After the news broke that a U.S. raid in Syria ended with the death of the leader of the Islamic State, President Joe Biden made a case for his administration’s “over-the-horizon” warfare model. It’s a rebranding of the drone strikes and commando raids employed for the better part of 20 years in quasi-war zones like Somalia and Yemen — and basically a promise to hunt militants to the ends of the earth.
“This operation is testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorist threats no matter where they try to hide, anywhere in the world,” Biden announced after the raid by U.S. special operations forces on the home of ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi. “I’m determined to protect the American people from terrorist threats, and I’ll take decisive action to protect this country.”
That “capability” has proved decidedly lacking, however, in an area of the world where ISIS is ascendant, as one of Biden’s top generals acknowledged this week. “Candidly, I’m personally not satisfied with our progress against violent extremists in Africa — and particularly East Africa and West Africa,” Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, the head of the U.S. military’s Africa Command, said in response to a question from The Intercept during a Thursday conference call with reporters. “I assess that violent extremism in those two regions continues to expand in geography, reach, and influence.”
Since the 2000s, the United States has regularly deployed small teams of commandos to advise, assist, and even accompany local forces into battle. The U.S. has provided weapons, equipment, and aircraft and offered many forms of counterterrorism training to partners all across the African continent, from Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger in the West to Kenya and Somalia in the East. There are now, however, no fewer than seven ISIS affiliates threatening as many as 11 countries — Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, and Somalia — according to the State Department and the Pentagon. Add in Al Qaeda-affiliated and other radical groups and the total number of Islamist terrorist organizations on the continent is at least 18.
“In the southern part of Africa, we’ve seen the emergence of ISIS-Central Africa and ISIS-Mozambique, which is of concern,” said Townsend. Last year, militant Islamist groups carried out almost one attack per day (329 in total) in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province alone, according to a recent report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution devoted to African security. Close to 1,100 people were killed in the violence. In the last two weeks, a surge of more than 20 attacks on four villages in Cabo Delgado displaced more than 14,000 people.
Elsewhere on the continent, the situation is even worse. The Sahel, where both Al Qaeda and ISIS-affiliated groups operate, saw attacks by militant Islamists jump last year from 1,180 to 2,005 — a 70 percent increase. “This continues an uninterrupted escalation of violence involving militant Islamist groups in the region since 2015,” the Africa Center noted in its report. “While having originated and still largely centered in Mali, the propensity of this violence has now shifted to Burkina Faso, which accounts for 58% of all events in the Sahel.”
This violence is also spreading southward toward previously stable states along the Gulf of Guinea, according to Townsend. “JNIM, which is an arm of Al Qaeda, and ISIS groups continue to expand, creeping toward the coastal states,” he said. “We’ve seen recent attacks in Benin, Togo, and Côte d’Ivoire. These attacks show this expansion that I’m concerned about.”
Killing Women and Children
In his celebratory comments Thursday, Biden praised the “precision” raid in Syria, even as rescue workers said that women and children were among at least 13 people killed during the attack, in which the ISIS leader set off an explosion that killed himself and others, according to the Pentagon. Spokesperson John Kirby blamed civilian deaths on al-Qurayshi “and his lieutenants.” It’s not yet clear what really happened during the raid and how those civilians were killed; first reports from the U.S. government have proved unreliable in the past.
Biden boasted that U.S. forces “successfully removed a major terrorist threat to the world,” but the mission seemed little different from other high-profile post-9/11 raids. That includes the 2019 raid in which the previous ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, took his own life with a suicide vest and the 2011 targeted killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, as well as the killings of many other lieutenants and middling militants in U.S. commando raids and airstrikes across the Middle East and Africa. These tactical triumphs have been fleeting and ultimately of little strategic consequence to America’s larger war effort, partly because civilian casualties in those strikes have frequently been used by both Al Qaeda and ISIS to bolster recruitment.
Townsend, speaking shortly after news broke of the raid in Syria, acknowledged that U.S. military interventions needed to be paired with “good governance” for counterterrorism efforts to be effective. But the soldiers the U.S. trains in the Sahel keep overthrowing the governments that the U.S. is trying to prop up. Last month, a U.S.-trained officer overthrew the democratically elected president of Burkina Faso, the third coup in that country by an American protégé since 2014. In 2020 and 2021, another U.S.-trained officer twice overthrew the government of neighboring Mali.
On the other side of the continent in Somalia, America has waged a war of special operations missions and drone strikes for close to 20 years. In 254 declared U.S. raids and airstrikes in Somalia since 2007 — including at least nine attacks under the Biden administration — AFRICOM claims that just five civilians have been killed, but the U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group Airwars estimates that the actual number may be as high as 143. Meanwhile, there was a 17 percent increase in attacks by the Al Qaeda-linked al-Shabab last year over 2020 numbers, according to the Africa Center. The 2,072 violent incidents, in a country where ISIS also operates, represent a doubling of attacks since 2015. “In Somalia, al-Shabab is taking advantage of the political leadership there being distracted by a prolonged political crisis,” said Townsend, referencing delayed legislative and presidential elections. “While that’s going on, the pressure is off al-Shabab.”
In his remarks at the White House yesterday, Biden referenced “terrorist operations” by ISIS in Africa but touted America’s ability to “strengthen the security of our allies and partners around the world.” But the Africa Center tells a very different story, in which “security” is lacking for allies and partners all across the continent. “Overall, militant Islamist group violence in Africa climbed 10 percent in 2021 setting a record of over 5,500 reported events linked to these groups,” according to their recent report, which also estimated that 12,700 people were killed in the violence. Even Townsend echoed this: “I’m not satisfied with our progress,” he admitted. “I think there is work to be done.”
NO FINAL DE JANEIRO, os militares tomaram o poder em Burkina Faso, derrubando o presidente democraticamente eleito do país, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré.
O golpe foi anunciado na televisão estatal na segunda-feira, 24 de janeiro, por um jovem oficial que disse que os militares tinham suspendido a Constituição e dissolvido o governo. Ao seu lado estava sentado um homem em farda camuflada, que ele apresentou como o novo líder de Burkina Faso: o tenente-coronel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, comandante de uma das três regiões militares do país.
Damiba é um soldado altamente treinado, graças em grande parte ao exército dos EUA, que tem um longo histórico de preparar soldados da África que depois acabam promovendo golpes. Damiba participou em pelo menos meia dúzia de exercícios de treino dos norte-americanos, de acordo com o Comando Africano dos EUA, ou AFRICOM.
Em 2010 e 2020, ele participou em um programa anual de treino de operações especiais conhecido como exercício Flintlock. Em 2013, Damiba foi aceito em um curso de Treinamento e Assistência em Operações de Contingência na África, um programa de treinamento em manutenção da paz financiado pelo Departamento de Estado dos EUA. Em 2013 e 2014, Damiba participou do Curso de Oficial Básico de Inteligência Militar na África, patrocinado pelos Estados Unidos. Em 2018 e 2019, participou de compromissos com um Elemento de Apoio Civil Militar do Departamento de Defesa dos EUA em Burkina Faso.
Damiba é apenaso último de uma série de líderes golpistas da África Ocidental que foram treinados pelas forças armadas americanas, enquanto os EUA despejaram mais de US$ 1 bilhão em assistência de segurança para promover a “estabilidade” na região. Desde 2008, oficiais treinados pelos EUA tentaram pelo menos nove golpes (e foram bem-sucedidos em pelo menos oito) em cinco países da África Ocidental, incluindo Burkina Faso (três vezes), Guiné, Mali (três vezes), Mauritânia e Gâmbia.
Desde os anos 2000, os Estados Unidos têm destacado regularmente pequenas equipes de comandos para aconselhar, prestar assistência e acompanhar as forças armadas locais, mesmo em batalha; forneceram armas, equipamentos e aeronaves; ofereceram muitas formas de treinamento, incluindo o Flintlock, que é conduzido pelo Comando de Operações Especiais da África e focado no aumento das capacidades antiterroristas das nações da África Ocidental, incluindo Burkina Faso, Guiné, Mali, Mauritânia, Níger, Nigéria e Senegal.
“Quando os EUA priorizam o treinamento tático, nós ignoramos metas de longo prazo que poderiam criar governos mais estáveis”, disse Lauren Woods, diretora do Monitor de Assistência em Segurança, um programa da organização sem fins lucrativos Center for International Policy. “Precisamos de mais transparência e debate público sobre o treinamento militar estrangeiro que fornecemos”. E precisamos fazer um trabalho muito melhor pensando nos riscos a longo prazo – incluindo golpes e abusos das forças que treinamos”.
O AFRICOM enfatiza que sua cooperação de segurança e suas “atividades de capacitação” promovem o “desenvolvimento de militares profissionais”, que são disciplinados e comprometidos com o bem-estar de seus cidadãos. “O treinamento militar americano inclui módulos sobre a lei do conflito armado, subjugação ao controle civil e respeito aos direitos humanos”, disse a porta-voz do AFRICOM, Kelly Cahalan, ao Intercept. “As tomadas de poder por militares são inconsistentes com o treinamento e a educação militar dos EUA”.
Mas os golpes de Estado conduzidos por oficiais treinados pelos EUA têm se tornado uma ocorrência cada vez mais comum em Burkina Faso e em outros lugares da região.
‘Desde 2008, oficiais treinados pelos EUA tentaram pelo menos nove golpes (e foram bem-sucedidos em pelo menos oito deles) em cinco países da África Ocidental’.
No meio de 2021, por exemplo, os boinas verdes americanos chegaram à Guiné para treinar uma unidade de forças especiais liderada pelo coronel Mamady Doumbouya, um jovem oficial carismático que também serviu na Legião Estrangeira francesa. Em setembro, membros da unidade de Doumbouya tiraram um tempo de sua instrução ainda em andamento – em táticas de pequenas unidades, cuidados táticos de combate e a lei do conflito armado – para invadir o palácio presidencial e depor o presidente de 83 anos do país, Alpha Condé. Doumbouya logo se autoproclamou o novo líder da Guiné e os Estados Unidos encerraram o treinamento.
Em 2020, o coronel Assimi Goïta, que trabalhou durante anos com as forças de Operações Especiais dos EUA, participou dos exercícios de treinamento Flintlock e de um seminário da Universidade de Operações Especiais Conjuntas na Base Área MacDill, na Flórida, foi quem chefiou a junta que derrubou o governo do Mali.
“O ato de motim no Mali é fortemente condenado e inconsistente com o treinamento e educação militar dos EUA”, disse na ocasião o tenente-coronel Anton T. Semelroth, porta-voz do Pentágono.
Depois de promover o golpe, Goïta assumiu uma posição menor e ficou com o cargo de vice-presidente em um governo de transição encarregado de devolver o Mali ao governo civil. Mas, nove meses depois, ele tomou o poder novamente em seu segundo golpe.
Goïta nem sequer foi o primeiro oficial malinês treinado pelos EUA a derrubar o governo do país. Em 2011, quando um levante apoiado pelos EUA na Líbia derrubou o autocrata Muammar Gaddafi, os combatentes tuaregues a seu serviço saquearam os depósitos de armas do regime, viajaram ao seu país natal, o Mali, e começaram a tomar conta da parte norte do país. Indignado com a resposta ineficaz de seu governo, Amadou Sanogo – um oficial que aprendeu inglês no Texas, recebeu treinamento de inteligência no Arizona e passou pelo treinamento básico de oficiais de infantaria do exército na Geórgia – resolveu agir com as próprias mãos e derrubou o governo democraticamente eleito de seu país.
“Os EUA são um grande país com um exército fantástico”, ele disse após o golpe de 2012. “Eu tentei colocar em prática aqui todas as coisas que aprendi lá”.
Em 2014, outro oficial treinado pelos EUA, o tenente-coronel Isaac Zida, tomou o poder em Burkina Faso em meio a protestos populares. Dois anos antes, quando ainda era major, Zida participou de um curso de treinamento em contra-terrorismo na Base Aérea MacDill, que foi patrocinado pela Universidade de Operações Especiais Conjuntas, e participou de um curso de inteligência militar em Botsuana que foi financiado pelo governo dos Estados Unidos.
No ano seguinte, outro golpe em Burkina Faso instalou no poder o general Gilbert Diendéré. Ele não só tinha participado do exercício antiterrorismo Flintlock, liderado pelos EUA, mas também atuou literalmente como um garoto-propaganda, aparecendo em uma foto do AFRICOM dirigida aos soldados burquinenses antes de seu destacamento para o Mali em apoio ao exercício Flintlock de 2010.
O então major Gilbert Diendéré se dirige aos soldados burquinenses antes de serem enviados ao Mali em apoio ao exercício Flintlock 10, do AFRICOM, em Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, em 1º de maio de 2010.
Foto: U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Jeremiah Erickson, Flintlock 10 Public Affairs
Em 2014, duas gerações de oficiais com formação nos EUA se enfrentaram na Gâmbia quando um grupo de golpistas treinados pelos EUA tentaram (mas não conseguiram) derrubar outro golpista treinado pelos EUA, Yahya Jammeh, que havia tomado o poder em 1994. A rebelião fracassada tirou a vida de Lamin Sanneh, o suposto líder do movimento, que havia obtido um mestrado na Universidade Nacional de Defesa, NDU na sigla em inglês, em Washington, D.C.
“Não posso ignorar a sensação de que o seu estudo nos Estados Unidos influenciou de alguma forma as suas ações”, escreveu o ex-mentor de Sanneh na NDU, Jeffrey Meiser. “Não posso deixar de pensar se simplesmente imprimir em nossos estudantes estrangeiros o ‘programa americano’ não é contraproducente e antiético”.
Em 2018, a agência de notícias militares Stars and Stripes informou que o general Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, líder de um golpe contra o presidente eleito da Mauritânia, “trabalhou com as forças americanas que treinam no país africano”. Preso e acusado de corrupção após uma década no poder, Aziz foi recentemente libertado sob fiança devido a problemas de saúde.
Os golpistas treinados pelos EUA não estão estritamente confinados à África Ocidental. Antes de Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi depor o primeiro presidente democraticamente eleito do Egito, Mohammed Morsi, ele passou por treinamento básico em Fort Benning, na Geórgia (em 1981) e instrução avançada na Faculdade de Guerra do Exército dos EUA (em 2006).
Um estudo de 2018 feito pelo think tank favorito dos militares, a Rand Corporation, lançou dúvidas sobre a noção de que o treinamento militar dos EUA cria golpistas.
“Há pouca evidência de que a [assistência ao setor de segurança] em geral (medida em dólares) associa-se à propensão a golpes na África”, de acordo com o Estudo, que foi escrito para o Escritório do Secretário de Defesa e observou que havia uma associação “marginalmente significativa” no período pós-Guerra Fria.
Um ano antes, porém, um estudo de Jonathan Caverley da Escola Naval de Guerra dos EUA, e Jesse Savage, do Trinity College de Dublin, no Journal of Peace Research, analisou dados de 1970 a 2009, e encontrou uma “relação robusta entre o treinamento de militares estrangeiros nos EUA e as tentativas de golpe de Estado apoiados pelos militares”, apesar de os autores limitarem sua análise ao programa Internacional de Educação e Treinamento Militar – “que se concentra explicitamente na promoção de normas de controle civil”.
Earlier this week, the military seized power in Burkina Faso, ousting the country’s democratically elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré.
The coup was announced on state television Monday by a young officer who said the military had suspended the constitution and dissolved the government. Beside him sat a camouflage-clad man whom he introduced as Burkina Faso’s new leader: Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, the commander of one of the country’s three military regions.
Damiba is a highly trained soldier, thanks in no small part to the U.S. military, which has a long record of training soldiers in Africa who go on to stage coups. Damiba, it turns out, participated in at least a half-dozen U.S. training exercises, according to U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM.
In 2010 and 2020, he participated in an annual special operations training program known as the Flintlock exercise. In 2013, Damiba was accepted into an Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance course, which is a State Department-funded peacekeeping training program. In 2013 and 2014, Damiba attended the U.S.-sponsored Military Intelligence Basic Officer Course-Africa. And in 2018 and 2019, he participated in engagements with a U.S. Defense Department Civil Military Support Element in Burkina Faso.
Damiba is just the latest in a carousel of coup leaders in West Africa trained by the U.S. military as the U.S. has pumped in more than $1 billion in security assistance to promote “stability” in the region. Since 2008, U.S.-trained officers have attempted at least nine coups (and succeeded in at least eight) across five West African countries, including Burkina Faso (three times), Guinea, Mali (three times), Mauritania, and the Gambia.
Since the 2000s, the United States has regularly deployed small teams of commandos to advise, assist, and accompany local forces, even into battle; provided weapons, equipment, and aircraft; offered many forms of training, including Flintlock, which is conducted by Special Operations Command Africa and focused on enhancing the counterterrorism capabilities of nations in West Africa, including Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal.
“When the U.S. prioritizes tactical training, we overlook longer-term goals that could create more stable governments,” said Lauren Woods, director of the Security Assistance Monitor, which is a program of the nonprofit Center for International Policy. “We need more transparency and public debate on the foreign military training that we provide. And we need to do a much better job thinking about the long-term risks — including coups and abuses by forces we train.”
AFRICOM emphasizes that its security cooperation and “capacity-building activities” foster the “development of professional militaries,” which are disciplined and committed to the well-being of their citizens. “U.S. military training regularly includes modules on the law of armed conflict, subjugation to civilian control, and respect for human rights,” AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan told The Intercept. “Military seizures of power are inconsistent with U.S. military training and education.”
But coups d’état by U.S.-trained officers have become an increasingly common occurrence in Burkina Faso and elsewhere in the region.
Since 2008, U.S.-trained officers have attempted at least nine coups (and succeeded in at least eight) across five West African countries.
Last summer, for example, American Green Berets arrived in Guinea to train a special forces unit led by Col. Mamady Doumbouya, a charismatic young officer who had also served in the French Foreign Legion. In September, members of Doumbouya’s unit took time out from their ongoing instruction — in small unit tactics, tactical combat casualty care, and the law of armed conflict — to storm the presidential palace and depose the country’s 83-year-old president, Alpha Condé. Doumbouya soon declared himself Guinea’s new leader and the U.S. ended the training.
In 2020, Col. Assimi Goïta, who worked with U.S. Special Operations forces for years, participating in Flintlock training exercises and attending a Joint Special Operations University seminar at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, headed the junta that overthrew Mali’s government.
