Spending on the US war on terror recently hit 1$ trillion, as reported by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a US government watchdog agency. Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), covering Afghanistan and other Global War On Terror (GWOT) operations, ranging from the Philippines to Djibouti began immediately after the 9/11 attacks and continues.
Has the threat to America been eliminated? Well, its hard to say, isn’t it?. There have been no attacks since 9/11. which implies that the Homeland Security team must be doing its job well. On the flip side, the threat is as alive as at any other time prior to 9/11, with Bin Laden — the mastermind — still around, hiding somewhere in Pakistan, and releasing cynical videos to scare the Americans and their allies.
Everyone will remember the days when the Bush administration was compounding the magnitude of the threat by introducing what they called a threat alert system, with a color coded index. The security threat to the US resembled a stock market index, with television news anchors announcing where the index stood every day.
By announcing the response to the 9/11 attacks as Global War On Terror, the Bush administration was also magnifying the enemy. The administration also engaged in worldwide propaganda against terrorism. This was widely reported the media as well, and news about several other armed groups around the world made headlines. The general attention towards similar attacks across the globe received primetime exposure on all media channels. It was as if the whole world were being attacked by terrorists, who somehow were all connected, with their only goal terrorizing the people.
The policy of “Global War on Terror” not only diluted the focus on the real enemy, it also lacked a benchmark that could be used to measure its progress — the reason why none of us can ever conclusively say whether or not the job is done.
The USA was seen as chasing the weapon, rather than the enemy. Since it was declared a "global war," US government resources were spent on assisting other nations to do their own dirty laundry. Nations with internal disturbances by armed groups lobbied the US administration to include their enemies in the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) resulting in Foreign Aid and Diplomatic Operations spending alone (as part of the GWOT), amounting to 46.6 million.The US taxpayer was now paying for several other wars around the globe, several of which an average American would have never heard of before.
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