Month: December 2011

The Guardian reported on Sunday that “senior British officials believe that a ‘last push’ in 2012 is likely to definitively destroy al-Qaida’s remaining senior leadership in Pakistan.” The vicious drone war, wildly accelerated under Obama, has managed to kill a considerable number of al Qaeda members, despite killing and maiming many more civilians.

But don’t prepare you palms for applause just yet: the same report acknowledged that the Obama administration’s capacity to kill is not a winning strategy even if it has crippled terrorist operatives in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province.

However, well-informed sources outside government and close to Islamist groups in north Africa said at least two relatively senior al-Qaida figures have already made their way to Libya, with others intercepted en route, raising fears that north Africa could become a new “theatre of jihad” in coming months or years.

Libya isn’t the only suspected “new theater” mentioned in the piece: Somalia and Nigeria were also noted locales for al Qaeda.

This really shows the futility of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan-Pakistan. Extending the military occupation of Afghanistan and secret war in Pakistan (against the will of huge majorities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and America) until we kill enough al Qaeda members does two things: (1) makes them leave Af-Pak, and (2) ensures that violent anti-American sentiment is constantly regenerated. By most accounts, the war has only exacerbated the terrorist threat facing America by fueling hatred and fundamentalism. When ninety-two percent of Afghans have never even heard of 9/11, the war is viewed as an unprovoked abuse. In fact, the war was intended to be directly against US interests. Al Qaeda planned to draw America into a long and costly war there while simultaneously provoking America to commit crimes that would predictably incite extremism and hatred against the U.S. far beyond the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. That seems to be exactly what has happened.

And now the Obama administration has expanded America’s secret wars to Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, and beyond, apparently applying the same failed strategy in these “new theaters.”

For the record, I think the so-called terrorist threat is vastly inflated. The point is not that there is a worldwide Islamic jihad growing throughout the world. The point is that aggressive interventionist foreign policy will continue to create terrorists ready to attack America or Americans. What threat there is will dissipate if the motivation is taken away.

The war in Afghanistan is costing hundreds of billions of dollars. The military occupation is party to severe human rights violations and outright atrocities. Conditions are not only not improving, they are getting worse. If you’re a regular reader of this site, you know about these things in detail. If you’re a regular consumer only of major media outlets, you know almost nothing of the war.

In the past year, “weekly monitoring of 52 major papers, news Web sites, TV networks and stations, and radio stations” found that Afghanistan made up only 2 percent of the coverage. Via Brian Stelter at the New York Times blog:

Of all the news content in newspapers and on the Web, television and radio this year, Afghanistan accounted for about 2 percent of coverage, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an arm of the Pew Research Center.

Six other subjects were given more sustained attention than the war there. In descending order, they were the economy in the United States; the unrest in the Middle East; the 2012 presidential election; the earthquake, tsunami and ensuing nuclear disaster in Japan; the killing of Osama bin Laden; and the shooting in Tucson in which six were killed and Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, was critically injured.

Here is the full study. Truthfully, I’m not even sure how to feel about this predictable reality. It’s tragic the news media doesn’t pay close attention to this, and even more tragic that virtually the entire electorate is ignorant of what is going on there. But if Afghanistan were given lots of coverage time, we could expect it to be inaccurate, indoctrinated, and to whitewash American crimes (which are ubiquitous).

Back during the initial swing of protests in Bahrain, and when the Khalifa regime’s crackdown was at its harshest, dozens of medical professionals were arrested for the crime of treating as patients those protesters who had been injured by violent Bahraini security forces. At the time, the authorities slapped trumped up charges on them like “attempting to overthrow the government” and “spreading false news.” After international condemnation, mainly from rights groups, the regime granted those doctors release on bail pending a retrial. Since that decision, the commission appointed to investigate the government’s abuses in response to Arab Spring protests found, among other things, that torture was systemic (and probably still is). That commission investigated a total of 300 cases, although they received 5,200 complaints of abuse. People were beaten, electro-shocked, sexually abused, suspended in stress positions, etc.

Some of those medics now awaiting retrial have spoken out, notably in this AFP story:

“I can’t talk,” sobbed consultant paediatrician Nader Dawani, recounting how he was forced to stand up for seven days, while being beaten repeatedly, mainly by a female officer.

“She was the harshest. She used to hit me with a hose and wooden canes, many of which broke on my back,” said the frail 54-year-old man.

“They attempted to insert a bottle in my anus,” he recounted.

…”At night they would take me blindfolded. I can smell alcohol fuming with their breaths. One interrogator would say: It is the weekend and we are a group. If you don’t confess, we will sleep with you one at a time.”

The Bahraini dictatorship has done a decent job of deflecting criticism and feigning reform, particularly by doing things like lifting the martial law that was initially imposed and allowing this independent commission to investigate abuse, etc. But the repression continues. Demonstrations still occur on almost a nightly basis, usually to be met with tear gas and rubber bullets by security forces. In an interview with Josh Rogin, Bahraini activist Nabeel Rajab said “The military has taken part in suppressing the protests. They have killed people, they have tortured people, they have arrested people, they have detained people. They have established checkpoints and humiliated people at checkpoints, raided houses, robbed houses, demolished mosques.”

U.S. support for this savagery remains assertive, however. Over $92 million in aid has been sent since Obama’s inauguration and another $26.2 million slated for next year. The Pentagon has also cut deals with Bahrain in arms trade, sending dozens of American tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopter gunships, thousands of .38 caliber pistols and millions of rounds of ammunition, from .50 caliber rounds used in sniper rifles and machine guns to bullets for handguns, some of which were undoubtedly used against protesters. The Obama administration was forced to suspend a similar package of military equipment, $53 million worth, making it conditional on reform. But Bahraini opposition groups and a U.N. statement last week acknowledged that no substantive move towards reform has been made. My guess is that new package of military aid is really being postponed, not suspended with conditions.

While shock and disapproval are the right reactions for Americans to have, nobody should be surprised that U.S. support continues unabated. Bahrain has long engaged in torture in its time as a U.S. ally. One year before the Arab Spring protests broke out, Human Rights Watch released a report noting torture on the rise despite a decade of promises from the regime for reform. Of primary interest to U.S. national security planners is the maintenance of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, which oversees the flow of oil, and also to prevent a slide towards Iran if the majority Shiites gain their rights. But no amount of real politick warrants this brutality. So long as the peacenik, Nobel laureate Barack Obama continues to support Bahrain, it is his administration that is committing crimes of torture and repression in Bahrain.

But it will continue. One primary reason is that the press simply doesn’t care. The White House press corps doesn’t ask why American tax payers are donating money to this dictatorship. The nation’s top newspapers don’t have headlines about Obama’s relentless support for sadistic cruelty and authoritarianism in Bahrain. In fact, I was surprised last week when Nicholas Kristoff wrote about this issue in a New York Times Op-Ed. It was a rare event. Without a press corps willing to ask tough questions, and without an electorate that gives a shit, these policies will continue forever.

As the presidential campaign drifts into its most petty and superficial, here is a reminder of what is important, of what Washington is all about and is likely to continue being all about unless Americans wake up and understand what U.S. terrorism around the world really is:

I recently wrote more extensively about the U.S. drone war in Pakistan: Secrecy Obstructs Accountability: How the Drone War Will Help Get Obama Reelected.