“The act of mutiny in Mali is strongly condemned and inconsistent with U.S. military training and education,” Marine Corps Lt. Col. Anton T. Semelroth, a Pentagon spokesperson, said at the time.
After staging the coup, Goïta stepped down and took the job of vice president in a transitional government tasked with returning Mali to civilian rule. But nine months later, he seized power again in his second coup.
Goïta wasn’t even the first U.S.-trained Malian officer to overthrow the country’s government. In 2011, when a U.S.-backed uprising in Libya toppled autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, Tuareg fighters in his service looted the regime’s weapons caches, traveled to their native Mali and began to take over the northern part of that country. Angered by the ineffective response of his government, Amadou Sanogo — an officer who learned English in Texas, received intelligence training in Arizona, and underwent Army infantry-officer basic training in Georgia — took matters into his own hands and overthrew his country’s democratically elected government.
“America is a great country with a fantastic army,” he said after the 2012 coup. “I tried to put all the things I learned there into practice here.”
In 2014, another U.S.-trained officer, Lt. Col. Isaac Zida, seized power in Burkina Faso amid popular protests. Two years earlier, when he was a major, Zida attended a counterterrorism training course at MacDill Air Force Base that was sponsored by Joint Special Operations University and attended a military intelligence course in Botswana that was financed by the U.S. government.
The next year, another coup in Burkina Faso installed Gen. Gilbert Diendéré. Diendéré had not only taken part in a U.S.-led Flintlock counterterrorism exercise, but he also served as a literal advertisement for it, appearing in an AFRICOM photo addressing Burkinabe soldiers before their deployment to Mali in support of the 2010 Flintlock exercise.
Then-Col. Maj. Gilbert Diendéré addresses Burkinabe soldiers prior to their deployment to Mali in support of AFRICOM’s Flintlock 10 exercise in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on May 1, 2010.
Photo: U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Jeremiah Erickson, Flintlock 10 Public Affairs
In 2014, two generations of U.S.-educated officers faced off in the Gambia as a group of American-trained would-be coup-makersattempted (but failed) to overthrow another U.S.-trained coup-maker, Yahya Jammeh who had seized power back in 1994. The unsuccessful rebellion claimed the life of Lamin Sanneh, the purported ringleader, who had earned a master’s degree at National Defense University in Washington, D.C.
“I can’t shake the feeling that his education in the United States somehow influenced his actions,” wrote Sanneh’s former NDU mentor Jeffrey Meiser. “I can’t help but wonder if simply imprinting our foreign students with the ‘American program’ is counterproductive and unethical.”
In 2008, Stars and Stripes reported that Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the leader of a coup against Mauritania’s elected president, “has worked with U.S. forces that train in the African country.” Arrested and charged with corruption after a decadelong rule, Aziz was recently released on bail due to ill health.
U.S.-trained coup-plotters aren’t strictly confined to West Africa. Before Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi deposed Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, he underwent basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, (in 1981) and advanced instruction at the U.S. Army War College (in 2006).
A 2018 study by the military’s go-to think tank, the Rand Corporation, cast doubt on the notion that U.S. military training breeds coup-makers.
“[T]here is little evidence that overall [security sector assistance] (measured in dollar terms) associates with coup propensity in Africa,” according to the study, which was written for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and did note that there was a “marginally significant” association in the post-Cold War period.
A year before, however, a study by Jonathan Caverley of the U.S. Naval War College and Jesse Savage of Trinity College Dublin in the Journal of Peace Research, analyzing data from 1970 to 2009, found “a robust relationship between U.S. training of foreign militaries and military-backed coup attempts” despite the authors limiting their analysis to the International Military Education and Training program — “which explicitly focuses on promoting norms of civilian control.”
The supposed point of the “war on terror” was to stop terrorism. Instead, the war on terror has created many, many more terrorists.
President George W. Bush at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 2, 2007. (McConnell Center / Flickr)
It began more than two decades ago. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” and told a joint session of Congress (and the American people) that “the course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain.” If he meant a twenty-year slide to defeat in Afghanistan, a proliferation of militant groups across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and a never-ending, world-spanning war that, at a minimum, has killed about 300 times the number of people murdered in America on 9/11, then give him credit. He was absolutely right.
Days earlier, Congress had authorized Bush “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determine[d] planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons.” By then, it was already evident, as Bush said in his address, that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks. But it was equally clear that he had no intention of conducting a limited campaign. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there,” he announced. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”
Congress had already assented to whatever the president saw fit to do. It had voted 420 to 1 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate to grant an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that would give him (and presidents to come) essentially a free hand to make war around the world.
“I believe that it’s broad enough for the president to have the authority to do all that he needs to do to deal with this terrorist attack and threat,” Senate minority leader Trent Lott (R-MS) said at the time. “I also think that it is tight enough that the constitutional requirements and limitations are protected.” That AUMF would, however, quickly become a blank check for boundless war.
In the two decades since, that 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force has been formally invoked to justify counterterrorism (CT) operations — including ground combat, air strikes, detention, and the support of partner militaries — in twenty-two countries, according to a new report by Stephanie Savell of Brown University’s Costs of War Project. During that same time, the number of terrorist groups threatening Americans and American interests has, according to the US State Department, more than doubled.
Under that AUMF, US troops have conducted missions across four continents. The countries in question include some of little surprise like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and a few unexpected nations like Georgia and Kosovo. “In many cases the executive branch inadequately described the full scope of U.S. actions,” writes Savell, noting the regular invocation of vague language, pretzeled logic, and weak explanations. “In other cases, the executive branch reported on ‘support for CT operations,’ but did not acknowledge that troops were or could be involved in hostilities with militants.”
AUMFing in Africa
“We are entering into a long twilight struggle against terrorism,” said Representative David Obey (WI), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, on the day that the 2001 AUMF’s fraternal twin, a $40 billion emergency spending bill, was passed. “This bill is a down payment on the efforts of this country to undertake to find and punish those who committed this terrible act and those who supported them.”
If you want to buy a house, a 20 percent down payment has been the traditional ideal. To buy an endless war on terror in 2001, however, less than 1 percent was all you needed. Since that initial installment, war costs have increased to about $5.8 trillion.
“This is going to be a very nasty enterprise,” Obey continued. “This is going to be a long fight.” On both counts, he was dead on. Twenty-plus years later, according to the Costs of War Project, close to 1 million people have been killed in direct violence during this country’s ongoing war on terror.
Over those two decades, that AUMF has also been invoked to justify detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; efforts at a counterterrorism hub in the African nation of Djibouti to support attacks in Somalia and Yemen; and ground missions or air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. The authorization has also been called on to justify “support” for partner armed forces in thirteen countries. The line between “support” and combat can, however, be so thin as to be functionally nonexistent.
In October 2017, after the Islamic State ambushed US troops in Niger — one of the thirteen AUMF “support” nations — killing four American soldiers and wounding two others, US Africa Command claimed that those troops were merely providing “advice and assistance” to local counterparts. Later, it was revealed that they had been working with a Nigerien force under the umbrella of Operation Juniper Shield, a wide-ranging counterterrorism effort in northwest Africa. Until bad weather prevented it, in fact, they were slated to support another group of American commandos trying to kill or capture Islamic State leader Doundoun Cheffou as part of an effort known as Obsidian Nomad II.
Obsidian Nomad is, in fact, a 127e program — named for the budgetary authority (Section 127e of Title 10 of the US Code) that allows Special Operations forces to use select local troops as surrogates in counterterrorism missions. Run either by Joint Special Operations Command, the secretive organization that controls the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the Army’s Delta Force, and other elite special mission units, or by more generic “theater special operations forces,” its special operators have accompanied local commandos into the field across the African continent in operations indistinguishable from combat.
The US military, for instance, ran a similar 127e counterterrorism effort, code-named Obsidian Mosaic, in neighboring Mali. As Savell notes, no administration has ever actually cited the 2001 AUMF when it comes to Mali, but both Donald Trump and Joe Biden referred to providing “CT support to African and European partners” in that region. Meanwhile, Savell also notes, investigative journalists “revealed incidents in which U.S. forces engaged not just in support activities in Mali, but in active hostilities in 2015, 2017, and 2018, as well as imminent hostilities via the 127e program in 2019.” And Mali was only one of thirteen African nations where US troops saw combat between 2013 and 2017, according to retired Army brigadier general Don Bolduc, who served at Africa Command and then headed Special Operations Command Africa during those years.
In 2017, the Intercept exposed the torture of prisoners at a Cameroonian military base that was used by US personnel and private contractors for training missions and drone surveillance. That same year, Cameroon was cited for the first time under the 2001 AUMF as part of an effort to “support CT operations.” It was, according to Bolduc, yet another nation where US troops saw combat.
American forces also fought in Kenya at around the same time, said Bolduc, even taking casualties. That country has, in fact, been cited under the AUMF during the Bush, Trump, and Biden administrations. While Biden and Trump acknowledged US troop “deployments” in Kenya in the years from 2017 to 2021 to “support CT operations,” Savell notes that neither made “reference to imminent hostilities through an active 127e program beginning at least in 2017, nor to a combat incident in January 2020, when al Shabaab militants attacked a US military base in Manda Bay, Kenya, and killed three Americans, one Army soldier and two Pentagon contractors.”
In addition to cataloging the ways in which that 2001 AUMF has been used, Savell’s report sheds light on glaring inconsistencies in the justifications for doing so, as well as in which nations the AUMF has been invoked and why. Few war on terror watchers would, for example, be shocked to see Libya on the list of countries where the authorization was used to justify air strikes or ground operations. They might, however, be surprised by the dates cited, as it was only invoked to cover military operations in 2013, and then from 2015 to 2019.
In 2011, however, during Operation Odyssey Dawn and the NATO mission that succeeded it, Operation Unified Protector (OUP), the US military and eight other air forces flew sorties against the military of then Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, leading to his death and the end of his regime. Altogether, NATO reportedly conducted around 9,700 strike sorties and dropped more than 7,700 precision-guided munitions.
Between March and October of 2011, in fact, US drones flying from Italy regularly stalked the skies above Libya. “Our Predators shot 243 Hellfire missiles in the six months of OUP, over 20 percent of the total of all Hellfires expended in the 14 years of the system’s deployment,” retired lieutenant colonel Gary Peppers, the commander of the 324th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron during Operation Unified Protector, told the Intercept in 2018. Despite those hundreds of drone strikes, not to mention attacks by manned aircraft, the Barack Obama administration argued, as Savell notes, that the attacks did not constitute “hostilities” and so did not require AUMF citation.
The War for Terror
In the wake of 9/11, 90 percent of Americans were braying for war. Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was one of them. “[W]e must prosecute the war that has been thrust upon us with resolve, with fortitude, with unity, until the evil terrorist groups that are waging war against our country are eradicated from the face of the Earth,” he said. More than 20 years later, al-Qaeda still exists, its affiliates have multiplied, and harsher and deadlier ideological successors have emerged on multiple continents.
As both political parties rushed the United States into a “forever war” that globalized the death and suffering al-Qaeda meted out on 9/11, only Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) stood up to urge restraint. “Our country is in a state of mourning,” she explained. “Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.’”
While the United States was defeated in Afghanistan last year, the war on terror continues to spiral elsewhere around world. Last month, in fact, President Biden informed Congress that the US military “continues to work with partners around the globe, with a particular focus” on Africa and the Middle East, and “has deployed forces to conduct counterterrorism operations and to advise, assist, and accompany security forces of select foreign partners on counterterrorism operations.”
In his letter, Biden acknowledged that troops continue detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and support counterterrorism operations by the armed forces of the Philippines. He also assured Congress and the American people that the United States “remains postured to address threats” in Afghanistan; continues its ground missions and air strikes in Iraq and Syria; has forces “deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS”; others in Turkey “to support Counter-ISIS operations”; around ninety troops deployed to Lebanon “to enhance the government’s counterterrorism capabilities”; and has sent more than 2,100 troops to “the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to protect United States forces and interests in the region against hostile action by Iran and Iran-backed groups,” as well as approximately 3,150 personnel to Jordan “to support Counter-ISIS operations, to enhance Jordan’s security, and to promote regional stability.”
In Africa, Biden noted, US forces “based outside Somalia continue to counter the terrorist threat posed by ISIS and al-Shabaab, an associated force of al Qaeda” through air strikes and assistance to Somali partners and are deployed to Kenya to support counterterrorism operations. They also remain deployed in Djibouti “for purposes of staging for counterterrorism and counter-piracy operations,” while in the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel, US troops “conduct airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations” and advise, assist, and accompany local forces on counterterrorism missions.
Just days after Biden sent that letter to Congress, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the release of an annual counterterrorism report that also served as a useful assessment of more than twenty years of AUMF-fueled counterterror operations. Blinken pointed to the “spread of ISIS branches and networks and al-Qaeda affiliates, particularly in Africa,” while noting that “the number of terrorist attacks and the overall number of fatalities resulting from those attacks increased by more than 10 percent in 2020 compared with 2019.” The report itself was even bleaker. It noted that “ISIS-affiliated groups increased the volume and lethality of their attacks across West Africa, the Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin, and northern Mozambique,” while al-Qaeda “further bolstered its presence” in the Middle East and Africa. The “terrorism threat,” it added, “has become more geographically dispersed in regions around the world” while “terrorist groups remained a persistent and pervasive threat worldwide.” Worse than any qualitative assessment, however, was the quantitative report card that it offered.
The State Department had counted thirty-two foreign terrorist organizations scattered around the world when the 2001 AUMF was passed.. Twenty years of war, around $6 trillion, and nearly 1 million corpses later, the number of terrorist groups, according to that congressionally mandated report, stands at sixty-nine.
With the passage of that AUMF, George W. Bush declared that America’s war would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Yet after twenty years, four presidents, and invocations of the AUMF in twenty-two countries, the number of terrorist groups that “threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security” has more than doubled.
The 2001 AUMF is like a blank check that U.S. presidents have used to conduct military violence in an ever-expanding number of operations in any number of places, without adequate oversight from Congress. But it’s also just the tip of the iceberg
Savell told TomDispatch. “To truly end U.S. war violence in the name of counterterrorism, repealing the 2001 AUMF is the first step, but much more needs to be done to push for government accountability on more secretive authorities and military programs.”
When Congress gave Bush that blank check — now worth $5.8 trillion and counting — he said that the outcome of the war on terror was already “certain.” Twenty years later, it’s a certainty that the president and Congress, Representative Barbara Lee aside, had it all wrong.
As 2022 begins, the Biden administration has an opportunity to end a decades-long mistake by backing efforts to replace, sunset, or repeal that 2001 AUMF — or Congress could step up and do so on its own. Until then, however, that same blank check remains in effect, while the tab for the war on terror, as well as its AUMF-fueled toll in human lives, continues to rise.
It began more than two decades ago. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” and told a joint session of Congress (and the American people) that “the course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain.” If he meant a 20-year slide to defeat in Afghanistan, a proliferation of militant groups across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and a never-ending, world-spanning war that, at a minimum, has killed about 300 times the number of people murdered in America on 9/11, then give him credit. He was absolutely right. More
It began more than two decades ago. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” and told a joint session of Congress (and the American people) that “the course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain.” If he meant a 20-year slide to defeat in Afghanistan, a proliferation of militant groups across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and a never-ending, world-spanning war that, at a minimum, has killed about 300 times the number of people murdered in America on 9/11, then give him credit. He was absolutely right.
Days earlier, Congress had authorized Bush “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determine[d] planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons.” By then, it was already evident, as Bush said in his address, that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks. But it was equally clear that he had no intention of conducting a limited campaign. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there,” he announced. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”
Congress had already assented to whatever the president saw fit to do. It had voted 420 to 1 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate to grant an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that would give him (and presidents to come) essentially a free hand to make war around the world.
“I believe that it’s broad enough for the president to have the authority to do all that he needs to do to deal with this terrorist attack and threat,” Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) said at the time. “I also think that it is tight enough that the constitutional requirements and limitations are protected.” That AUMF would, however, quickly become a blank check for boundless war.
In the two decades since, that 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force has been formally invoked to justify counterterrorism (CT) operations — including ground combat, airstrikes, detention, and the support of partner militaries — in 22 countries, according to a new report by Stephanie Savell of Brown University’s Costs of War Project. During that same time, the number of terrorist groups threatening Americans and American interests has, according to the U.S. State Department, more than doubled.
Under that AUMF, U.S. troops have conducted missions across four continents. The countries in question include some of little surprise like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and a few unexpected nations like Georgia and Kosovo. “In many cases the executive branch inadequately described the full scope of U.S. actions,” writes Savell, noting the regular invocation of vague language, pretzeled logic, and weak explanations. “In other cases, the executive branch reported on ‘support for CT operations,’ but did not acknowledge that troops were or could be involved in hostilities with militants.”
For nearly a year, the Biden administration has conducted a comprehensive evaluation of this country’s counterterrorism policies, while continuing to carry out airstrikes in at least four countries. The 2001 AUMF has, however, already been invoked by Biden to cover an unknown number of military missions in 12 countries: Afghanistan, Cuba, Djibouti, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Niger, the Philippines, Somalia, and Yemen.
“A lot is being said about the Biden administration’s rethinking of U.S. counterterrorism strategy, and while it’s true that Biden has conducted substantially less drone strikes so far than his predecessors, which is a positive step,” Savell told TomDispatch, “his invocation of the 2001 AUMF in at least 12 countries indicates that the U.S. will continue its counterterrorism activities in many places. Basically, the U.S. post-9/11 wars continue, even though U.S. troops have formally left Afghanistan.”
AUMFing in Africa
“[W]e are entering into a long twilight struggle against terrorism,” said Representative David Obey (WI), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, on the day that the 2001 AUMF’s fraternal twin, a $40 billionemergency spending bill, was passed. “This bill is a down payment on the efforts of this country to undertake to find and punish those who committed this terrible act and those who supported them.”
If you want to buy a house, a 20% down payment has been the traditional ideal. To buy an endless war on terror in 2001, however, less than 1% was all you needed. Since that initial installment, war costs have increased to about $5.8 trillion.
“This is going to be a very nasty enterprise,” Obey continued. “This is going to be a long fight.” On both counts he was dead on. Twenty-plus years later, according to the Costs of War Project, close to one million people have been killed in direct violence during this country’s ongoing war on terror.
