US War on Terror Kills Nearly 500,000 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan

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US War on Terror Kills Nearly 500,000 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan
November 08, 2018 4:40 PM

• Ayaz Gul

FILE - Bodies of civilians and security forces are placed at a hospital in Ghazni province, Afghanistan, Aug. 12, 2018.

ISLAMABAD —
A study released Thursday says the U.S.-led war on terrorism has killed about 507,000 people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan during its 17 years and is showing a 22 percent increase in deaths in the past two years.

The death toll includes U.S. and allied troops, civilians in the war zones, local military and police forces, as well as militants, who have died from war violence, according to the report by Brown University's Costs of War Project.

The report said the number of indirect deaths was several times larger than deaths caused by direct war violence, bringing the total death count to well over 1 million people.

Fatalities in Afghanistan, as of October 2018, stood at about 147,000 people, including Afghan security forces, civilians and opposition fighters. The figure also included the deaths of 6,334 American soldiers and contractors, as well as more than 1,100 allied troops.

FILE - People wait to carry the bodies of their family members who died in an attack on the Police Training Academy, in Quetta, Pakistan, Oct. 25, 2016.
The report said that war-related violence had killed 65,000 people in neighboring Pakistan, including 90 American contractors, nearly 9,000 local security personnel and more than 23,000 civilians. The rest of the casualties were anti-government fighters.

The rest of the deaths, between 268,000 and 295,000, occurred in Iraq, where the U.S.-led military intervention began in 2003.

"Though the war on terror is often overlooked by the American public, press and lawmakers, the increased body count signals that, far from diminishing, this war remains intense," the report said.

It also lamented that the U.S. wars have displaced millions of people in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

"This update just scratches the surface of the human consequences of 17 years of war," the report warned in its concluding lines.

While the casualties in Pakistan have dropped by more than 80 percent in the past few years, intensified hostilities in Afghanistan continue to inflict record levels of casualties on civilians and pro-government forces. The year 2018, observers say, appears to be the deadliest so far since the conflict began 17 years ago.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-war-on...ple-in-afghanistan-iraq-pakistan/4650554.html

 

[PeaceGen]

i've read somewhere that the US military commanders asked the US government leaders at the time for 500.000 troops to do a good job on the regime-change from Saddam to their present day leaders.
they received only 150.000 troops to work with.

i believe that with more troops, more innocent lives would have been spared, less people would have suffered, more fighters would have stayed alive, etc. And since Libya it's been proven to me by the US' own actions, that the US likes to do half-assed jobs when they regime-change a country, to keep their costs down or something, i don't know why really.

what i do know is that i don't agree with this at all.
it's wrong to wage war in this fashion, even evil.

the same goes for Syria, peaceful demonstrators asking for a fair share of the national wealth, get labeled terrorists while being attacked by their own government with full Russian support, in horrible ways.

the US' blank-cheque always-look-the-other-way support for Saudi, and all that they are doing and have planned against Iran, is also downright evil. Only if the US starts to effectively restrain Saudi(-sponsored) militant activities outside Saudi Arabia, does the US regain a tiny bit of the honor it has completely lost since Trump took office and set out the new Iran "policy".

finally, i don't just say this on this forum.
i maintain an email list which i'll be expanding once more to include more European and leading NATO countries' governments and major media companies, and i have a way of building up (over months and years by the way) a means of being nearly sure these people actually read my viewpoints.

messages, especially messages to convince some person or group, are always specifically worded for that group or person. all good writers, journalists and politicians know this.

i can not stop Trump. and i don't like it. and unfortunately, to have any chance of me being able to help the US sliding into true facism/nazi-behavior or worse, or the Russians or the Chinese doing the same, i feel myself much more potentially meaningful in terms of preventing wars and proxy-wars and regime-changes, if i keep most of my email campaign messages completely secret from the few forums on which i'm active.

