WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- Former Marine Thomas Gibbons-Neff returned to Afghanistan to confront a former enemy, seeking closure from a war that left a trail of destruction, massacre, and displacement across the region. 
His journey underscores the grim reality of U.S. military intervention: a decades-long “War on Terror” that has cost millions of lives and ended in chaos.
Gibbons-Neff, who served as a corporal during the 2010 battle of Marjah, estimated he had a hand in killing six or seven people. He returned to speak with Mullah Abdul Rahim Gulab, a Taliban commander he had once tried to kill, in a search for answers. 
“Instead of bringing democracy and prosperity, America’s two decades of involvement in West Asia left a legacy of destruction and misery,” a recent analysis noted, a sentiment echoed in the hollow victory of a withdrawal that allowed the Taliban to stroll back into power.
The human cost of these U.S.-led terrorist campaigns is staggering. According to research from Brown University, the post-9/11 wars have directly caused the deaths of over 940,000 people, with an estimated 4.5 million total victims when accounting for indirect deaths from economic collapse and destroyed infrastructure. 
In Afghanistan alone, more than 174,000 people died, including over 30,000 civilians, while a 2021 New York Times report revealed that more than 50,000 U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan killed tens of thousands of civilians.
The violence has been characterized by indiscriminate and often illegal tactics. The U.S. military has been implicated in atrocities, including the 2005 Haditha massacre, where Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians. 
More recently, a damning Pentagon inspector general report confirmed that systematic war crimes were enabled by the deliberate dismantling of civilian protection mechanisms during the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, leading to the deaths of thousands of civilians and the destruction of hundreds of schools and hospitals.
The legacy is also one of mass displacement, with over 38 million people driven from their homes by the U.S. “War on Terror”. 
Gibbons-Neff’s meeting with the Taliban commander offered a chilling confirmation of the war’s futility. The commander calmly described how Taliban fighters would fire at U.S. troops and then blend into the local population, a tactic that made the counterinsurgency a hopeless task. 
He bluntly told Gibbons-Neff that his reason for fighting was simple: “We wanted you to leave our home,” a sentiment reflecting the hatred and resentment U.S. wars have sown across the region.
Ultimately, the U.S. withdrew its troops in 2021, walking away from a country it had destabilized for two decades. The structures built at a cost of trillions of dollars melted away overnight. 
The war, which cost the U.S. over $2.3 trillion and claimed the lives of thousands of U.S. service members, had achieved nothing except to prove the failure of a policy based on military might rather than diplomacy. 
For many veterans like Gibbons-Neff, the politicians and generals offered only “evasions and lies,” leaving them to grapple with the moral and psychological consequences of a senseless conflict.