Over those two decades, that AUMF has also been invoked to justify detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; efforts at a counterterrorism hub in the African nation of Djibouti to support attacks in Somalia and Yemen; and ground missions or air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. The authorization has also been called on to justify “support” for partner armed forces in 13 countries. The line between “support” and combat can, however, be so thin as to be functionally nonexistent.
In October 2017, after the Islamic State ambushed U.S. troops in Niger — one of the 13 AUMF “support” nations — killing four American soldiers and wounding two others, U.S. Africa Command claimed that those troops were merely providing “advice and assistance” to local counterparts. Later, it was revealed that they had been working with a Nigerien force under the umbrella of Operation Juniper Shield, a wide-ranging counterterrorism effort in northwest Africa. Until bad weather prevented it, in fact, they were slated to support another group of American commandos trying to kill or capture Islamic State leader Doundoun Cheffou as part of an effort known as Obsidian Nomad II.
Obsidian Nomad is, in fact, a 127e program — named for the budgetary authority (section 127e of title 10 of the U.S. Code) that allows Special Operations forces to use select local troops as surrogates in counterterrorism missions. Run either by Joint Special Operations Command, the secretive organization that controls the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the Army’s Delta Force, and other elite special mission units, or by more generic “theater special operations forces,” its special operators have accompanied local commandos into the field across the African continent in operations indistinguishable from combat.
The U.S. military, for instance, ran a similar 127e counterterrorism effort, codenamed Obsidian Mosaic, in neighboring Mali. As Savell notes, no administration has ever actually cited the 2001 AUMF when it comes to Mali, but both Trump and Biden referred to providing “CT support to African and European partners” in that region. Meanwhile, Savell also notes, investigative journalists “revealed incidents in which U.S. forces engaged not just in support activities in Mali, but in active hostilities in 2015, 2017, and 2018, as well as imminent hostilities via the 127e program in 2019.” And Mali was only one of 13 African nations where U.S. troops saw combat between 2013 and 2017, according to retired Army Brigadier General Don Bolduc, who served at Africa Command and then headed Special Operations Command Africa during those years.
In 2017, the Intercept exposed the torture of prisoners at a Cameroonian military base that was used by U.S. personnel and private contractors for training missions and drone surveillance. That same year, Cameroon was cited for the first time under the 2001 AUMF as part of an effort to “support CT operations.” It was, according to Bolduc, yet another nation where U.S. troops saw combat.
American forces also fought in Kenya at around the same time, said Bolduc, even taking casualties. That country has, in fact, been cited under the AUMF during the Bush, Trump, and Biden administrations. While Biden and Trump acknowledged U.S. troop “deployments” in Kenya in the years from 2017 to 2021 to “support CT operations,” Savell notes that neither made “reference to imminent hostilities through an active 127e program beginning at least in 2017, nor to a combat incident in January 2020, when al Shabaab militants attacked a U.S. military base in Manda Bay, Kenya, and killed three Americans, one Army soldier and two Pentagon contractors.”
In addition to cataloging the ways in which that 2001 AUMF has been used, Savell’s report sheds light on glaring inconsistencies in the justifications for doing so, as well as in which nations the AUMF has been invoked and why. Few war-on-terror watchers would, for example, be shocked to see Libya on the list of countries where the authorization was used to justify air strikes or ground operations. They might, however, be surprised by the dates cited, as it was only invoked to cover military operations in 2013, and then from 2015 to 2019.
In 2011, however, during Operation Odyssey Dawn and the NATO mission that succeeded it, Operation Unified Protector (OUP), the U.S. military and eight other air forces flew sorties against the military of then-Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, leading to his death and the end of his regime. Altogether, NATO reportedly conducted around 9,700 strike sorties and dropped more than 7,700 precision-guided munitions.
Between March and October of 2011, in fact, U.S. drones flying from Italy regularly stalked the skies above Libya. “Our Predators shot 243 Hellfire missiles in the six months of OUP, over 20 percent of the total of all Hellfires expended in the 14 years of the system’s deployment,” retired Lieutenant Colonel Gary Peppers, the commander of the 324th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron during Operation Unified Protector, told the Intercept in 2018. Despite those hundreds of drone strikes, not to mention attacks by manned aircraft, the Obama administration argued, as Savell notes, that the attacks did not constitute “hostilities” and so did not require AUMF citation.
The War for Terror?
In the wake of 9/11, 90% of Americans were braying for war. Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was one of them. “[W]e must prosecute the war that has been thrust upon us with resolve, with fortitude, with unity, until the evil terrorist groups that are waging war against our country are eradicated from the face of the Earth,” he said. More than 20 years later, al-Qaeda still exists, its affiliates have multiplied, and harsher and deadlier ideological successors have emerged on multiple continents.
As both political parties rushed the United States into a “forever war” that globalized the death and suffering al-Qaeda meted out on 9/11, only Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) stood up to urge restraint. “Our country is in a state of mourning,” she explained. “Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.’”
While the United States was defeated in Afghanistan last year, the war on terror continues to spiral elsewhere around world. Last month, in fact, President Biden informed Congress that the U.S. military “continues to work with partners around the globe, with a particular focus” on Africa and the Middle East, and “has deployed forces to conduct counterterrorism operations and to advise, assist, and accompany security forces of select foreign partners on counterterrorism operations.”
In his letter, Biden acknowledged that troops continue detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and support counterterrorism operations by the armed forces of the Philippines. He also assured Congress and the American people that the United States “remains postured to address threats” in Afghanistan; continues its ground missions and air strikes in Iraq and Syria; has forces “deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS”; others in Turkey “to support Counter-ISIS operations”; around 90 troops deployed to Lebanon “to enhance the government’s counterterrorism capabilities”; and has sent more than 2,100 troops to “the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to protect United States forces and interests in the region against hostile action by Iran and Iran-backed groups,” as well as approximately 3,150 personnel to Jordan “to support Counter-ISIS operations, to enhance Jordan’s security, and to promote regional stability.”
In Africa, Biden noted, U.S. forces “based outside Somalia continue to counter the terrorist threat posed by ISIS and al-Shabaab, an associated force of al Qaeda” through air strikes and assistance to Somali partners and are deployed to Kenya to support counterterrorism operations. They also remain deployed in Djibouti “for purposes of staging for counterterrorism and counter-piracy operations,” while in the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel, U.S. troops “conduct airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations” and advise, assist, and accompany local forces on counterterrorism missions.
Just days after Biden sent that letter to Congress, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the release of an annual counterterrorism report that also served as a useful assessment of more than 20 years of AUMF-fueled counterterror operations. Blinken pointed to the “spread of ISIS branches and networks and al-Qaeda affiliates, particularly in Africa,” while noting that “the number of terrorist attacks and the overall number of fatalities resulting from those attacks increased by more than 10 percent in 2020 compared with 2019.” The report, itself, was even bleaker. It noted that “ISIS-affiliated groups increased the volume and lethality of their attacks across West Africa, the Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin, and northern Mozambique,” while al-Qaeda “further bolstered its presence” in the Middle East and Africa. The “terrorism threat,” it added, “has become more geographically dispersed in regions around the world” while “terrorist groups remained a persistent and pervasive threat worldwide.” Worse than any qualitative assessment, however, was the quantitative report card that it offered.
The State Department had counted 32 foreign terrorist organizations scattered around the world when the 2001 AUMF was passed.. Twenty years of war, around six trillion dollars, and nearly one million corpses later, the number of terrorist groups, according to that congressionally mandated report, stands at 69.
With the passage of that AUMF, George W. Bush declared that America’s war would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Yet after 20 years, four presidents, and invocations of the AUMF in 22 countries, the number of terrorist groups that “threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security” has more than doubled.
“The 2001 AUMF is like a blank check that U.S. presidents have used to conduct military violence in an ever-expanding number of operations in any number of places, without adequate oversight from Congress. But it’s also just the tip of the iceberg,” Savell told TomDispatch. “To truly end U.S. war violence in the name of counterterrorism, repealing the 2001 AUMF is the first step, but much more needs to be done to push for government accountability on more secretive authorities and military programs.”
When Congress gave Bush that blank check — now worth $5.8 trillion and counting — he said that the outcome of the war on terror was already “certain.” Twenty years later, it’s a certainty that the president and Congress, Representative Barbara Lee aside, had it all wrong.
As 2022 begins, the Biden administration has an opportunity to end a decades-long mistake by backing efforts to replace, sunset, or repeal that 2001 AUMF — or Congress could step up and do so on its own. Until then, however, that same blank check remains in effect, while the tab for the war on terror, as well as its AUMF-fueled toll in human lives, continues to rise.
“No military in the world works as hard as we do to avoid civilian casualties,” Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said recently.
Experts say that isn’t true.
“There was a time I could have said that,” Larry Lewis, who spent a decade analyzing military operations for the U.S. government under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, told The Intercept. “But that’s not what I’m seeing of late. Civilian protection is not prioritized. We’re not the best because we’re choosing not to be the best.”
The hard sell from the Pentagon comes in the wake of a New York Times investigation of a 2019 airstrike in Baghuz, Syria, that killed up to 64 noncombatants and was obscured through a multilayered coverup. It also follows intense media coverage of an August drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that the Pentagon initially insisted was a “righteous strike” before admitting that it killed 10 civilians, seven of them children.
Revelations about these attacks have raised calls for increased scrutiny of U.S. military strikes. On Tuesday, the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic asked Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to open new investigations of past U.S. attacks in Yemen, apologize for the deaths of civilians whom the U.S. has already acknowledged killing, and provide compensation to their families.
“The Department of Defense should do more to show it takes the prospect of accountability for civilian deaths and injuries with the seriousness it deserves,” wrote Radhya Al-Mutawakel, the chair of Mwatana, and Priyanka Motaparthy of Columbia in a letter sent to Austin and shared exclusively with The Intercept. “The recent New York Times report on civilian deaths in Baghuz, Syria indicates serious gaps in how the Department has ensured accountability. These events have raised serious concerns that there may be significant shortcomings in how the military responded to reports of civilian harm from Yemen, as well.”
A report byMwatana released earlier this year examined 12 U.S. attacks in Yemen, 10 of them so-called counterterrorism airstrikes, between January 2017 and January 2019. The authors found that at least 38 Yemeni civilians — 19 men, six women, and 13 children — were killed and seven others injured in the attacks.
A June Pentagon report on civilian casualties acknowledged one of those incidents, the death of a civilian in Al-Bayda, Yemen, on January 22, 2019. Mwatana’s investigation found that the attack killed Saleh Ahmed Mohamed Al Qaisi, a 67-year-old farmer who locals said had no terrorist affiliations. The U.S. had previously acknowledged four to 12 civilian deaths in another incident chronicled by Mwatana, a raid by Navy SEALs on January 29, 2017, that was first exposed by The Intercept. Both Mwatana and The Intercept reported a higher death toll. Regarding the remaining allegations, Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, told Mwatana in an April 2021 letter: “USCENTCOM is confident that each airstrike hit its intended Al Qaeda targets and nothing else.”
But the Pentagon gives short shrift to investigations of civilian harm. Mwatana’s 156-page analysis of the 12 incidents was based on four years of investigations, often including site visits soon after attacks, by researchers who conducted nearly 70 interviews. It also drew on government documents, medical records, photographs, and videos. In 2017, however, there were reportedly just two full-time staff members at CENTCOM responsible for assessing reports of civilian harm caused by U.S. strikes in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. A 2020 analysis of 228 U.S. military investigations of civilian casualty incidents found that site inspections were carried out in just 16 percent of those investigations.
“The U.S. military continues to refuse to conduct investigations of civilian harm where it can, and it never talks to victims and witnesses,” said Marc Garlasco, once the chief of high-value targeting at the Pentagon and now the military adviser for PAX, a Dutch civilian protection organization.
In their letter to Austin, Al-Mutawakel and Motaparthy pointed out that investigations by news outlets disproved initial reports that the August strike in Kabul killed only an Islamic State target. “Only after a subsequent review of these detailed facts from the ground did the Department of Defense acknowledge its error,” they wrote. “Similarly, we believe there is a need to open new investigations into the civilian harm reports we provided, based on Mwatana’s detailed investigations in Yemen.”
“The U.S. military continues to refuse to conduct investigations of civilian harm where it can, and it never talks to victims and witnesses.”
Exposés by journalists and NGOs have routinely been necessary to push the Department of Defense to investigate attacks and admit to killing civilians. For example, CENTCOM reported that between August 2014 and March 2017, at least 352 civilians were killed in U.S. attacks in Iraq and Syria. But a 2017 investigation by journalists Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal of nearly 150 U.S.-led coalition airstrikes targeting ISIS in Iraq found that 1 in 5 of the coalition strikes resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition. A 2019 investigation by Amnesty International and Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group, revealed that while U.S.-led forces took responsibility for 159 civilian deaths in Raqqa, Syria, more than 1,600 civilians were actually killed in air and artillery strikes. The U.S. now acknowledges that 1,417 civilians were slain in U.S. attacks in Iraq and Syria.
As the war against ISIS in Syria came to a close in March 2019, U.S. aircraft dropped three bombs on a field in Baghuz, where women, children, and possibly a small number of ISIS fighters were sheltering, leading to a death toll that an Air Force lawyer in charge of determining the legality of strikes, Lt. Col. Dean W. Korsak, called “shockingly high.”
The military had determined in 2019 that at least four civilians were slain in the Baghuz strike, but those deaths did not appear in the Pentagon’s 2019, 2020, or 2021 civilian casualty reports to Congress. CENTCOM only admitted that civilians had been killed after the Times contacted the command with its findings. In an email Korsak shared with the Senate Armed Services Committee, a major with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations said that agents generally looked into civilian casualty reports only when there was a “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”
The circumstances surrounding the Baghuz attack offer additional reasons for skepticism of U.S. claims about civilian casualties. While the death toll was “almost immediately apparent” and Korsak flagged it as a possible war crime, the Times reported, “at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike. The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site.” On Monday, Austin ordered a high-level inquiry into the strike and earlier investigations of it.
“CENTCOM has never conceded a civilian death or injury from its actions in Yemen without either a journalist or NGO having already extensively reported on the case.”
Lewis, who authored the 2013 report “Reducing and Mitigating Civilian Casualties: Enduring Lessons” for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says it’s imperative for the Pentagon to create an independent review process for civilian harm. “It’s feasible because I’ve done it in Afghanistan,” he told The Intercept. “You need to know that someone is looking at your homework. If not, it’s easy to give it a half-effort — or worse. And this is what we saw in Iraq and Syria. We saw the same thing later in Afghanistan and in Somalia and Yemen too.”
“CENTCOM has never conceded a civilian death or injury from its actions in Yemen without either a journalist or NGO having already extensively reported on the case,” said Chris Woods, the director of Airwars. Its admissions only followed the reports of deaths by The Intercept and Mwatana and an Airwars investigation of a strike that the Pentagon later said wounded two civilians.
Over four years, the Trump administration conducted at least 181 attacks in Yemen, nearly the same number that Obama carried out during his eight years in office. Attacks under Trump resulted in up to 154 civilian deaths, according to Airwars. The Pentagon, however, claims that as few as five civilians were killed by the U.S. during that four-year span.
There have been four alleged U.S. airstrikes in Yemen during the Biden administration, including two earlier this month, according to data provided by Airwars to The Intercept. Central Command denies involvement. “CENTCOM conducted its last counterterror strike in Yemen on June 24, 2019,” the command told The Intercept by email. “CENTCOM has not conducted any new counterterror strikes in Yemen since.” The CIA did not respond prior to publication to questions about agency strikes in Yemen this year.
Like Al-Mutawakel and Motaparthy, Lewis says that the United States should reinvestigate civilian casualty allegations in Yemen. But he doesn’t think that the Pentagon should stop there. “We need an independent review for Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, and, yes, Yemen,” he told The Intercept.
PAX’s Garlasco went even further, calling for outside assessments of both targeting processes and civilian harm. “Only a complete and thorough review of U.S. airstrikes by an independent body can provide the proper distance and recommendations to improve civilian protection,” he said.
“DOD has $700 billion, but how much of it does it devote to civilian harm? Practically nothing.”
Conducting reviews and reducing civilian casualties in U.S. military operations will take more engaged leadership — on the part of the Pentagon or Congress — and dedicated funding, experts say. “One reason that this is such a mess is because this is not resourced,” said Lewis. “Civilian harm is a vast, complex, and challenging problem. DOD has $700 billion, but how much of it does it devote to civilian harm? Practically nothing.”
Despite acknowledging, for example, that it killed or injured 33 civilians in 2020 and having more than $3 million set aside for casualties resulting from U.S. attacks, the Pentagon failed to make any “ex gratia” payments to survivors. Motaparthy noted that despite the Pentagon’s immense budget, the military routinely claims that it lacks the resources to quickly respond to civilian casualty reports.
“The U.S. military should open new investigations into civilian harm we have reported and make a serious effort to understand the civilian impact of U.S. operations,” said Mwatana’s Al-Mutawakel. “All civilians killed or harmed by the U.S. military deserve acknowledgment, amends or reparations, and accountability for wrongs.”
I waited almost three months for some acknowledgement, but it never came. Not a bottle of champagne. Not a congratulatory note. Not an email of acknowledgement. Not one media request. Authors wait their whole lives for I-told-you-so moments like these. But mine passed without accolades, awards, or adulation. Being way ahead of the pack is More
As a parting shot, on its way out of Afghanistan, the United States military launched a drone attack that the Pentagon called a “righteous strike.” The final missile fired during 20 years of occupation, that August 29th airstrike averted an Islamic State car-bomb attack on the last American troops at Kabul’s airport. At least, that’s More
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Americans were braying for war. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 90 percent of Americans approved of the United States attacking Afghanistan, while 65 percent of the public was comfortable with the prospect of Afghan civilians being killed. Only 22 percent thought that the war would last more than two years.
