Washington, DC – Two decades ago, on May 1, 2003, then-US President George W Bush declared “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” in a speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, with a banner behind him proclaiming “mission accomplished”.
The theatrical event, coming just 43 days after the United States had launched a ground invasion of Iraq, was meant to declare the beginning of the end of one of the main prongs of Washington’s so-dubbed post-September 11, 2001 “global war on terror” (GWOT).
But far from ending operations, the US would send more troops to Iraq – peaking at about 168,000 forces in 2007, with no evidence the country had been involved in 2001’s 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC.
The US would also further expand its GWOT, carrying out what analysts say was an undeterminable amount of strikes and military operations – sometimes through partner forces – against those deemed threats to the US in more than 20 countries across the world.
And while the rhetoric and strategy of the “war on terror” has shifted across presidential administrations, including that of current President Joe Biden, it continues to be defined by a “lack of democratic accountability”, according to Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program.
That lack of accountability has persisted as US involvement has seen a “metastasis” over two decades, most notably spreading into an array of countries across Africa and Asia, she said. That sprawl has occurred as the US has shifted away from large-scale intervention.
“These are places where we hadn’t really had the conversation ‘Does it make sense for us to be pursuing these supposed adversaries? Are these even our adversaries or are they local groups with local interests?’” Ebright said. “There has not been that sort of democratic sanction.”
Who is the US still fighting?
Under the US Constitution, Congress has the sole right to declare war, something it has not done since World War II.
Instead, leaders have relied on a tangle of legal authorities to justify – at least in terms of domestic law – military adventurism related to the stated goal of snuffing out “terror” threats to the US.
While these legal justifications remain fluid, they generally support the broadened power for the executive branch – the White House, Department of Defense, and Central Intelligence Agency – to use or support force against groups deemed US enemies, according to analysts.
The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) of 2001 has remained a giant in this constellation of legal authorities and interpretations that continue to underpin US operations to counter “terror” that escape further congressional approval.
Enacted on September 18, 2001, it allows the US president to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorised, committed, or aided” the September 11, 2001 attacks, as well as nations that harboured those entities.
Used as the justification for the US invasion of Afghanistan, the 2001 AUMF has been widely interpreted to include groups associated with al-Qaeda, and controversially, ISIL (ISIS), and various offshoots. A subsequent AUMF, passed in 2002, created the legal justification for the US invasion of Iraq, and was later deemed applicable to Syria.
According to a 2021 report by Stephanie Savell, the co-director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, since 2001, the AUMF has been used to justify US air strikes and operations in Djibouti, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, among others, as well as “support” for partners in a wide range of countries, including Cameroon, Chad, Eritrea, Georgia, Kosovo, Jordan, Nigeria and the Philippines.
All told, presidential administrations have publicly cited the 2001 AUMF in “an unknown number of military operations, including airstrikes, combat, detention, and supporting partner militaries” in 22 countries since 2001, the report said.
But that is far from the whole picture of US involvement, Savell told Al Jazeera. Her analysis from 2018 to 2020 found that Washington undertook what it labelled as “counterterrorism” activities in 85 countries during those two years – ranging from “training or assisting” a country’s military expressly for counterterrorism, to actual US-conducted strikes.
She added that an ongoing analysis of Biden’s first years in office “looks very similar”.
“When I began this project [in 2015], I thought this was going to be straightforward: I’m going to make a map of the war on terror, and it’s going to have about seven or eight countries,” she told Al Jazeera. “But the more I dug, the more that I discovered the vast extent of what’s happening. This is not published or talked about on any government website, or in any kind of official, comprehensive way, to the point that even Congress doesn’t know the full story.”
From 2018 to 2020,