As with most of the times when the US has declared “war on” something in the past few decades, that something is becoming a dramatically bigger and worse problem than when the war was originally announced.

This time it’s the “War of Terror,” which in its first full year, 2002, saw a world with less than 1,000 terror attacks worldwide. The number of attacks has soared ever since, with 4,564 distinct terror attacks in 2011.

Not only has the US “global war on terror” not made a positive difference, the places the policy has directly targeted have ended up by far the worst off, with terror attacks virtually unheard of before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and the nation still having the most attacks of any nation on the planet.

Close behind Iraq are two other nations that US interventionism has been heavily thrown at, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The report, from the Institute for Economics and Peace, concluded that “terrorism can best be described as plateauing rather than decreasing” since the war began.