Americans wanted blood, and they got it. The United States invaded Afghanistan and spent the next 20 years making war there and beyond: in Burkina Faso; Cameroon; Iraq; Libya; Niger; the Philippines; Somalia; Syria; Tunisia; and Yemen, among other places. More than 770,000 people have since died violent deaths in America’s wars and interventions, including more than 312,000 civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Of the 10 percent of Americans who thought that war was not the answer, a small number demonstrated against the impending conflict. They marched in Austin, Texas; New York City; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; and elsewhere. It took courage to speak out against “indiscriminate retribution,” to assert that it was ludicrous to attack a country for a crime carried out by a small group of terrorists, and to suggest that the repercussions might echo for decades. They were mocked, screamed at, called scum and traitors, and worse.
Those who got it right in September 2001 have long since been forgotten. The White House, the Pentagon, and the media never sought the dissenters out for advice, comment, or counsel as the war in Afghanistan went off the rails, ending with the chaotic collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government on Sunday. Instead, those who got it wrong have consistently held sway in the halls of power. “This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” President Joe Biden, who voted for military action in 2001, admitted yesterday. “[Former Afghan President Ashraf] Ghani insisted the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong.” Ghani was hardly alone. Biden and countless other Americans played key roles in a 20-year road to defeat that began with the United States toppling the Taliban from power in 2001 and ended with the Taliban installing themselves in the presidential palace in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, this week.
Journalist Craig Whitlock’s new book, “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” will help ensure that no one forgets the harm America’s civilian and military leaders did, the lies they told, and the war they lost.
Synthesizing more than 1,000 interviews and 10,000 pages of documents, Whitlock provides a stunning study of failure and mendacity, an irrefutable account of the U.S.’s ignoble defeat in the words of those who — from the battlefield to NATO headquarters in Kabul and from the Pentagon to the White House — got it so wrong for so long, papered their failures over with falsehoods, and sought to avoid even an ounce of accountability.
“People often ask me, ‘How long will this last?’” President George W. Bush said on October 11, 2001, a few days after the United States started bombing Afghanistan. “This particular battlefront will last as long as it takes to bring Al Qaeda to justice. It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two. But we will prevail.”
More than a decade later, the U.S. still hadn’t won the war, and an obscure government agency, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, sought to figure out why. The result was more than 400 “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted with mostly American (but also Afghan and NATO) officials as well as other experts, aid workers, and consultants. Their assessments were candid, often damning, and the government sought to keep them under wraps.
But the indefatigable Whitlock and his employer, the Washington Post, via two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, forced the government to turn over the files. These records became the foundation of an award-winning series for the Post; now, combined with several troves of documents from various public collections, these files make “The Afghanistan Papers” the most comprehensive American accounting of the conflict and help explain, better than any book yet, why so many of those who planned, guided, and fought the war failed so spectacularly.
Deftly assembling accounts thematically and chronologically, Whitlock allows America’s war managers to hang themselves with their own quotes, offering an encyclopedic catalogue of lies and ineptitude, delusion and denial, incompetence and corruption, and, most of all, rank cowardice. Again and again, Whitlock presents the pessimistic assessments and harsh judgments of officials who believed that their remarks would never become public — war makers who could have spoken out publicly but too often kept their appraisals under wraps or voiced them when it was too late to matter.
“We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” recalled Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House war czar under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
“We did not know what we were doing,” said Richard Boucher, the Bush administration’s top diplomat for South and Central Asia.
“There was a tremendous … dysfunctionality in unity of command inside of Afghanistan, inside the military,” recalled Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, an early Afghanistan War commander.
“There was no campaign plan,” confessed Army Gen. Dan McNeill, who twice served as the top commander in Afghanistan under Bush. “I tried to get someone to define for me what winning meant, even before I went over, and nobody could.”
These and hundreds of other officials, military officers, diplomats, and analysts could have leveled with the American people immediately or at any time in the last 20 years. Had they done so, perhaps the war in Afghanistan could have been shortened by a decade or more; perhaps following conflicts wouldn’t have been so easy to start or proved so difficult to end; perhaps more than 770,000 people wouldn’t be dead and up to 59 million forced from their homes by America’s post-9/11 wars.
Instead, Americans muddled through the conflict in Afghanistan, unsure what they were there to accomplish, why they were doing it, who they were fighting, and what they were fighting for. “What were we actually doing in that country?” asked a U.S. official who served with the NATO senior civilian representative to Afghanistan. “We went in after 9/11 to defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but the mission became blurred.”
To call it confusion is the kindest possible assessment. Another is that, as Whitlock writes, the government was peddling pablum “so unwarranted and baseless that their statements amounted to a disinformation campaign.”
Seven-year-old Attiullah poses in front of an X-ray after being shot by U.S soldiers, according to his father, at Mirwais hospital in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Oct. 13, 2009.
Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
Whitlock does a masterful job of mining the hard-won SIGAR synopses and archived interviews to juxtapose private judgments with public comments. Bush’s first secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, recently died of multiple myeloma, but Whitlock ably demonstrates that shame ought to have taken him years earlier. Of all the craven war managers who take their star turn in “The Afghanistan Papers,” Rumsfeld may come off worst. “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” the late defense secretary wrote in an internal memo almost two years into the war. “We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.”
Rumsfeld never shared his pessimism with the American public. Instead, for years, he took the press to task for pushback while publicly crowing about signs of progress and corners turned. In 2003, Rumsfeld announced that the Taliban was finished. “To the extent that they assemble in anything more than ones and twos … they’ll be killed or captured,” he boasted. If there’s any justice, Rumsfeld is currently being grilled in the afterlife about whether it’s one or two Taliban fighters who are now overrunning cities and districts across Afghanistan.
So much in “The Afghanistan Papers” reads like an unsettling echo of the American war in Vietnam. During that conflict, the South Vietnamese military that was built, trained, armed, and funded by Americans was regularly (andnot alwaysunfairly) disparaged for its cowardice and incompetence. In the end, U.S. officials couldn’t understand how a 1 million-person army with billions of dollars’ worth of American weapons and equipment collapsed in 1975. In “The Afghanistan Papers,” Americans similarly disparage the Afghan military they built or make excuses for its weakness and ineptitude. How could the U.S. be at fault when its Afghan charges couldn’t read, write, or identify colors; mistook urinals for drinking fountains; couldn’t learn basic tactics or manage to shoot straight; and were both lazy and corrupt? Left unexamined is just why a rag-tag, under-armed, underfunded insurgency drawn from the same population, without an air force or superpower backing, was able to exist, much less make consistent progress, over 20 years, ending with a blitzkrieg that took one major city after another, including Kabul, in a matter of days.
Opium is another key overlap. During the Vietnam War, as heroin use among U.S. troops soared, Air America, a company run by the CIA, transported opium harvested by farmers in Laos who were also serving as soldiers in the agency’s secret army. Following its defeat in Southeast Asia, the United States sought to entangle the Soviet Union in its own “Vietnam” in Afghanistan, where, as the New York Times reported, “opium production flourished … with the involvement of some of the mujahedeen, rebels who were supported by the Central Intelligence Agency.” By the time Americans were fighting against some of those same mujahideen and their sons in the 2000s, the United States had turned against drug production and devoted billions to eradicating poppies, but Afghanistan nonetheless became the world’s top narco-state.
Whitlock offers Operation River Dance, a two-month joint U.S.-Afghan invasion of poppy fields in southern Afghanistan, as an object lesson. John Walters, the Bush administration’s drug czar, told reporters that the effort was “making enormous progress,” but in reality, everything went wrong. Bulldozers broke down; tractors got stuck in ditches; a State Department-leased plane filled with U.S. drug enforcement officials crashed into a group of houses, killing civilians; Afghans involved in the effort went AWOL; local farmers were angered and alienated; Afghan power brokers began using the operation to strike at rivals; and a previously tranquil region became a militant hotbed.
“They say it was very successful. I think that’s just plain B.S.”
“They say it was very successful,” then-Lt. Col. Michael Slusher, an adviser during the operation, told an Army interviewer. “I think that’s just plain B.S.”
“Just plain B.S.” is a fitting epitaph, not just for River Dance or the American drive to eradicate opium poppies, but for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan writ large. Just as in Vietnam, the military cooked the books at every level of command — lying about the war to itself, to Congress, and to the American people. “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” said Army Col. Bob Crowley, a senior counterinsurgency adviser in 2013 and 2014.
In the SIGAR interviews, Whitlock notes, “U.S. military officials and advisors described explicit and sustained efforts to deliberately mislead the public” from the battlefield on up to the White House, skewing data to make it appear that the U.S. was winning the war.
U.S. Marines walk through a poppy field in the Maranjan village in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on April 25, 2011.
Photo: Bay Ismoyo/AFP via Getty Images
If a small library of Vietnam War books is any guide, hawkish historians, revisionist reprobates, and aggrieved war makers will pick up this mantle and try to recast the war in Afghanistan in favorable terms, excusing yet another American military defeat and casting blame on the usual suspects.
Before Kabul fell to the Taliban, a coterie of U.S. ambassadors issued a demand: “Don’t lose Afghanistan.” This August 6 post on the Atlantic Council’s blog by five men, all of whom played key roles in America’s long march to defeat, ended with a plea for more war premised on the final fallback position of intellectually and morally bankrupt war hawks. The United States, they insisted, “can, and must, act forcefully in Afghanistan with air and defense support along with robust diplomacy. The country’s future — as well as Washington’s global credibility — is at stake.” It harkens back to a formerly classified 1965 breakdown of U.S. objectives in Vietnam by Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton: “70% — To avoid a humiliating US defeat,” compared with 10 percent for the publicly stated goal of allowing “the people of [South Vietnam] to enjoy a better, freer way of life.” Credibility was the overwhelming (and secret) reason to prolong the war another 10 years at a cost of millions of lives in Southeast Asia.
H.R. McMaster — a retired lieutenant general, national security adviser to President Donald Trump, Vietnam War historian, and one of the Americans who lost the war in Afghanistan — also entered the fray. The same man who wrote that “the war in Vietnam was not lost … on the front pages of the New York Times, or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C.” recently tweeted, prior to the fall of Kabul, “US media is finally reporting on the transformation of Afghanistan after their disinterest and defeatism helped set conditions for capitulation and a humanitarian catastrophe.”
Thankfully, we have “The Afghanistan Papers” to inoculate the body politic against such delusion and abject kookery. “With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict,” writes Whitlock. It’s a diplomatic way of saying that when faced with the opportunity to tell the truth and limit the amount of blood on their hands, America’s war managers consistently doubled down on violence.
“The Afghanistan Papers” helps provide some small measure of justice, forcing leaders to live with their now-public lies, and provides a convenient list of those who should be shunned by cable news producers, White House and Pentagon hiring committees, book publishers, and newspaper opinion-page editors.
In the wake of this week’s Taliban takeover, many are asking a question that will be repeated by future generations: “Who lost Afghanistan?” Whitlock’s “The Afghanistan Papers” offers the definitive answer.
Last month, President Joe Biden announced that America’s “military mission in Afghanistan will conclude on August 31st.” In the time since the July 8 statement, a Taliban offensive has overrun city after city across the country. On Sunday, the militant group entered the Afghan capital of Kabul, and several countries, including the United States, began to evacuate their embassies. As reports emerged that the Taliban had seized the presidential palace, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled the country.
“We, of course, are saddened indeed by the events. … But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world,” said the U.S. president.
But that president wasn’t Biden. It was Gerald Ford on April 23, 1975, as North Vietnamese forces rolled toward Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam.
A two-decade American effort to turn South Vietnam into a noncommunist bulwark in Southeast Asia had failed. A million-man army long advised, financed, trained, and equipped by the United States was crumbling as South Vietnamese soldiers fled the front lines. They stripped off their uniforms and attempted to disappear into the civilian population.
“We can and we should help others to help themselves,” said Ford. “But the fate of responsible men and women everywhere, in the final decision, rests in their own hands, not in ours.”
Last month, Biden echoed the same sentiments, putting the fate of Afghanistan squarely on the shoulders of the Afghan government and military. It is, he said, “the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.”
While the United States and its allies had propped up the Afghan government for the better part of two decades and had spent at least $83 billion to build, advise, train, and equip its faltering armed forces, Biden seemingly washed his and the rest of the U.S.’s hands of further responsibility. “We provided our Afghan partners with all the tools — let me emphasize: all the tools, training, and equipment of any modern military. We provided advanced weaponry,” he said.
The case was the same in South Vietnam. The United States had provided billions in high-tech weapons, but it hardly mattered as North Vietnamese forces rolled toward Saigon. The U.S.-backed “puppet troops,” as they were called by the North, melted away.
A week after Ford made his speech, South Vietnam ceased to exist. The United States’s military efforts in neighboring Cambodia and Laos fared no better. “Some tend to feel that if we do not succeed in everything everywhere, then we have succeeded in nothing anywhere. I reject categorically such polarized thinking,” Ford told the crowd at Tulane University. “America’s future depends upon Americans — especially your generation, which is now equipping itself to assume the challenges of the future, to help write the agenda for America.”
That new agenda could have included a complete reevaluation of U.S. foreign policy and a rejection of the ruinous national security strategy and reckless foreign interventions that led to America’s embarrassing defeats in Southeast Asia. Ford had demanded that “we accept the responsibilities of leadership as a good neighbor to all peoples and the enemy of none.” But in a few short years, the United States began a massive effort to saddle the Soviet Union with its own Vietnam War. It was one of the most aggressive campaigns ever mounted by the CIA, aiding guerrillas in Afghanistan and setting the stage for 9/11, the forever wars, and today’s Afghan collapse.
The years since have been typified by U.S. military interventions that yielded little, like the ruinous 1983 deployment of U.S. Marines to Beirut, the 1986 bombing of Libya, and, more recently, military setbacks, stalemates, and defeats from Iraq to Burkina Faso, Somalia to Libya, Mali to, again, Afghanistan. Victories, such as they are, have been confined to efforts in places like Grenada and Panama.
As he concluded his July 8 speech, Biden, like Ford before him, attempted to turn the page. “We have to defeat Covid-19 at home and around the world … [and] take concerted action to fight existential threats of climate change,” he asserted. The rapid rise in Covid-19 infections and deaths in the United States, paired with the devastating report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggests that meeting these challenges may be far more difficult than those the U.S. faced and failed in Afghanistan.
Taking questions from the press in July, Biden was asked if he saw “any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam.”
“None whatsoever. Zero,” he replied.
He was, in some way, right. The Afghan collapse was far more precipitous than that of the South Vietnamese armed forces. But Biden ignores the clear parallels between that past moment of defeat and the current one at his own peril and that of the United States as a whole. Ford’s 1975 speech was loaded with absurd rhetoric about the future, lacking any real attempt at redefining American foreign policy. Without a true reevaluation this time around, the U.S. risks falling into well-worn patterns that may, one day, make the military debacles in Southeast and Southwest Asia look terribly small.
The Biden administration has made combating sexual assault in the military a major policy goal. In January, as his first directive in office, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a memorandum calling on senior Pentagon leaders and top generals to “battle enemies within the ranks” with the aim of wiping out the “scourge of sexual assault.”
From 2013 to 2019, that was also Amy Braley-Franck’s mission — advocating for victims of sexual crimes within the military. A day after she informed a top general about widespread mishandling of sexual assault cases, however, she was suspended from duty and has been ever since.
“The military is its own society, as stated by Justice William Rehnquist, and those that speak outside the approved narrative are shunned,” Braley-Franck told The Intercept.
For close to two years, though, Braley-Franck has been suspended from her role as an Army sexual assault prevention and response victim advocate. She sees the suspension, at the hands of a general she was serving under, as a clear case of retaliation. On Tuesday, she has a hearing about a grievance she filed with the Army to resolve the issue.
“My case embodies all facets of why the program is failing — a dereliction of duties by commanders.”
“Secretary Austin needs to know that commanders’ willful blindness and retaliation is in direct violation of his commitment to reform,” she told The Intercept. “My case embodies all facets of why the program is failing — a dereliction of duties by commanders and willful violation of federal law with no oversight or accountability.”
As a centerpiece of their reform efforts, Austin and President Joe Biden formed the Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault, which recently recommended taking sexual assault cases outside the chain of command, a change military leaders have long resisted. Braley-Franck said her case proves that more reforms are still needed if the military truly wishes to rein in sexual misconduct.
A spokesperson for the Department of Defense did not provide a comment from Austin about the case.
President Joe Biden stands with Vice President Kamala Harris, left, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, right, during an event at the White House in Washington, D.C., on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2021. Biden vowed an all-hands-on-deck effort to combat sexual assault in the military.
Photo: Kevin Dietsch/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The problem of sexual assault in the military is chronic and widespread. Last year, the disappearance and murder of 20-year-old Army Specialist Vanessa Guillén at Fort Hood, an Army base in Killeen, Texas, sparked widespread discussion about sexual misconduct in the armed forces. A scathing Army review following her death found that “the command climate relative to the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) Program at Fort Hood was ineffective, to the extent that there was a permissive environment for sexual assault and sexual harassment.”
In his January memo, Austin, a former four-star general, acknowledged that military leaders have fallen short when it comes to addressing sexual assault. “I know you have worked this problem for many years. I tried to tackle it myself when I, too, commanded,” he told senior military leaders. “We simply must admit the hard truth: We must do more. All of us.”
Earlier this month, Biden voiced support for Austin’s endorsement of the Independent Review Commission on Military Sexual Assault’s recommendations to remove the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault from the chain of command and create highly specialized units to handle such cases. “To everyone who served on the IRC, thank you for your tireless work to deliver thoughtful, effective, actionable recommendations for how we can drive sexual assault and harassment from the ranks of the United States military,” Biden said in a statement.
Braley-Franck lent her expertise to the commission, serving on a panel of military sexual assault response coordinators and victim advocates and meeting, one-on-one, with commission Chair Lynn Rosenthal, who thanked her for “essential” contributions to the commission’s work. Nonetheless, Braley-Franck remained suspended from her regular duties.
Prior to the suspension, Braley-Franck worked as a victim advocate with the U.S. Army Reserve’s Illinois-based 416th Theater Engineer Command. She discovered that the unit had mishandled sexual assault complaints for years and accused the unit’s commanders of improperly opening internal investigations of sexual assault complaints rather than referring them for criminal investigations.
Documents show that in October 2019, after Braley-Franck notified criminal investigators of allegations of a sexual assault in the 416th, the Army launched an inquiry targeting her, according to official Army documents reviewed by The Intercept. The investigation probed a grab bag of allegations ranging from inappropriate work attire for wearing a “short skirt” and a racial bias claim with no outside witnesses to charges that Braley-Franck violated Defense Department regulations concerning contact with a sexual assault victim and in reaching out to the press.
