Thousands of pages have been written about what George Orwell got right: state invasions of privacy, the deceit of governments, the social inequality of Britain. Sixty-three years after his death in 2013 – the inaugural year of “Orwell Day” – American politics and foreign policy still have sinisterly Orwellian connotations.

After eleven years of warfare, American troops are finally being withdrawn from Afghanistan with 34,000 due to leave by the end of this year. However the “war on terror” has not been won, nor will it ever be if American tactics -which often seem to be mere proxies for actual counterterrorist strategy- continue. The United States’ counterinsurgency policy is currently one of “leadership decapitation”, where people determined to be the leading figures of Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations are targeted in an effort to dismantle the entire terrorist offensive. Leaving aside the ethical issues raised by assuming guilt on the basis of secret intelligence rather than fair trial and due process, and the collateral damage caused by the American military’s methods (usually remotely controlled drone strikes), the tactics are in any case futile. They perpetuate the threats to the United States, both by antagonising more susceptible young men and by being defensively ineffective. Leadership decapitation does not work because new leaders will always rise to the surface. Their only use is for the American government at home, because the deaths of high-profile terrorists like Osama Bin Laden generate positive PR to feed to the American media.

The notion of creating an abstract notion of ‘the enemy’ in order to strengthen the government’s power at home is familiar, and it is unsurprising that Orwell identified it so precisely in 1984, writing as he was in the early years of the Cold War. The USSR demonised Capitalism as much as the USA was gripped by a fear of the spectre of Communism. However, nearly half a century of an ideological stalemate later and the US is engaging in another drawn out and futile conflict – although this time the enemy is weaker and the American military stronger. In his 1945 essay, Notes on Nationalism, Orwell identified certain types of nationalists who were blinded by their ideological determination. Among these he described The British Tory, who could not accept that Britain would come out of World War Two with reduced power and prestige. This characterisation can easily be applied to Barack Obama and other leading military personnel who maintain that American intervention in Afghanistan has been positive, and that America’s international reputation has remained untarnished.

Again, on topics as vast and complex as this, many concerns – such as the physical and practical impact of America’s presence in Afghanistan –must be left aside for more detailed discussion. However even if we take (fittingly, given America’s history) an isolationist view of the domestic consequences of the “war on terror”, US policy does not appear to have been effective. America gains nothing from its destructive foreign policy – and it has everything to lose. Orwell wrote in 1941 that a soldier need not lose any sleep over the deaths he causes because “he is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil”. Is this the attitude American military officials take when they are not just killing their suspected enemies, but torturing them? The American government’s blanket defence of the “war on terror” relieves perpetrators of any moral guilt.

Ironically, the simplicity of the phrase “war on terror” could even have been inspired by Orwellian rhetoric. In Politics and the English Language, Orwell lambasts the use of “decadent language” and argues, “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words”. Orwell was commenting on contemporary politician’s use of long and complex phraseology to deceive the public. Since this has become such a hackneyed criticism political oratory has swung in the other direction, misleading through its simplicity by creating the impression of inescapable common sense. How can one argue against the import of defeating an international threat? It is a lot harder to identify the flaws in a sentence of three words than a sentence of ten.

So when it comes to the murky world of foreign policy it is more important than ever to remember the lessons and warnings, as well as the mistakes, of the uncannily prescient George Orwell.