Month: May 2012

At Foreign Policy, James Traub wonders whether we might be causing outrage and creating enemies through our drone war in Yemen.

As Barbara Bodine, a former ambassador to Yemen, notes, “Right now we don’t have a Pakistan-like reaction. But at first we didn’t have that reaction with Pakistan either. This is something that builds. And folks in Yemen know what’s going on in Pakistan. This will play into the broader narrative of the drones we use in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” Another lesson learned from Afghanistan is that even a counterinsurgency effort designed to protect civilians and promote good government will provoke nationalist resistance. People on the ground will see the intervention as against them, not for them (which explains why, according to WikiLeaks cables, President Saleh publicly insisted that the Yemeni air force had launched the strikes). Counterinsurgency, which seemed so promising all of two or three years ago, now looks like an illusory, or at least oversold, solution to the war on terror. How long before we say the same of drones?

First of all, to describe the U.S. war and occupation in Afghanistan as a project “designed to protect civilians and promote good government” is to have a severely warped view of what’s been going on there over the past decade. Overall violence and civilian casualties have increased for five years in a row and promoting good governance is laughable in the context of the inordinately corrupt Karzai government and its savage security forces. But Traub seems to acknowledge that this “counterinsurgency” campaign has been a failure, so we’ll leave that aside.

Traub writes this piece in the context of Obama’s recent decision to allow the CIA and JSOC to employ “signature strikes,” to bomb groups of individuals that they cannot even identify and who present no imminent threat that the administration is willing to establish. Even though Traub seems to be recognizing that the drone war in Yemen may be similarly “oversold,” he’s not getting off the train just yet. “There are no cost-free military solutions,” he posits, presuming there is a military solution to begin with. “But when does the cost exceed the value?” he asks.

The frequency of strikes is already much greater than most of us realize. A report by the Britain-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism counts 21 definite or possible drone strikes in Yemen over the last two months; a Yemeni government official has said that the United States has been launching an average of two strikes a day since mid-April. The danger of producing more militants than we kill in Yemen hardly seems hypothetical.

Plenty of informed voices have been singing this tune for years (not to mention this very site). And ever since Obama approved “signature strikes” in Yemen, these narratives of blowback have become more pronounced.

Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert at Princeton University (who Traub actually quotes), recently wrote, “Body bags are not a good barometer for success in a war like this. I would argue that U.S. missile strike[s] are actually one of the major — not the only, but a major — factor in AQAP’s growing strength.”

Jeremy Scahill, reporting for Nation, exposed in February after visiting Yemen how U.S. airstrikes that kill civilians and those ill-defined as militants – along with support for the brutal Yemeni government  – foments anti-Americanism and fuels international terrorism.

As Charles Schmitz, a Yemen expert at Towson University in Maryland, told the Los Angeles Times, “The more the U.S. applies its current policy, the stronger Al Qaeda seems to get.”

“U.S. involvement is far more than ever in Yemen. We have no evidence that all those being killed are terrorists,” Abdul Salam Mohammed, director of Abaad Strategic Center, told CNN. “With every U.S. attack that is conducted in Yemen al Qaeda is only growing in power and we have to ask ourselves why that is happening.”

“Drones are a weapon of terror in many ways, and the kind of hostility this is going to breed may not be worth the counter-terrorism gains,” says Barbara Bodine, who was U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 1997 to 2001.

Understanding blowback is an elementary part of understanding U.S. foreign policy. Yet in the pages of Foreign Policy, that understanding is only now just barely rearing its head.

Human Rights Watch:

The 76-page report, “Unacknowledged Deaths: Civilian Casualties in NATO’s Air Campaign in Libya,” examines in detail eight NATO air strikes in Libya that resulted in 72 civilian deaths, including 20 women and 24 children.

…the absence of a clear military target at seven of the eight sites Human Rights Watch visited raises concerns of possible laws-of-war violations that should be investigated.

Human Rights Watch called on NATO to investigate all potentially unlawful attacks and to report its findings to the UN Security Council, which authorized the military intervention in Libya.

Common Dreams:

Former US President George W Bush, his Vice-President Dick Cheney and six other members of his administration have been found guilty of war crimes by a tribunal in Malaysia.

…Transcripts of the five-day trial will be sent to the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, the United Nations and the Security Council.

A member of the prosecution team, Professor Francis Boyle of Illinois University’s College of Law, said he was hopeful that Bush and his colleagues could soon find themselves facing similar trials elsewhere in the world.

The eight accused are Bush; former US Vice President Richard Cheney; former US Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld; former Counsel to Bush, Alberto Gonzales; former General Counsel to the Vice President, David Addington; former General Counsel to the Defense Secretary, William Haynes II; former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo.

The men were tried in abstentia and the conviction seems to have focused on the issue of torture as opposed to the war of aggression against Iraq.

Via Ben Armbruster at ThinkProgress, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey says there is no need for the recent GOP push to build a missile defense system on the East coast of the United States.

Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH,) who supported the East Coast missile defense measure, claims it’s needed “to lessen the threats from both Iran and North Korea.” But the AP reports that Lt. Gen. Patrick J. O’Reilly, the head of the U.S. missile defense program, told Congress recently that North Korea lacks the testing for a capable system and has made little progress in its spaceflight program. And former CIA Mideast analyst Paul Pillar has noted that “the intelligence community does not believe [the Iranians] are anywhere close to having an ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile].”

Moreover, as Dempsey hinted at in the press conference, Danger Room notes that existing systems already have the eastern sea board covered from ICBM threats.

“This is a political move,” said Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) referring to the GOP’s missile defense scheme. “Every time the election comes around, the Republicans run out a national security agenda.”

This just shows how fervently nationalistic and militaristic many representatives in Congress are, even compared to military officials.

How about NATO’s push for missile defense in Eastern Europe? Does Dempsey buy the bogeyman rationale for that boondoggle?

The government has demanded that any discussion of torture and detainee mistreatment be prohibited by the judge in the military trial of five men accused of facilitating the 9/11 attacks. The government has even gone so far as to demand that there must be “a 40-second delay in the audio feed the government makes available to the public, media, and representatives of non-governmental organizations who observe the tribunal,” in order to “permit a courtroom security official to cut off the audio feed whenever the defendants describe their detention and interrogation in US custody.”

This absurdity makes clear the reasons for the government’s insistence that torture not be talked about, but also the reasons for the military tribunals themselves, as opposed to civilian trials. Col. Morris Davis, who was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo before he resigned in 2007, explains:

[T]he reason the apologists want a second-rate military commission option is because of what we did to the detainees, not because of what the detainees did to us. This is not about the exigencies of the battlefield and the problems our soldiers face trying to fight a war; this is about torture, coercion, rendition and a decade or more in confinement without an opportunity to confront the evidence — abuses that would have us up in arms if done to an American citizen by some other country — that make the tarnished military commissions uniquely suited to try and accommodate the small category of cases where we crossed over to the dark side.

In prosecuting individuals for heinous crimes, we are desperately trying to cover up our own.

(h/t to Andy Worthington)