“I used every process available to me. And the last process available was going to the Associated Press.”
The suspension finally came on November 20, 2019, a day after she sent an email to Lt. Gen. Charles Luckey, the top Army Reserve commander, detailing the 416th’s mishandling of sexual assault allegations and acts of retaliation. The justification given accused Braley-Franck of “possibly violating the D-SACCP” — Department of Defense Sexual Assault Advocate Certification Program — “code of professional ethics.” Almost two years later, the Army has never specified what portions of the code of ethics she was suspended for breaching.
The investigation of her contact with the press stemmed from Braley-Franck’s frustrations with inaction on sexual assault claims. She said she attempted to report allegations up the chain of command, but they went nowhere. “I used every process available to me,” she explained. “And the last process available was going to the Associated Press.”
Last January, after the AP published an article about her allegations, Democratic Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth sent a letter to Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy requesting an investigation. The probe eventually led to Maj. Gen. Miyako Schanely, the chief of the Reserve unit, losing her command; administrative action against two other senior leaders; and 12 other officers, noncommissioned officers, and Army civilians receiving official reprimands or other disciplinary actions.
Schanely was the same general responsible for Braley-Franck’s suspension.
The same day that the Army announced its findings against Schanely, it also concluded its investigation of Braley-Franck. The findings, authored by Col. Rodney Abrams, as well as documents shared by Braley-Franck, suggest that many of the allegations are based on debatable suppositions and scant or contradictory evidence.
“I find,” wrote Abrams, “Ms. Franck’s conduct in contacting the victim of an alleged sexual assault … on or about 28 June 2019 violated” Defense Department regulations and the D-SAACP code of professional ethics. As proof, he cited a statement by Maj. Andrew Johnson: “MAJ Johnson had warned Ms. Franck that the alleged victim did not want to be contacted.” An email sent on the day in question and shared with The Intercept by Braley-Franck indicates that Johnson actually asked that Braley-Franck, the 416th’s victim advocate, contact the victim, a private. In it, Johnson wrote: “I … formally request the VA conduct a follow up session with PVT [name redacted].”
Johnson did not reply to a request for comment. Abrams declined an interview request and referred The Intercept to an Army spokesperson.
Abrams also found that Braley-Franck “failed to respect the alleged victim’s right to privacy and confidentiality” by providing documents to the AP. The article cited by Abrams specifically notes that “the AP usually doesn’t identify sexual assault victims” but did so in the case of one survivor who “gave permission to use her name.”
A 17-year-old Army private, whose case spurred Braley-Franck’s whistleblowing and whose name was not published by the AP, was reportedly raped, resulting in a broken collarbone and a broken arm, according to files reviewed by The Intercept.
“For over a year, no one assisted her until I was notified in June of 2019,” Braley-Franck told The Intercept. “No victim’s rights or privacy were ever violated by me. I reported felony rapes and aggravated assaults of multiple soldiers to include a 17-year-old who also suffered broken bones. These commanders violated federal law by not reporting these crimes to the MCIO” — Military Criminal Investigative Organization.
Amy Braley-Franck, second from left, is seen at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the newly renovated Vicenza Military Community Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention Program Resource Center, along with Maj. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, left; Monique Y. Ferrell, center; Capt. Harrison M. Zabell, second right; and Lt. Col. Eric A. Baus, right, in Vicenza, Italy, on Oct. 7, 2015.
Photo: Davide Dalla Massara/U.S. Army
While not speaking directly about Braley-Franck’s case, Independent Review Commission Chair Rosenthal said that those supporting sexual assault survivors should be removed from the command reporting structure. Sexual assault response coordinators “and victim advocates need to be able to focus on the victim’s needs, so they shouldn’t have to fear what’s going to happen with their own career,” she told The Intercept. “Their job is to advocate for the victims and discover deficiencies in policies, like the ones that were identified that resulted in the commander being removed.”
Braley-Franck, who served as the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention Program manager for U.S. Army Africa from 2015 to 2018, was also instrumental in facilitating press coverage that led to an investigation of Maj. Gen. Joseph Harrington, the commander of U.S. Army Africa, after he exchanged a large number of Facebook messages — 1,158 of them between February 12, 2017, and June 3, 2017 — with the spouse of an enlisted soldier. Harrington was later sacked and stripped of a star.
A recent investigation by The Intercept found systemic sexual misconduct at U.S. Africa Command. Criminal investigation files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act revealed 158 cases of sexual crimes involving U.S. military personnel in Africa that were reported over the past decade, while the official Pentagon accounting lists just 73 cases of sexual assault over that same period.
“They are especially angry with me because they cannot treat me like they do service members who do not have the same civil rights protections,” Braley-Franck said of the Army. “Their annoyance pales in comparison to the justified anger and pain suffered by hundreds of thousands of victims and their families.”
Citing Privacy Act restrictions, Lt. Col. Simon Flake, a spokesperson for Army Reserve Command, provided no information about Braley-Franck’s case and sent The Intercept an almost 2-month-old press release detailing the investigation that corroborated Braley-Franck’s allegations of mishandled sexual assault cases in the 416th Theater Engineer Command.
“Uncovering the insider threat of sexual abuse creates a recruiting and retention issue,” Braley-Franck told The Intercept. “America’s families would not allow their sons and daughters to join if they realized that their fellow service members are a greater risk to them than the enemy.”
This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault.
On the night of June 5, 2017, a soldier stationed at Camp Lemonnier, a sprawling U.S. military base in the sun-bleached African nation of Djibouti, started her first shift with Alpha Company. She wasn’t happy about the new assignment. Transferring to Alpha Company meant joining a team without anyone she knew. There was also talk of sexual harassment within the unit.
Around midnight, she reported for duty at a guard post, where she found herself alone with a male noncommissioned officer who outranked her. He told her that he had been watching her for almost nine months, ever since a pre-deployment ceremony at which he decided that he wanted to “eat her pussy.”
The harassment made her uncomfortable, but she didn’t protest, because she was afraid that the soldier would become violent, she later told military investigators. When it was time for her to rotate to the next post, around midnight, he said she should stay, then stood up and told her to “suck his dick.” She told investigators that he “was not taking no for an answer.” He warned her that if she reported him, no one would believe her, because she had less military experience. Fearing for her safety, she began masturbating his penis before he forced it into her mouth.
The incident is one of 158 cases of sexual crimes — including rape, sexual assault, and abusive sexual contact — involving U.S. military personnel in Africa that were reported over the past decade, according to criminal investigation records from the Army, Navy, and Air Force that The Intercept and Type Investigations obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
While many of the files are heavily redacted, making it impossible to identify the military personnel involved, they nonetheless shine a light on the operations of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, whose commanders and troops have been embroiled in a long series of scandals. Even more striking is the fact that the number of incidents described in the files are more than double the Pentagon’s official sexual assault figures for the African continent, highlighting the degree to which the military has failed to properly track cases of sexual offenses, thereby masking the overall severity of the problem.
“Those numbers have made me ill. And I would imagine there are at least five times that number of assaults.”
The Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, or SAPRO, compiles annual reports to Congress that are supposed to include all reported cases of sexual assault involving U.S. military personnel. Between 2010 and 2020, the year of the most recent report, the Pentagon lists just 73 cases of sexual assault in the AFRICOM area of operations. Yet the files obtained by The Intercept and Type Investigations show that military criminal investigators logged at least 158 allegations of sexual offenses in the AFRICOM area of operations during that same period.
The case files reveal that these charges of sexual misconduct involving U.S. military personnel occurred in at least 22 countries in Africa — including 13 nations that do not appear in the annual Pentagon reports. Some of the allegations accuse members of the military; others recount attacks on U.S. personnel by civilians on or near U.S. outposts.
“Those numbers have made me ill,” said Erin Kirk-Cuomo, who served as a combat photographer in the Marine Corps and founded the nonprofit advocacy group Not In My Marine Corps to highlight the issues of sexual assault and harassment. “And I would imagine there are at least five times that number of assaults — just from what we know about unreported sexual assaults in general.”
A Pattern of Assault
AFRICOM is not unique. The problem of sexual misconduct in the military is chronic and widespread, with overseas deployments posing particular dangers. One study found that women with “combat-like experiences” in Afghanistan and Iraq had significantly greater odds of reporting sexual harassment or both sexual harassment and sexual assault. The Pentagon estimates that roughly 20,500 service members experience sexual assault each year, according to the latest Pentagon survey, but only 6,290 official allegations of sexual assault were made in 2020, according to the most recent SAPRO report. This year, the Government Accountability Office also found that the Pentagon had failed to document up to 97 percent of allegations of sexual assault of its civilian employees.
The Department of Defense notes that survivors of sexual assault are often reluctant to come forward for a variety of reasons, including a desire to move on, maintain privacy, and avoid feelings of shame. Yet troops say that even when they do speak out, they often face a military culture and command structure that doesn’t take their allegations seriously and a military justice system that provides little accountability. Only a small percentage of cases are ever prosecuted, and they rarely — about 0.9 percent of the time, according to 2020 statistics — result in convictions for sexual offenses.
Most of the 158 reports identified in the AFRICOM files represent cases in which a member of the armed forces, or someone assaulted by them, wanted to seek justice through the military system. The fact that many of these reports may not be included in the Pentagon’s official records highlights how the military has failed to properly track sexual assault cases and take appropriate action to address the problem.
“I’m not surprised at all,” said retired Col. Don Christensen, a former chief prosecutor for the Air Force who is now the president of Protect Our Defenders, an organization dedicated to combating sexual assault in the military. “Their tracking process is very flawed. You see incomplete data, cases that aren’t tracked. You have missing information and reports that don’t seem to add up.”
“You see incomplete data, cases that aren’t tracked. You have missing information and reports that don’t seem to add up.”
A Pentagon spokesperson, Maj. César Santiago, said the Defense Department collects data on sexual assault to inform “policy, program development, and oversight actions” around the issue. “Each year, the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office aggregates data on reports of sexual assault, analyzes the results, and presents them in the Department’s Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military,” Santiago said in an email.
The findings by The Intercept and Type Investigations come as the Biden administration makes combating sexual assault in the military a major policy goal. In January, as his first directive in office, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a memorandum calling on senior Pentagon leaders and top generals to “battle enemies within the ranks” and wipe out the “scourge of sexual assault.”
Currently, commanders decide whether to charge a suspect with a sexual crime and whether a case should result in a general court-martial. Critics note that the system is rife with conflicts of interest. The situation is akin to a corporate executive deciding whether a case involving the sexual assault of one employee by another should go to trial. The military’s mostly male senior officers — who generally lack formal legal training — often doubt survivors, side with the accused, and may pressure survivors not to bring formal charges. There are just a tiny number of court-martial convictions of sex crimes.
On July 2, the Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault, established by Austin at President Joe Biden’s direction, recommended taking cases outside the chain of command, a change military leaders have long resisted. The commission recommended that independent judge advocates, reporting to a civilian-led Office of the Special Victim Prosecutor, should decide whether to charge an alleged perpetrator of sexual assault and whether that charge should result in a court-martial.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaks during a briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, May 6, 2021.
Photo: Susan Walsh/AP
Both Biden and Austin have backed the proposal.
“I strongly support Secretary Austin’s announcement that he is accepting the core recommendations put forward by the Independent Review Commission on Military Sexual Assault (IRC), including removing the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault from the chain of command and creating highly specialized units to handle these cases and related crimes,” Biden said in a statement last week. “For as long as we have abhorred this scourge, the statistics and the stories have grown worse. We need concrete actions that fundamentally change the way we handle military sexual assault.”
It will be up to Congress to amend the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a leading voice on the issue, also has bipartisan support for a bill that would take prosecution decisions out of the chain of command for major crimes, including rape and sexual assault.
“They know that transparency and accuracy make them look worse.”
Austin has made the collection of data a centerpiece of his efforts. His January memo directed military leaders to undertake a “frank, data-driven assessment” of sexual assault and harassment prevention programs. “A primary focus should be on how you are conducting oversight to ensure programs and policies are being executed on the ground,” Austin wrote. “Please ensure this assessment includes relevant data over the past decade, victim support efforts, and advocacy.”
“They know that transparency and accuracy make them look worse,” Christensen said. “Often people give up and quit looking for this information, so it’s a win-win for them.”
Military Leadership Failures
The night after the alleged assault at the guard post in Djibouti, the female soldier said the same man attempted to assault her again. According to the case file, he tried to kiss her, then said that he wanted a relationship with her and that he would “shower her with gifts.”
After that, the female soldier filed an official complaint, which led to a military protective order prohibiting the man from contacting or communicating with her. Army investigative documents note that an officer believed there was probable cause that a sexual assault had occurred, and the case was referred to a commander to consider disciplinary or administrative action. It’s unclear whether any further action was taken in the case. Because the names of the troops involved are redacted in the case file and the SAPRO reports contain few details, it’s also unclear whether this case is one of the 73 allegations of sexual assault included in the Defense Department’s annual figures.
But the prevalence of these cases at AFRICOM highlights the degree to which military leaders have created a culture in which indiscipline and criminal behavior have been allowed to flourish at the command.
If you have information about sexual assault in the U.S. military, email Nick Turse via nickturseTI@protonmail.com.
In 2013, Maj. Gen. Ralph Baker, the commander of a counterterrorism force in the Horn of Africa, was removed from his job on charges of sexual misconduct. Baker had “forced his hand between [an AFRICOM senior policy adviser’s] legs and attempted to touch her vagina against her will,” according to a criminal investigation file obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. (Demoted to the rank of brigadier general, Baker was allowed to quietly retire.)
Maj. Gen. Joseph Harrington, the commander of U.S. Army Africa, was sacked and stripped of a star after he exchanged a large number of Facebook messages — 1,158 of them between February 12, 2017, and June 3, 2017 — with the spouse of an enlisted soldier. Air Force Lt. Col. Denis Paquette, the commander of a secret U.S. drone base in Tunisia, was dismissed from military service after carrying on a relationship with an airman and impeding the investigation that resulted. Troops stationed at Paquette’s drone base had gained a reputation for heavy drinking and hard partying.
With little outside oversight, Camp Lemonnier has been the location of a high percentage of alleged sexual assaults of U.S. military personnel on the continent. A former French Foreign Legion outpost that has expanded from 88 acres to nearly 600 acres, Camp Lemonnier serves as a key hub for American counterterrorism operations in Yemen and Somalia. It is the largest U.S. base on the continent, hosting about 5,000 U.S. and allied personnel.
Alleged crimes at Camp Lemonnier, according to the AFRICOM files, include the following:
In 2013, an investigation by Navy criminal investigators “revealed allegations of a history of sexually inappropriate comments and behavior” by an Air Force staff sergeant who harassed and touched female subordinates, including an instance in which he unzipped the blouse and forcibly spread the legs of a subordinate while she was on duty at a guard shack.
In March 2015, a soldier allegedly plied a 20-year-old specialist with more than the allowed two alcoholic drinks, followed her back to her quarters, and sexually assaulted her. For weeks, the soldier continued to harass the specialist, walking into her quarters uninvited as well as kissing and touching her. She said she went along with it for fear of upsetting their professional relationship but eventually reported the incident. The final report by Army investigators notes that the allegations “could not be substantiated or refuted,” and the case was closed.
In August 2015, a Navy chief yeoman reported that she was “hit, bit, and choked” as well as sexually assaulted by a U.S. Army staff sergeant.
In April 2016, a specialist with the Army’s 2nd Battalion, 124th Infantry said that while sitting outside her quarters to use the Wi-Fi, another soldier began chatting her up and invited her to his room. When she declined, the soldier grabbed her hand and began pulling her away, eventually lifting her up and carrying her to his quarters. There, he proceeded to kiss her and grope her and tried to pull down her pants. She was able to escape when the perpetrator’s roommate walked in. The perpetrator then walked back to the specialist’s quarters and tried to kiss her again, then took her hand and attempted to place it on his penis, according to criminal investigative files.
In June 2017, a Navy Exchange massage therapist said that a master-at-arms third class demanded “extra services” from her. She refused to perform any sexual acts and reported him. During the investigation, another massage therapist, a civilian, said the same man had groped her during a massage and also asked for “extra services.” After the massage therapists declined to provide further information, Navy investigators closed the case.
All of these incidents, whether the alleged victim was a civilian or a member of the military, are supposed to be included in the Pentagon’s Defense Sexual Assault Incident Database and listed in the annual SAPRO reports to Congress. But it’s not clear whether they are. The annual reports do not tell the whole story.
Illustration: Vicky Leta for The Intercept
“Zero Data”
According to the SAPRO accounting over the last decade, sexual assaults involving U.S. military personnel were reported in nine African countries: Djibouti, Ghana, Kenya, the Seychelles, Somalia, South Africa, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. John Manley, an AFRICOM spokesperson, touted the “wealth of data” in the SAPRO reports, which he said represented “all [Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention program] reporting throughout DoD.”
But the AFRICOM files obtained by The Intercept and Type Investigations include cases not just from those nine nations, but also from 13 others: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Morocco, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, and South Sudan. Those 13 countries do not appear anywhere in the annual reports.
“Overseas, it’s like the Wild West,” said Kirk-Cuomo. “In these deployed situations, there’s no oversight, and people feel like they can get away with it. There is no tracking. There is basically zero data on sexual assaults coming out of any of these places.”
“In these deployed situations, there’s no oversight, and people feel like they can get away with it.”
The redacted information in the investigative files makes it difficult to match the 73 cases in the Pentagon’s annual SAPRO reports with the 158 cases in the AFRICOM files. Whether some cases that occurred in Africa are logged elsewhere in SAPRO data is unclear because AFRICOM doesn’t track sexual assaults and the Pentagon declined to provide raw data or clarify the discrepancies. More than two years after The Intercept and Type Investigations first requested an interview with a representative from SAPRO, Santiago, the Pentagon spokesperson, replied, “Unfortunately, we do not have anyone available.”
One case that was omitted from the official Pentagon filings was an alleged assault of a soldier in Senegal.
