the fate of the numerous families it has completely torn apart,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s Director for East and Southern Africa.

“AFRICOM thinks it can simply smear its civilian victims as ‘terrorists,’ no questions asked," Muchena added.

A report by the Costs of War project at Brown University revealed that 20 years of post-9/11 wars in West Asia have cost the American taxpayers an estimated $8 trillion. 

A tiny fraction of that could have helped the refugee crisis where Syrians?, Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans and others drowned after climbing onto flimsy boats with their frightened children to flee U.S. wars waged on their countries. Many of whom had never seen the sea before and never saw land again. 

Experts agree the human costs go much deeper with long-term consequences, which may come back to haunt Washington as many seek revenge for the death of their families and loved ones.

Mission accomplished? 

If the U.S. terms a mission accomplished as a staggering civilian death toll, wide-scale damage to residential infrastructure, the significant increase in terrorism, prolonging wars, plundering other nations oil or devastating countries hopes of aspirations instead of bringing democracy, prosperity, freedom and human rights, et. then it has accomplished that mission.

But evidence of the U.S. military unable to defeat the will of the people’s resistance on the battlefield suggests no matter how advanced Washington's weapons may be, it has been defeated on the ground and cannot win a war.