SHELL

Incrementing in Bash using an Until Loop

i=0

until [ $i -gt 3 ]
do
  echo i: $i
  ((i=i+1))
done

bash increment variable in while loop

You are using USCOUNTER in a subshell, that's why the variable is not showing in the main shell.

Instead of cat FILE | while ..., do just a while ... done < $FILE. This way, you avoid the common problem of I set variables in a loop that's in a pipeline. Why do they disappear after the loop terminates? Or, why can't I pipe data to read?:

while read country _; do
  if [ "US" = "$country" ]; then
        USCOUNTER=$(expr $USCOUNTER + 1)
        echo "US counter $USCOUNTER"
  fi
done < "$FILE"
Note I also replaced the `` expression with a $().

I also replaced while read line; do country=$(echo "$line" | cut -d' ' -f1) with while read country _. This allows you to say while read var1 var2 ... varN where var1 contains the first word in the line, $var2 and so on, until $varN containing the remaining content.