On February 13, 2015, the soldier, who was supporting the U.S. response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, left a dinner with co-workers to return to her hotel in Senegal’s capital, Dakar. While walking past a group of young men, she reported that one of them grabbed her and slammed her into an alley wall. Another pulled down her pants. The men “were laughing and appeared to be joking as they were groping her and digitally penetrating her,” according to the file. The woman believed she was gang raped as well, although she had difficulty recalling details of the latter part of the assault.
The AFRICOM files include a copy of an Army criminal investigation report detailing the allegations. But Senegal is not mentioned in any of the Pentagon’s annual reports on sexual assault from 2010 to 2020.
“U.S. Africa Command has no record of these allegations,” said AFRICOM spokesperson Manley.
The AFRICOM files highlight the ways in which the military can actively discourage survivors of sexual assault from coming forward with their allegations.
Survivors of sexual assault said they felt reluctant or afraid to aid investigations, pressured to change their accounts, and constrained by their chain of command, according to the AFRICOM files. Some thought that they would not be believed and doubted that reporting an assault would lead to a positive outcome. Others were ignored, laughed off, suspected of exaggerating, or accused by leadership of lying about the abuse.
“Women are regularly treated like they’re the problem,” said Amy Braley Franck, who served as the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention program manager for U.S. Army Africa from 2015 to 2018. “They aren’t cared for, because the system doesn’t operate properly. And there’s no oversight.”
“Women are regularly treated like they’re the problem. They aren’t cared for, because the system doesn’t operate properly.”
Members of the military who want to report a sexual assault say the system for doing so is difficult to navigate, even at the largest and best-resourced U.S. base in Africa. “In Djibouti, the Navy SHARP office is supposed to have a full-time staff member on the camp — which sometimes they do, but sometimes they don’t,” said Braley Franck. “Several times, I called their hotline number to get somebody to take care of a service member — because that was their responsibility — and nobody answered their phone.”
A spokesperson at Camp Lemonnier did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the allegation.
For instance, a soldier who reported being sexually assaulted while deployed in Africa, and who spoke to The Intercept and Type Investigations on the condition of anonymity, said she was unaware of even how to locate SHARP personnel or military criminal investigators on her base.
“Everyone thinks it’s just so easy to go talk to a SHARP representative or CID, but it’s not,” the soldier said.
The soldier highlighted another issue that has plagued the military: the failure of military leaders to take sexual assault seriously.
After she reported being assaulted, she said her superiors disregarded her allegations — although Army investigators later corroborated her claims. And it wasn’t her first such experience. Referring to a prior assault, she said she was frustrated by the process of seeking justice. “I learned that in the end nothing really happened, and I was told the defense would be able to change the story,” she said. The experiences left her embittered toward her superiors and skeptical of the military justice system.
“So many bad things happened when I did do the right thing, so I’m worried about what would happen if I did it again,” she said. “Leadership is not taking any accountability. If your soldiers are abusive, are acting like perverts, you need to put a stop to it. But leadership looks at it like, ‘Not my business. Not my problem.’”
Marines serving at Camp Lemonnier wait to take their places during the Marine Corps Birthday Ceremony held aboard Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, Africa, Nov. 10, 2010.
Photo: U.S. Marines/Dvids
Meeting the Enemy
The soldier was assaulted at Camp Lemonnier along with an Army specialist. The specialist, whose name is being withheld by The Intercept and Type Investigations, told Army criminal investigators that a delivery person from a local hardware vendor assaulted them as they were unloading supplies in April 2014 — grabbing them, grinding on them, kissing them, and licking their necks. They repeatedly shoved him away and shouted “No!”
The specialist said their commanding officer later joked that the locals liked “to play grab-ass with my soldiers.”
The soldier corroborated the specialist’s account in contemporaneous testimony to criminal investigators and in recent interviews with The Intercept and Type Investigations. It is unclear whether their case is included in the Pentagon’s annual figures. But years later, the specialist is still angry about the response from her commanding officer. “It really pissed me off,” she said. “At first, I couldn’t believe that it was just written off. But it happens all the time.”
The specialist was never the same after her report of the assault was shrugged off, according to the soldier who was assaulted alongside her. She went from a model soldier to one who didn’t care.
When she redeployed to Fort Polk, Louisiana, later in 2014, the specialist started smoking marijuana, even though she knew she might fail a drug test. When she did fail, she didn’t mount a defense, accepting a less-than-honorable discharge to expedite her departure from the Army.
Hers is a common story. A 2016 Human Rights Watch investigation found significant evidence of less-than-honorable or “bad” discharges being meted out to military personnel who reported sexual assault. And a Rand study released in February found that sexual assault doubled the odds that a service member would separate from the military in the ensuing 28 months. The research also showed that service members who said they were sexually harassed were 1.7 times more likely to leave the military over the same time span.
“The services are losing at least 16,000 manpower years prematurely subsequent to sexual assault and sexual harassment in a single year,” the Rand researchers wrote. “Furthermore, members who separate from service because of sexual assault or sexual harassment are likely forgoing considerable compensation relative to continuing their service; indeed, some victims likely give up hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime earnings.”
When a Navy criminal investigator asked the specialist what the worst part about the assault by the delivery person was, she didn’t mention the details of the crime itself. Instead, she said, the worst part was “knowing your leadership did not care.”
This betrayal was the hardest lesson of her military career.
“You think it’s enemies — people overseas — that you’ll need to fight,” she told The Intercept and Type Investigations. “You realize later that you don’t only have to fight enemies overseas, but also the people around you.”
Research assistance provided by Darya Marchenkova.
AS FORÇAS ARMADAS DOS EUA mataram 23 civis e feriram outros 10 no Afeganistão, no Iraque e na Somália em 2020, segundo relatório do Pentágono sobre mortes de civis divulgado em 2 de junho – e imediatamente acusado de maquiar os números. Especialistas afirmam que o relatório subnotifica de forma expressiva a quantidade de mortos e feridos em operações militares americanas, apontando ainda que o Pentágono não efetuou pagamentos de condolências, espécie de indenização, nem nos poucos casos reconhecidos pelo governo.
“O fracasso em contabilizar e corrigir de forma precisa os danos a civis é um desserviço àqueles que já sofrem perdas inimagináveis e aos americanos, que merecem mais transparência em relação às operações dos EUA”, afirma Annie Shiel, conselheira-sênior de política norte-americana e advocacia do Center for Civilians in Conflict, o CIVICS. Ela sinaliza uma “enorme discrepância entre o número de mortes divulgados pelo Departamento de Defesa e aqueles apontados por organizações que monitoram danos a civis, por grupos de direitos humanos, pela ONU e pela imprensa”.
Um cálculo conservador de civis mortos pelos militares dos EUA em 2020, segundo a Airwars – grupo britânico que monitora ataques aéreos –, indica um número quase cinco vezes maior: 102 mortes em ataques americanos realizados em cinco países: Afeganistão, Iêmen, Iraque, Síria e Somália. Como observa Chris Woods, diretor da Airwars, “a incapacidade do Pentágono em pagar qualquer compensação para os civis afetados em 2020 – mesmo com milhões de dólares disponíveis para esse fim –, sugere desinteresse nos efeitos devastadores das ações malsucedidas dos EUA”.
A expressiva subnotificação do Pentágono não inclui nenhum dos ataques secretos perpetrados pela Agência Central de Inteligência, a CIA, os quais não são reconhecidos pelo governo dos EUA. Tampouco considera a mortandade civil resultante do apoio bélico dos EUA a países aliados, como a Arábia Saudita, cujos bombardeios já mataram milhares de pessoas no Iêmen.
Em anos anteriores, os EUA efetuaram pagamentos de condolências a civis que o governo reconheceu ter ferido em operações militares. As cifras variam muito, de 125 dólares a 15 mil para um civil morto no Afeganistão. Entre 2015 e 2019, os EUA destinaram 2 milhões de dólares a essas compensações.
Apesar de existir um fundo de 3 milhões de dólares do Departamento de Defesa para pagamentos relacionados a mortes, ferimentos e danos causados por ações militares americanas e de aliados, o novo relatório observa que o departamento “não ofereceu nem fez qualquer pagamento ex gratia [sem obrigação legal] em 2020”.
A razão por trás da falta de pagamentos – e de eventuais pendências nas compensações – segue uma incógnita. Porta-voz da Defesa, Michael Howard declarou ao Intercept que “diversos fatores podem afetar uma decisão do comando para oferecer um pagamento ex gratia” e que “detalhes sobre os números dos pagamentos planejados ou em andamento não estão disponíveis no curto prazo”.
Especialistas demonstram indignação. “O Congresso reiteradamente autorizou o financiamento de pagamentos ex gratia por danos a civis, e, de forma confusa, o Departamento de Defesa fracassou reiteradamente em usar esses fundos de forma substancial, apesar do grande número de mortes de civis confirmadas pelo departamento”, afirmou Shiel, do CIVICS.
O relatório anual mais recente
contempla ações militares dos EUA em seis países: Afeganistão, Iêmen, Iraque, Síria, Somália e Nigéria – onde uma missão de resgate de reféns foi conduzida em 2020. Além dos casos do ano passado, o documento acrescenta outras 63 mortes e 22 feridos civis aos números oficiais do Pentágono, em episódios ocorridos entre 2017 e 2019 – a maioria dos casos no Iraque e na Síria.
Howard observa que o Pentágono “avalia novos relatórios sobre operações passadas após recebê-los e reconsidera avaliações prévias se novas informações relevantes vierem à tona”.
‘Especialistas afirmaram que o Pentágono parece terceirizar o trabalho pesado para grupos de direitos humanos e jornalistas, para só então validar alguns casos’.
Em vez de direcionar seus vastos recursos para a condução de investigações aprofundadas, o Pentágono parece terceirizar o trabalho pesado, deixando a tarefa da contagem de mortos e feridos a grupos de direitos humanos e jornalistas, para só então validar alguns casos.
“Aparentemente muitas das mortes de civis reconhecidas no relatório vêm de grupos e fontes externos que solicitam revisões sobre ataques e ações aos militares”, aponta Priyanka Motaparthy, do Instituto de Direitos Humanos da Faculdade de Direito de Columbia. “Não vemos sinais de um esforço sério para entender o impacto total das operações militares dos EUA na população civil.”
O relatório do Pentágono indica apenas a terceira vez em que os EUA reconheceram civis mortos e feridos no Iêmen. Em maio de 2020, o órgão declarou que “não identificou mortes de civis resultantes de operações militares dos EUA no Iêmen” em 2019, mas o novo relatório do Departamento de Defesa agora reconhece a morte de um civil em Al Bayda, Iêmen, em 22 de janeiro de 2019.
Uma investigação da organização Mwatana for Human Rights, com sede no Iêmen, publicada no começo deste ano, revelou que um ataque aéreo em Al Bayda, em 21 ou 22 de janeiro de 2019, matou Saleh Ahmed Mohamed Al Qaisi, um agricultor e pintor de 67 anos – segundo os habitantes do local, sem relações com o terrorismo. Uma testemunha afirmou à Mwatana que um “drone” atirou no carro de Saleh. “Estamos sendo mortos a sangue frio”, disse um familiar.
“As Forças Armadas dos EUA passaram cerca de 20 anos matando pessoas no Iêmen, mas ainda não conseguem investigar e responsabilizar de forma adequada”, afirmou Radhya al-Mutawakel, liderança da Mwatana. “Esta admissão nova e atrasada das Forças Armadas americanas mostra como são inadequadas as avaliações iniciais dos EUA sobre suas próprias operações. Seus registros não têm credibilidade.”
Em quatro anos, o governo Trump conduziu pelo menos 181 ataques no Iêmen – aproximadamente o total de ações dos oito anos da gestão Obama. As operações militares de Trump resultaram em um total estimado de 76 a 154 civis mortos, segundo a Airwars. O Departamento de Defesa, no entanto, alega que somente 13 civis podem ter morrido e dois ficado feridos, em três ataques ao longo do mesmo período de quatro anos.
O Comando Central dos EUA, o CENTCOM, reconheceu somente em janeiro de 2019 a morte de civis, cerca de cinco meses depois da Mwatana apresentar provas de que Al Qaisi não era combatente. Tornou-se um padrão: as admissões anteriores do Pentágono em relação à morte de civis no Iêmen – relacionadas a dois ataques realizados em 2017 – ocorreram após uma reportagem do Intercept sobre um massacre de iemenitas pelos SEALs, braço de operações especiais da Marinha, e de uma investigação da Airwars a respeito de um ataque aéreo que, mais tarde, o Pentágono afirmou ter ferido dois civis.
“Não há evidências de que o CENTCOM já tenha relatado danos a civis decorrentes das ações no Iêmen sem que antes tenham sido divulgados pela imprensa ou por ONGs. Isso sugere que o comando não prioriza essa questão vital”, afirma Wood. “A Airwars ficou chocada ao saber, por exemplo, que apesar das informações sobre a escalada de ataques a civis no Iêmen durante o governo Trump, nenhuma equipe foi criada para analisar tais alegações.”
No começo deste ano, o governo Biden suspendeu os flexíveis “princípios” de ataque da era Trump, impôs limites temporários às operações de “ação direta” de contraterrorismo – exigindo aprovação da Casa Branca para ataques de drones e incursões fora de zonas de guerra convencionais, como o Afeganistão – e lançou uma avaliação de tais operações. Essas medidas, entretanto, não têm efeito para as vítimas dos ataques já feitos.
A Mwatana informou que Al Qaisi era o principal supridor de sua família, e que seu carro, do qual os parentes dependiam, custou milhares de dólares. Outras famílias também enfrentaram dificuldades financeiras devido aos ataques em que os EUA admitiram mortes de civis sem oferecer pagamentos ex gratia, apesar dos recursos disponíveis no orçamento do Pentágono.
“É chocante que as Forças Armadas dos EUA tenham reconhecido novos registros de civis mortos, mas não tenham feito um único pagamento a civis afetados nem, até onde sabemos, oferecido qualquer assistência”, observou Motaparthy, do Instituto de Direitos Humanos da Universidade de Columbia. “Reconhecer erros é um passo importante, mas aqueles que foram afetados nada recebem para reconstruir suas vidas e se recuperar de suas perdas.”
Recently, I wanted to show my wife a picture, so I opened the photos app on my phone and promptly panicked when I saw what was there. It’s not what you think. A lot of people are worried about what’s lurking on their smartphones. Compromising photos. Illicit text messages. Embarrassing contacts. Porn. What I noticed More
The leaflet depicts an airstrike in progress, with militants scattering as a missile streaks toward the ground.
In the foreground, a fighter in a military uniform, holding an assault rifle, tries to flee. He looks terrified. The caption, printed in Somali, reads: “Life is a gift.”
On the other side, the same man is shown sans weapon and wearing civilian clothes, smiling at a grinning child and a woman with outstretched arms. “Don’t play with this gift,” reads the text.
Another leaflet depicts a fierce-looking hyena menacing a goat above the text: “If a hyena becomes the judge, goats will not get justice.” The other side reads, “Be part of eliminating injustice by reporting al-Shabab movements.”
A third flyer shows five women and a girl standing together in front of the Somali flag. “Our security is our responsibility,” reads the front side. The back asks for information about al-Shabab, a Somali militant group.
The leaflet depicts a fierce-looking hyena menacing a goat above the text: “If a hyena becomes the judge, goats will not get justice.”
Image: U.S. AFRICOM
The three leaflets, obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act, were part of a previously unreported and wildly successful U.S. military program designed to gather intelligence from Somali civilians. The propaganda campaign aimed at weakening al-Shabab was so effective and produced so many defectors, according to U.S. Africa Command spokesperson John Manley,that it overwhelmed Somali authorities and had to be suspended. Manley did not provide the exact dates of the leaflet program prior to publication, but records show that it took place sometime between 2017 and 2020.
The success of the leaflets, however, underscores the failures of another system ostensibly designed to engage Somalis: an obscure online portal they can now use to report civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes.
“The flyers make clear that the U.S. government knows how to communicate effectively with Somalis in areas controlled by al Shabaab if it wants to,” Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, told The Intercept. “That the U.S. has not created an effective means for Somalis harmed by U.S. military actions to communicate their experiences and needs to the U.S. government suggests that learning about and responding constructively to the impact of U.S. actions is not a high priority for U.S. officials.”
For more than a decade after the U.S. began counterterrorism airstrikes in Somalia, there was no mechanism for locals to report civilian casualties directly to Africa Command. Last June, that changed when AFRICOM finally created a web portal to field allegations. But there was a catch — actually, several.
You need a computer or smartphone as well as internet access to communicate with AFRICOM. But Somalia is the least wired country on Earth, with just 2 percent of people regularly using the internet in 2017, the last year for which such statistics are available, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency. Where al-Shabab holds sway, there is almost no online access as the group has “prohibited companies from providing access to the internet and forced telecommunication companies to shut data services in al-Shabaab-controlled areas,” according to the U.S. State Department.
The command added a feature to its website that allows it to be read in the Somali language, but — in addition to accessing the internet — you need to know the English word “translate” and locate it on the tiny toolbar at the top of the webpage.
The results of the initiative have been predictably underwhelming: AFRICOM has received roughly 70 responses over the last year, only seven of which, according to Manley, were related to civilian casualties. “Six were about one incident we were already assessing, and one was about another incident we were already assessing,” he told The Intercept. “Both incidents were assessed unsubstantiated.”
The complexity of AFRICOM’s online civilian casualty reporting process stands in stark contrast to the simpler mechanism used to turn Somalis into government boosters and informants. In recent years, Special Operations Command Africa, or SOCAFRICA, began producing propaganda leaflets meant to induce members of al-Shabab to defect and encourage Somalis to provide information about militants. All are written in Somali and include local telephone numbers to contact authorities.
“These leaflets were produced by SOCAFRICA to inform populations of tip-lines and influence local populations to use the tip-lines,” Manley told The Intercept.
SOCAFRICA produced four to five versions of eight different leaflets, each microtargeted to specific locales and providing local phone numbers for authorities in the cities of Bosaso, Galkayo, Kismayo, Mogadishu, or Wanlaweyn. Some leaflets even provide a second number for people to call or text for “assistance.”
Assessments by AFRICOM and SOCAFRICA found that the flyers “were very effective, but there were too many people defecting, leading to overcrowding at the defection centers,” according to Manley. “The program was eventually placed on hold by the Government of Somalia until the defection centers were able to manage the large number of defectors.”