now it gets tricky; i've always defended the US' actions with much vigor and sharp words.
do i change that? and if so, into what? because if i don't point out how plotting or performing terror attacks against western targets, or let sustained reputation attacks on the US' actions outside their borders on forums like this, is completely counter-productive for everyone on the planet including the groups (men, women and children) who actively plot and perform such attacks, then the number of innocent casualties is only going to rise. possibly dramatically and become a weekly thing.
so i will continue to talk against people on this forum who make it a regular habit to post the worst moral offenses of the US or any other country big or small, on this forum.
and i've proven several times already over the years, that i can end such verbal violence-generating bullshit on a forum like this with relative easy, quickly, and until a new group walks in with the same silly idea of how to spend their time on a forum like this.

but i agree this should be a multi-polar world, with more geopolitical poles than just the US, Russia and China by they way, the UK, France, Germany, India should be able to be among the superpowers if they choose to be (because they have the population count for it and/or the economy for it as well, now or within the next few decades).
The superpowers (US, Russia, China) are acting like 5-year olds at the moment, trying to determine who is strongest. trying to prove they're the strongest. it's not only childish, it's downright evil to hold expensive arms races or do things like enrich the rich but somehow not have the money to give the middle class and poor decent levels of wealth, or to intimidate smaller countries as a superpower, blackmail smaller countries as a superpower, or to put smaller countries in horrible civil war for year after year just to get a new naval base in a new area.
all of the superpowers are currenty engaging in behavior that too often can be called nothing else but evil.
when the **** are you going to learn to stop measuring dicks and shouting you're the strongest and the greatest, "super"powers?

so... bottom-line : over here in Western-Europe and the US, there are these new anti-election, wide-spread government tapping of just about everything done electronically, and last but not least : back-hacking permissions for government, that had to be put in place in a hurry because the Russians and the Chinese tried dumb evil games against dumb Americans to mess with the US elections. not that i don't respect dumb people, by the way. i do.
that had the unfortunate side-effect that someone at the CIA or my own country's AIVD, whom are on that email list of mine, recently decided, to completely crash one of my computers after i sent out a few words of polite criticism to that email list.
now, i've got that covered, it'll be fully back up by tomorrow night, and i mention it only for 2 reasons :
1: Muslims, everyone else who is not American on the planet, i agree : since Trump took office the US has done things (Iran for instance will be a repeat of Iraq it seems and repeating such behavior is extra-evil) (and that US southern border immigration policy is very evil too in my opinion), that i too find morally so completely unacceptable,
that firm underground internet political peace-activism has become necessary by guys and girls like me, against the US abusing it's military prevalence (the fact they have the strongest military on Earth), whenever the **** they feel some selfish need for it.
2: i do try to use freedom of speech in (secret) ways, ways you'd never seen on mass media like CNN or Fox News, or forums like this even, to prevent wars and regime-changes from becoming "necessary". but i'm only human, meaning somethings i can get done and some i just can't, and i'm more and more restricted by factors beyond my control. i'll try to make those restrictions a temporary thing, but i could get more restricted too. the future is often very foggy and thus hard to predict by the way, and (emotional-)blackmail is a last resort tool in such activities of course. i try to stay as friendly and polite as possible towards the ones i need to convince of something by email.

i don't know how much of a difference i can make. but i do know i've made a difference in the past already.
more than once in fact.

don't think i'll allow *sustained* reputation attacks against the West to run on this forum, because that just gets more innocent people without any power of foreign policy of their government, killed or injured. And even the fighter with the "bravery" to take a knife from any kitchen and use it to attack people in the streets, is in fact someone who has been made frustrated and angry enough by someone else (or a group of so-called friends), that i consider him as much a victim of these warmongers and other slightly-smarter-than-average evil ones who want to keep this war on terror going for as long as possible, and who by the way, would love to see it intensified.
that would allow *them* to make themselves even richer in bloodmoney than they already are today.

if this message offends you, i advise against "taking action against" me. you've been warned. i'm swift and harsh against those who attack me.

 

[jamal18]

They haven't included the 1 million Iraqis that died in the embargo on Iraq before the war.

 

[Jaanbaz]

Sand nigger lives(according to Americans) don't matter, move along.