Manley told The Intercept that the centers will reopen “once fully approved by the Government of Somalia and the U.S. Embassy.” State Department spokesperson Gregory W. Pfleger declined to comment, adding: “The referral to State must have been a mistake.”
People view the bodies of their deceased relatives who they say are civilians killed during a raid on their farms in Bariire, outside of Mogadishu, Somalia, on Aug. 25, 2017. Somali community leaders accused the troops, accompanied by U.S. military advisers, of having killed the civilians, including children, in the overnight operations.
Mohamed Abdiwahab/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. militaryrarely conducts site visits during investigations of airstrikes or ground raids, and AFRICOM, says Manley, has never even interviewed the family member of a drone strike victim as part of an inquiry into civilian casualties. The military almost never explains its reasons for eschewing site visits either, but when it has, according to a researchers from Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute and the Center for Civilians in Conflict, it “most often cited security threats to U.S. forces and local nationals.”
“Witnesses may refuse to cooperate [with investigations] because they are afraid of retribution,” reads one military guide dealing with the protection of civilians. “Individual U.S. and host-nation sources should be protected from possible retaliation.”
Dangers to civilians do not seem to have been a major concern when SOCAFRICA developed the leaflet program asking people to call in tips that could put them at risk of being outed as snitches. “We’ve heard [from the U.S. military] that communicating with civilians about civilian casualties would expose them to security risks, namely the risk of reprisal by al Shabaab,” said Daniel Mahanty, the head of the U.S. program at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, or CIVIC. “And here we have a program that encourages just that.”
While SOCAFRICA produced 39 leaflets that promote loyalty to the Somali government, encourage members of al-Shabab to leave the group, and urge Somali civilians to inform on militants, they apparently failed to produce even one to ease the reporting of civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes. Somali civilians are, instead, left with a cumbersome online portal that, according to Abdullahi Hassan, the Somalia Researcher at Amnesty International, people living in impacted areas are unlikely to know about, let alone use.
Experts see online civilian casualty reporting as a positive initial effort but say the United States must do more. “Many Somalis are not able to access the Web,” Chris Woods, the director of Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group, told The Intercept. “So there would certainly be value in AFRICOM using more traditional routes such as flyers to reach affected communities.”
Amnesty’s Hassan also sees AFRICOM’s online civilian casualty portal as beneficial but noted that most people impacted by AFRICOM operations in Somalia live in al-Shabab-controlled areas, where the group bans smartphones, making it harder for them to use the internet safely.
“This makes the online reporting portal only useful to a small portion of the Somali population,” Hassan said.
The leaflets, by contrast, “are written in Somali language and contain telephone numbers where members of the public can easily contact authorities to report and share information. This is a clear indication that AFRICOM was, from the onset, less interested in setting up safe and accessible civilian casualty reporting mechanisms for families and victims of their operations in Somalia.”
Hassan suggested several additional steps AFRICOM could take to improve civilian casualty reporting, including a secure, toll-free phone number that allows Somalis to provide allegations of civilian casualties directly to the command, as well as a physical location in a government-controlled area — like the capital, Mogadishu — where reports could be submitted. He also urged AFRICOM and the U.S. embassy in Mogadishu to proactively seek out and collect allegations of civilian harm from members of parliament, clan representatives, and government officials, as well as local human rights groups.
Africa Command has made recent strides in terms of transparency concerning reports of civilian harm. In April 2020, AFRICOM began issuing quarterly Civilian Casualty Assessment reports chronicling allegations and reviews. The command’s latest assessment, published in March, noted that AFRICOM had received no new reports of civilian casualties during the quarter ending on December 31, 2020, and closed out two of its three open cases as “unsubstantiated.” After the report was finished, but before it was publicly released, at least two more casualty allegations, relating to strikes conducted on January 1 and January 19, 2021, came to light. AFRICOM is currently assessing those reports.
“Even as we maintain pressure on al-Shabaab’s terrorist network, we continue to minimize risk to civilians during our operations,” U.S. Army Gen. Stephen Townsend, the commander of AFRICOM, wrote in the last quarterly report. “Transparency, abiding by the rule of law, and promoting security and stability are foundational to how we operate.”
“Airwars and our partners have called on AFRICOM to go back and comprehensively review dozens of historical allegations against U.S. forces in Somalia dating back to 2007,” said Woods. “Doing so would, we believe, send a clear message that AFRICOM takes Somali civilian harm concerns seriously and that it is willing to concede both current and past mistakes.”
Transparency and accountability have not been defining aspects of U.S. military efforts in Africa, from counting civilian injuries and deaths to air-dropping leaflets. In 2016, for example, The Intercept filed a Freedom of Information Act request for leaflets used in the campaign against Joseph Kony and his murderous Lord’s Resistance Army. Special Operations Command told The Intercept that it could not locate any of the fliers, instead sending a collection of tiny blurry images. Meanwhile, some of the fliers were sitting at a U.S. outpost in Africa, where they were incinerated instead of being released under the FOIA.
If accountability for civilian harm is truly a priority, experts say that Africa Command needs to ditch its two-tiered reporting system and develop one that makes it as easy for Somalis to tell the U.S. military when it has killed or wounded civilians as it does to inform on al-Shabab.
“From our perspective,” CIVIC’s Mahanty told The Intercept, “the U.S. and the government of Somalia, and frankly all of the many international armed actors in Somalia, should have a unified, or at least compatible, approach that enables, and in fact encourages, civilians to safely report civilian casualties and to expect an appropriate response, including condolence payments when warranted and where civilians themselves so prefer.”
The U.S. military killed 23 civilians and injured another 10 in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia during 2020, according to a Pentagon report on civilian casualties that was released on Wednesday and immediately faced charges of being a whitewash. Experts said the report vastly undercounts the dead and wounded from U.S. military operations, and they noted that the Pentagon failed to provide condolence payments even in the handful of cases where it acknowledges causing deaths or injuries.
“The failure to accurately account and make amends for civilian harm does a disservice to civilians already suffering unimaginable loss, as well as to the Americans who deserve fuller transparency into the ways that U.S. operations have harmed civilians,” Annie Shiel, the senior adviser for U.S. policy and advocacy at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept. She also noted an “enormous discrepancy between DoD’s civilian casualty numbers and those published by civilian harm tracking organizations, human rights groups, the United Nations, and the media.”
A conservative accounting of civilians killed by the U.S. military in 2020, according to Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group, is almost five times higher: 102 noncombatant deaths resulting from U.S. attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. And as Chris Woods, the director of Airwars, pointed out, “The Pentagon’s failure to pay out any compensation to affected civilians during 2020 – despite several million dollars being available for that purpose — suggests a lack of interest in the devastating aftermath of those U.S. actions which go wrong.”
The Pentagon’s dramatic undercount does not include any of the secret attacks carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency, which the U.S. government does not acknowledge. Nor does it take into account the civilian toll resulting from assistance to allies, such as Saudi Arabia, whose bombing campaign has killed thousands of civilians in Yemen.
In past years, the U.S. has provided condolence payments to civilians it acknowledged harming in its operations. Payouts can vary widely, from $125 to $15,000 for a civilian killed in Afghanistan. From 2015 to 2019, the U.S. paid $2 million in condolence payments to civilians there.
Despite a dedicated annual Department of Defense fund of $3 million for payments for deaths, injuries, or damages resulting from U.S. or allied military actions, the new report notes that the Defense Department “did not offer or make any such ex gratia payments during 2020.”
The reasons behind the lack of payments and whether any are pending remains opaque. Michael Howard, a Defense Department spokesperson, told The Intercept that “numerous factors can affect a commander’s decision to offer an ex gratia payment” and “details on the numbers of payments planned or in progress are not available on short notice.”
Experts were vexed by the failure to provide payments. “Congress has repeatedly authorized funding for ex gratia payments for civilian harm, and, confoundingly, the DoD has repeatedly failed to make substantial use of those funds despite the large number of cases where the department has confirmed civilian casualties,” said CIVIC’s Shiel.
This latest annual report covers U.S. military actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, as well as Nigeria, where a hostage rescue mission was conducted in 2020. It also adds to the Pentagon’s official toll an additional 63 civilian deaths and 22 injuries during 2017 to 2019, mostly in Iraq and Syria.
The Pentagon, Howard noted, continues to “assess new reports concerning past operations after they are received and reconsiders previous assessments if new relevant information comes to light.”
Experts said that the Pentagon appears to be outsourcing the legwork to human rights groups and journalists and then only deeming a few cases credible.
Rather than deploying its sizable resources to conduct comprehensive investigations, experts said that the Pentagon appears to be outsourcing the legwork to human rights groups and journalists — and then only deeming a few cases credible.
“It appears many of the civilian casualties acknowledged in the report come from outside groups or sources asking the military to review its strikes or actions,” Priyanka Motaparthy of Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute told The Intercept. “We just don’t see the signs that there’s a serious effort to understand the full impact of U.S. military operations on civilians.”
The Pentagon report marks only the third time the U.S. has acknowledged killing or wounding civilians in Yemen. Last May, the Pentagon stated that it “did not identify any civilian casualties resulting from U.S. military operations in Yemen” in 2019, but the new Defense Department report now acknowledges the killing of one civilian in Al Bayda, Yemen, on January 22, 2019.
An investigation by the Yemen-based Mwatana for Human Rights, published earlier this year, revealed that an airstrike in Al Bayda on January 21 or 22, 2019, killed Saleh Ahmed Mohamed Al Qaisi, a 67-year-old farmer and painter who locals said had no terrorist affiliations. A witness told Mwatana that a “drone” conducted an airstrike on Saleh’s car. “We are being killed in cold blood,” said a family member.
“The U.S. military has spent nearly 20 years killing people in Yemen but still hasn’t worked out how to properly investigate and ensure accountability,” said Radhya al-Mutawakel, the chairperson of Mwatana for Human Rights. “This new, belated admission by the U.S. military shows how inadequate initial US assessments of its own operations are. Its records cannot be trusted.”
Over four years, the Trump administration conducted at least 181 attacks in Yemen, nearly the same total as President Barack Obama carried out during eight years in office. Attacks under Trump resulted in an estimated 76 to 154 civilian deaths, according to Airwars. The Defense Department, however, claims that as few as 13 civilians may have been killed and two wounded in three attacks during that same four-year span.
U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, only acknowledged the January 2019 civilian death about five months after Mwatana presented evidence that Saleh Ahmed Mohamed Al Qaisi was a noncombatant. It’s become a pattern: The Pentagon’s previous Yemeni civilian casualty admissions, both stemming from attacks in 2017 under Trump, followed reporting by The Intercept of a massacre of Yemenis by Navy SEALs and an Airwars investigation of an airstrike that the Pentagon later said wounded two civilians.
“There’s no evidence of CENTCOM ever having reported civilian harm from its actions in Yemen, unless first prompted by media or NGOs. That suggests in our view a lack of command prioritization on this vital issue,” Woods said. “Airwars was shocked to learn for example that — despite reported civilian harm having escalated sharply in Yemen under Donald Trump — no permanent civilian casualty assessment team was created to review such claims.”
Earlier this year, the Biden administration suspended looser Trump-era targeting “principles,” imposed temporary limits on counterterrorism “direct action” operations, requiring White House approval for drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional war zones like Afghanistan, and launched a review of such operations. This changes nothing for victims of past attacks, however.
Mwatana reported that Saleh Ahmed Mohamed Al Qaisi was his family’s primary breadwinner and his car, on which his relatives relied, cost thousands of dollars. Other families have also experienced financial hardship in the wake of attacks where the U.S. has admitted civilian casualties but offered no ex gratia payments, despite funds being available in the Pentagon’s budget.
“It is astonishing that the U.S. military has acknowledged new reports of civilian deaths but has not made a single payment to an affected civilian, or as far as we know, any offer of assistance,” said Motaparthy of Human Rights Institute. “Acknowledging errors is an important step but those harmed are left to rebuild their lives and recover from losses with nothing.”
Jason Patinkin spent the better part of a decade as a freelance reporter, covering conflicts, extremism, and counterinsurgency in East Africa for major news outlets including the Washington Post, Reuters, and the Associated Press. He won commendations for relentless reporting under a repressive regime in South Sudan and broke stories about war crimes that provoked global outrage.
But as Patinkin watched a brutal civil war unfold in Ethiopia this winter and spring, the coverage by his most recent employer, the U.S. government-funded broadcaster Voice of America, shocked and unnerved him. Troops and paramilitaries loyal to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed were accused of killing and expelling civilians and committing gang rape, but VOA’s coverage largely favored the government, in Patinkin’s view, while ignoring its potential war crimes.
For months, Patinkin complained to senior editors about bias in the news outlet’s Ethiopia coverage. In his resignation email last month, he called out “VOA’s pro-Abiy propaganda effort,” its failure to issue corrections for “false and biased reporting,” and its airing of “pro-government propaganda while ignoring atrocities blamed on pro-government forces.” Twelve other current and former VOA service chiefs, reporters, and staffers, as well as outside experts, described violations of basic journalistic standards in VOA’s coverage of Ethiopia stretching back decades. Ethnic factions, especially in VOA’s Amharic language section, have used the news agency to push partisan agendas and settle scores, current and former VOA staff, including two former heads of the agency’s Horn of Africa service, told The Intercept.
“Since I was hired full-time at VOA about a year and a half ago, I’ve seen many incidents and decisions here that caused me great concern as a journalist,” Patinkin wrote in his April 30 resignation email, which was seen by The Intercept. “But VOA’s continued tolerance of a wartime propaganda effort is too much. I cannot in good conscience remain associated with this organization.”
Founded in 1942 with a mandate to serve as a “reliable and authoritative source of news,” Voice of America’s digital, television, and radio platforms provide news in more than 45 languages to an estimated weekly audience of more than 278 million people. With an annual budget of $252 million, the broadcaster says it is committed to “telling audiences the truth.”
The agency’s Horn of Africa service, especially VOA Amharic — which broadcasts in the language of the ethnic Amhara leaders and militias that Abiy and his government depend on — has failed to live up to that mission, the current and former VOA staffers said. “The Amharic service reaches Abiy’s political base. If the Amharic service were impartial, if it were reporting the atrocities, it would be so important,” one Africa Division reporter told The Intercept. “Instead, the American taxpayer is paying for propaganda.”
“This is a war, maybe a genocide, in Ethiopia,” the reporter said. “We have access to a lot of information — on the ground — that could be reported, but we’re hampered at every turn. It’s a matter of life or death. That’s no exaggeration whatsoever.”
“We have access to a lot of information — on the ground — that could be reported, but we’re hampered at every turn. It’s a matter of life or death. That’s no exaggeration whatsoever.”
VOA declined to answer detailed questions from The Intercept and did not respond to requests to interview senior staff named in this article. “The Voice of America expects all its journalists to adhere to the principles of producing accurate, balanced and comprehensive reporting with journalistic integrity free of political interference on all broadcasting platforms and languages,” said Anna K. Morris, a Voice of America spokesperson. “Nearly 12 million people tune in to the [VOA Horn of Africa Service’s] broadcasts every week because of its impactful reporting aiming for the highest journalistic standards.”
But VOA staffers say that since Abiy dispatched troops to Ethiopia’s Tigray region last November to crush what he called a mutiny, the news agency’s longtime journalistic failings have become even more pronounced. “I never thought that I would experience this in the United States of America,” that same Africa Division reporter said. “We come from countries where we’ve never really had press freedom. To experience this in the U.S. is shocking.”
That is precisely why Patinkin felt compelled to resign after repeated complaints to his bosses, he told The Intercept.
“It’s appalling that VOA has been used to advance wartime propaganda. What VOA is doing, particularly the Horn of Africa service, is a complete abdication of the sacred duty that we have as journalists,” Patinkin said. “There may be a genocide going on in Tigray right now, so as a journalist, not to mention as a Jew — whose people have experienced genocide — there is no way that I’m going to be a part of that.”
Jason Patinkin photographed in Washington, D.C., on May 13, 2021.
Photo: Yodith Dammlash for The Intercept
While Voice of America has been a trusted news source for millions around the world for almost 80 years, there have been long-standing problems. Last year, Amanda Bennett, the director of Voice of America from 2016 to 2020, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that before she came on the job, “discipline and accountability were lax” and even “major infractions — like threatening coworkers, sleeping on the job, plagiarism, viewing pornography, and going AWOL for months — or even years — went unpunished.”
Voice of America was in turmoil for much of last year as Michael Pack, a former conservative filmmaker appointed by President Donald Trump to head VOA’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, sought to remake the broadcaster and other government-funded overseas news agencies. Pack’s tenure was marked by whistleblower complaints, a subpoena from Congress, a finding by the Office of Special Counsel that there was a “substantial likelihood” of wrongdoing among USAGM leadership, and court orders barring him from meddling in the operations of Voice of America and the other networks he oversaw. Pack resigned in January, seven months into a three-year term.
Pack was criticized for trying to undermine VOA’s editorial independence, but what has occurred in the news agency’s Africa Division has arguably been far more pernicious. Many division employees are African immigrants whose willingness to air workplace grievances may be constrained by circumstances beyond their control. “I’m lucky that I’m a white guy with no kids and a little bit of savings, so I could quit. But many of my colleagues might not have that freedom,” Patinkin said. “There are issues of citizenship, race, and gender that feed into issues of power at VOA’s Africa Division that make it difficult, even for people who are very upset, to speak out.”
Multiple current and former staff members, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions, cast blame for the agency’s ethical and journalistic lapses on Negussie Mengesha, who recently retired as the head of the Africa Division after almost 40 years at VOA.
Mengesha immigrated to the United States in 1981 because journalism in Ethiopia was subject to “total censorship,” he said in a 2019 VOA video. Yet at Voice of America, Mengesha curtailed press freedom, advancing an unethical brand of journalism at odds with VOA policy and industry standards, current and former staffers said.
“Working with the now-retired former Africa Division head, Negussie, and the now-Horn of Africa head [Tizita Belachew], feels like we’re working for an extension of the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation,” the Africa Division staffer said.
A photograph of Negussie Mengesha is seen on a branded Voice of America digital background, posted on May 12, 2016, and archived from his biography on VOA’s website.
Screenshot: VOA
Phone calls and emails to Mengesha and Belachew went unreturned. A reporter for The Intercept visited a Washington, D.C.-area address associated with Mengesha, but no one answered the door. A note left for Mengesha at that address yielded no response.
Negussie Mengesha “is one of the biggest perpetrators of bias,” said Annette Sheckler, a former chief of Voice of America’s Horn of Africa service. “I am 100 percent certain that [VOA’s] coverage of the war against Tigray is biased in favor of Abiy Ahmed.”
VOA’s Horn of Africa service broadcasts to Ethiopia and Eritrea in three languages via VOA Amharic, VOA Afaan Oromoo, and VOA Tigrigna. Questions have long swirled around VOA’s Amharic programming, which began in 1982, almost 14 years before the other services, and aims to reach more than 100 million people in Ethiopia and Eritrea. A 1996 report by the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) mentioned that the Amharic service was replaced by “a new ‘Horn of Africa’ service” following “congressional complaints.” Sheckler, who served as head of the Horn of Africa service in the late 1990s, said that at the time, the Africa Division still resembled a 1950s-style “patronage system.”
VOA’s focus on Ethiopia came at a pivotal time for that nation. During the 1970s and 1980s, members of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, known as TPLF, led a civil war against a Marxist dictatorship, finally taking power in 1991 at the head of a coalition known as the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, or EPRDF. Meles Zenawi, a Tigrayan, led Ethiopia from 1991 until his death in 2012 and presided over a period of stability and economic growth. His government, a key U.S. ally in the so-called war on terror, was also repressive and abusive to both critics and journalists.
Anti-government protests forced the TPLF from power in 2018, paving the way for Abiy, a self-styled reformer, to become prime minister. Tigrayan politicians were quickly purged from positions of authority, stoking enmity between the TPLF-governed Tigray region and the federal government.
Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, right, is welcomed by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, second right, for his first visit in 22 years, at the airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on July 14, 2018.
Photo: Mulugeta Ayene/AP
VOA was credited with playing an important role in bringing down Ethiopia’s dictatorship in 1991 but soon became a target for the new government, which harassed and arrestedVOA journalists and even jammed VOA’s radio broadcasts. During these years, Ethiopians and Ethiopian Americans working for the Horn of Africa service often pushed coverage agendas along ethnic and political lines, with the Amharic service acting as the “voice of the opposition,” according to former VOA employees who spoke with The Intercept.
Sheckler, who went to work for the EPRDF government after leaving VOA, said reporters working in the Horn of Africa service advanced a partisan political agenda that was at odds with its journalistic mandate. The head of another language service, who attended VOA Africa Division editorial meetings in the 1990s and 2000s and spoke on the condition of anonymity out of reluctance to publicly revisit their time at VOA, corroborated Sheckler’s account. “Negussie frequently presented politically biased positions when he was the chief of the Amharic Service,” the head of the other foreign language service said.
“I wanted to do something about the unethical behavior of the journalists who were working for me, but my boss was not only one of them, but the leader of them.”
Peter Heinlein spent more than a quarter century at VOA, including as a bureau chief in Moscow and New Delhi and as VOA’s senior White House correspondent, before retiring in 2018. For five years, Heinlein worked as a reporter in Ethiopia and was even arrested for what the EPRDF government called “illegal reporting.” When he took the reins at the Horn of Africa service in 2012, Heinlein found the very same biases and breaches of journalistic ethics that Sheckler had encountered more than a decade before. Many reporters showed little regard for basic journalistic standards. Instead, the Amharic section, he said, was being used to settle old scores from the 1970s and focused on undermining the EPRDF government. For example, callers on one talk radio show were frequently expatriate plants whose goal was to “bash the Ethiopian government,” Heinlein said. When he complained, Mengesha, by then chief of the Africa Division, seemed unmoved.
“I wanted to do something about the unethical behavior of the journalists who were working for me, but my boss was not only one of them, but the leader of them,” said Heinlein. “I told Negussie this is untenable. He told me that if I didn’t like it, I could leave. So, eventually, I asked for a transfer.”
Prior to 2018, when Abiy came to power, it was standard practice to simply translate English-language stories already published by VOA into local languages for audiences in Ethiopia and Eritrea. After Abiy became prime minister, an additional “government perspective” was added to previously published VOA stories, and sometimes even wire service articles, before being aired for an Ethiopian audience, two Africa Division reporters told The Intercept. “This is only for Ethiopian stories,” said one of them. “The other stories from the English services were not reedited.”
“Up until Abiy took over, we were able to report freely. If we got government reaction — ‘great.’ If we tried and didn’t — ‘fine,’” another Africa Division staffer said. “But once Abiy came to power, everything changed.”
The civil war in Ethiopia is rooted in long-standing ethnic enmities that were enflamed last fall when Abiy’s government launched a military operation to capture leaders of the TPLF, the ethnic-based party that has long represented the Tigray region. While Amhara authorities say they are reclaiming land seized by the TPLF in the 1990s, Tigrayans and the U.S. government allege that Ethiopian and allied forces are conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign in western Tigray. “Whole villages were severely damaged or completely erased,” according to a U.S. government report obtained by the New York Times. The Ethiopian government denies the charge.
The United Nations’ human rights office says all sides, including the TPLF, are committing atrocities, but far more killings, rapes, and mass expulsions of civilians are attributed to Ethiopian troops, Amhara paramilitary forces, and allied soldiers from neighboring Eritrea. Six months on, the conflict has spawned a humanitarian crisis that has displaced 2.2 million people and left 91 percent of the region’s population in need of food assistance.
A complete picture of the civilian toll has been difficult to establish because Abiy has imposed an information blackout and a severe crackdown on journalists. Most recently, Simon Marks, an Irish journalist working for the Times who previously freelanced for VOA and has reported extensively on human rights abuses in the Tigray region, was expelled from Ethiopia on Thursday without explanation.
The U.N. corroborated accounts of mass killings in Axum and Dengelat in central Tigray by Eritrean armed forces as well as the indiscriminate shelling of the towns of Mekelle, Humera, and Adigrat. Last month, the BBC confirmed, using video footage, that Ethiopian troops massacred at least 15 unarmed men near the town of Mahbere Dego. Initial reports said that hundreds of people killed with machetes and knives in Mai-Kadra were victims of ethnic Tigrayan forces. Later, Tigrayan refugees from the town said they were targeted by Ethiopian federal troops and allied regional forces, suggesting that both sides may have committed mass killings along ethnic lines. Government and allied forces have also been implicated in the widespread use of sexual assault — from the gang rape of women and girls to forcing them into sexual slavery — as a weapon of war.
An Ethiopian refugee who fled the Tigray conflict holds her child at the Um Raquba refugee camp in Sudan’s eastern Gedaref state on Dec. 5, 2020.
Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images
Ethiopia’s Council of Ministers recently designated the TPLF as a terrorist organization, scuttling hopes for peace talks.
According to its “journalistic code,” VOA “rejects efforts by foreign and domestic special interest groups to use its radio and TV broadcasts, websites and social media sites as platforms for their own views.” But that is precisely what VOA reporters say is happening. “We hear from our audience. They tell us that they’re switching to the BBC because we’re pushing an Amhara agenda,” an Africa Division reporter said. “I could understand if people criticized VOA for pushing ‘America’s story,’ but we’re pushing a foreign government’s agenda. I feel like it’s the highest crime.”
Seven current Africa Division staffers spoke of bias by VOA Amharic that they said affects the whole Horn of Africa service. Reporters detailed a raft of issues, from parroting government talking points to inserting what one staffer called “pro-government propaganda” in VOA’s language service articles. Most crucially, the Africa Division staffers said, VOA Amharic soft-pedals reports of atrocities by government and allied forces; at the same time, VOA Amharic fails to republish reports of atrocities that VOA Tigrigna manages to get on the air.
Reporting from the Amharic service used Abiy’s preferred terminology, calling the conflict a “law enforcement operation” instead of a “war” in its opening days and referring to the TPLF as a “junta,” several Africa Division staff said. “It was literally a ‘copy and paste’ from government propaganda,” one reporter explained.
Patinkin ran into his own terminology troubles. “It was quite clear to me that this was a war, a civil war, so I used those words in a script, and that was removed,” he told The Intercept. Patinkin, a former nonresident fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, spent five years covering the civil war in South Sudan, where he and this reporter were colleagues and became friends. Informed by his long record of reporting on conflict in the region, he recalled the ways in which language has been used, in South Sudan and other countries, to advance government interests, and began to raise concerns with his superiors. “My journalist’s ‘Spidey sense’ tingled,” he said. “I knew something was wrong.”
A senior journalist with the Africa Division told The Intercept that they were similarly unsettled. “We got directives from our managers on how we should cover the conflict in Tigray. We asked, ‘Why should you issue directives on how we should cover the Ethiopian conflict and not every other conflict in Africa?’ We have covered post-election violence in Kenya, the crisis in Nigeria, and every other conflict on the continent, but there were no directives on how we should go about it,” they explained. “They said not to call it a war but to call it what the Ethiopian government is saying. We said, ‘That’s playing into the hands of the Ethiopian government.’” The complaints went nowhere, said the senior staffer, who asked not to be named due to potential repercussions at VOA. “You don’t want to push back too hard because that’s the hand that feeds you. But I agree with Jason Patinkin. We’re being censored.”
In his resignation email, Patinkin highlighted an English-language report “in December which was critical of PM Abiy and then withdrawn.”
That withdrawn story, a video package by a freelancer titled “Tigray Conflict Tarnishes Ethiopian Prime Minister’s Peacemaker Image,” echoed mainstream coverage by major international news organizations like the Times. It was critical of Abiy, noting that his image had taken a hit due to “alleged war crimes,” and was published briefly before being pulled at the behest of VOA’s Africa Division, according to email messages reviewed by The Intercept. A shadow of the story remains only as a dead link on the VOA website, although the video still exists on YouTube.
After Patinkin raised questions about the story’s withdrawal, Steven Springer, VOA’s news standards and best practices editor, wrote that then-Deputy Africa Division Director Scott Stearns and Negussie Mengesha had judged the report “to be unbalanced,” and vaguely suggested that a single analyst — who offered 33 anodyne words in the video — had engaged in “hate speech” on a social media account. In another email, Stearns wrote that editors would work with the freelancer on revisions. But a separate email reviewed by The Intercept indicates that the story had actually been killed a day earlier because the Africa Division had rejected the piece and there was now “no customer for it” at VOA. Three current staffers told The Intercept that the story was killed because it reflected poorly on Abiy.
A senior editor in the Africa Division told The Intercept that Patinkin’s were the only complaints that the editor had ever heard about biased coverage of Ethiopia, but current and former staffers say that’s impossible. “If management tries to rewrite history and say that they don’t know anything about it, that’s complete bullshit,” said one former staffer who attended a January 21 virtual meeting of the English to Africa Service held via Microsoft Teams that the staffer said was dominated by reporters voicing concerns about the agency’s Ethiopia coverage. Stearns, now acting Africa Division director, and Sonya Green, the chief of VOA’s English to Africa Service, were both at the meeting, according to four attendees.
“Sonya gaslit all of us,” the former staffer said. “She said we were not censored and that there was no bias in our coverage of Ethiopia.”
“The VOA PR office is the correct department to correspond with on official statements,” Green told The Intercept by email. “Please direct your questions to them.”
Ironically, editors selectively use VOA best practices, like an emphasis on providing “balance,” to curtail coverage, shape the narrative, and exhaust reporters, three staffers said. A double standard exists when it comes to pro-government experts and critics. Analysts who espouse anti-Abiy views have been nixed by editors and management, while more controversial experts who espouse anti-Tigrayan, anti-Oromoo sentiments are regularly used by VOA Amharic, Africa Division staffers explained.
Editors also find ways, the staffers said, to delay or even kill stories critical of Abiy’s government and fast-track others that portray it in a positive light. A major scoop about the mass killing of Tigrayan civilians last November was held until it was reported by other outlets, according to four VOA reporters. It was, several staffers said, not an isolated incident. Stories of extrajudicial killings are spiked for being “too small” or “too local.” “It’s all done under the guise of VOA editorial policy, but we all know what’s taking place,” one VOA reporter explained.
Freelancers and staff reporters alike now self-censor and file fluff reports that they know will meet muster, said three Africa Division reporters. “They’re filling the air with garbage,” said one of them. “This is a waste of taxpayers’ money. I’d rather see the service close than operate the way it is. Every day, I ask myself, ‘Am I a part of this mess? Am I allowing this mess?’”
Patinkin specifically cited coverage of the civilian killings as a precipitating factor in his decision to leave VOA, charging in his resignation email “that the Horn Service, under Tizita Belachew, Scott Stearns, and Negussie Mengesha, continues to air pro-government propaganda while ignoring atrocities blamed on pro-government forces.”
Outside experts bolstered these allegations, pointing to stark differences between coverage by VOA Amharic and VOA Tigrigna as well as other international media. Desta Haileselassie Hagos, a postdoctoral research fellow at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, who has been monitoring news coverage of the war in Tigray as part of a project documenting the civilian toll of the conflict, said he noticed a consistent pattern in which VOA Tigrigna aired news of atrocities that never appeared on the Amharic service.
“The Axum massacre was covered by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and big international media including CNN, but it took one month after VOA Tigrigna did the story for VOA Amharic to publish just one article,” Desta said. He also pointed to a number of stories, including a December 31, 2020, report on looting by Ethiopian troops and allied Amhara regional forces and a January 11, 2021, report about the killing of civilians by Ethiopian and Eritrean troops, that were published by VOA Tigrigna but never appeared on VOA Amharic. This bias is unique to VOA among similar broadcasters, Desta said. “BBC is doing a great job compared to VOA,” he told The Intercept. “When the BBC broadcasts news in Tigrigna, they air the same report in Amharic.”
A senior editor in VOA’s Africa Division with personal knowledge of Patinkin’s allegations claimed that Patinkin offered general complaints about bias but never provided specific examples. If he had offered five or more detailed allegations and been ignored, that would constitute negligence and a “big story,” the editor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged.
But Patinkin had hardly been silent about his concerns. On March 23, he sent an email to Steven Springer, a senior editor whose job was to field concerns about VOA standards and issues such as bias in its coverage. The message, which was reviewed by The Intercept, included summaries of 28 VOA stories published between November 13, 2020, and March 19, 2021, followed by bolded critiques about the nature of the reporting and questions of fairness and balance. The synopses, extracted from a “Morning Highlights” email sent daily to members of the Africa Division, were only “some of the most outrageous” examples Patinkin had found, he wrote. The email, amounting to 11 printed pages, ended with a plea: “So what do I do? Leave VOA?… I know that unless there are major changes, it is impossible to hold on to my journalistic integrity while remaining under the current Africa Division leadership who has allowed, and even directed, such abhorrent coverage of this horrific war.” Hours later, Springer acknowledged receipt of the message.
Confronted with this information, the senior editor with personal knowledge of Patinkin’s allegations said that VOA management did not ignore his complaints. The editor suggested that The Intercept frame this part of the article as: “The resolution of Jason’s complaints was not to Jason’s satisfaction.”
That’s something Patinkin and his former bosses agree on. Patinkin says he continued to email Springer almost daily until he resigned, and emails seen by The Intercept show that Patinkin offered a running commentary about gaps in VOA reporting, comparisons of Voice of America coverage with that of other major news outlets, and specific allegations of bias in VOA stories. What action, if any, Springer took is unclear, as he did not agree to speak with The Intercept. “I trust that you received a statement from our Public Relations office,” Springer wrote in an email. “That covers me as well.”
Beyenesh Tekleyohannes cries in her house with a group of relatives in the village of Dengolat, north of Mekele, the capital of Tigray, on Feb. 26, 2021. A report by Amnesty International on Feb. 27, 2021, alleged that Eritrean soldiers fighting in Tigray had killed hundreds of people in November last year in what the rights group described as a likely crime against humanity.
Photo: Eduardo Soteras/AFP via Getty Images
During the last week of April, when Patinkin gave his two weeks’ notice, Mengesha retired.
Mengesha began his journalism career in Ethiopia in 1966. But the circumstances that he and other reporters faced in his native country made the job nearly impossible. There was “no freedom of the press. Imagine, as a journalist, you’re not free to report,” he recalled in a VOA video segment published on World Press Freedom Day in 2019. “I had to flee Ethiopia … because I could not really practice my profession.”
Mengesha immigrated to the United States in 1981, began work at VOA’s Amharic service as a senior editor in 1982, and later became service chief of VOA Amharic and the Africa Division program manager before finally taking the helm as the Africa Division director. In 2018, Mengesha returned to Ethiopia for the first time in more than 35 years. During that trip, he had a one-hour, off-the-record meeting with Abiy. “He’s a very impressive person,” Mengesha said in a televised VOA recap that was light on substance and heavy on praise. “He seems to be quite determined, energetic … very charismatic. A very wonderful person, actually.”
This month marks the first time in almost 40 years that Mengesha isn’t directly shaping coverage of Ethiopia at VOA, but three reporters said that Belachew remains an impediment to unbiased coverage, continuing a tradition of squelching stories that reflect poorly on Abiy’s government.
For example, during an editorial meeting held on January 11, 2021, via Microsoft Teams, a reporter pitched a story about the killing of hundreds of Tigrayan civilians and described interviews with family members of the dead, according to four VOA Africa Division staffers who attended. Once the reporter had finished, then-Amharic editor and now-Horn of Africa Chief Belachew unmuted herself and laughed. All four staffers recalled some variation of: “Ha ha! Is that so?” It has had, one attendee said, a chilling effect on other reporters. “It’s despicable,” said another who was present at the virtual meeting. “It’s a toxic environment. It’s unprofessional. There’s no code of conduct.”
Some worried that Mengesha would continue to control coverage from afar through Belachew and others he installed at VOA. Four Africa Division reporters pointed to a Horn of Africa service coordinator based in Ethiopia who, they said, serves as a gatekeeper for local reporting, weeding out articles submitted by local VOA freelancers that might buck the government line. “He essentially works out of the prime minister’s office in Addis Ababa,” said one VOA staffer. “Reports get sent to him and he decides whether they’ll be forwarded on.”
In his resignation email, Patinkin lamented to acting VOA Director Yolanda López that he couldn’t get a straight answer about his concerns, writing: “first you told me that ‘VOA management…has taken the necessary actions to ensure a balance and unbiased coverage.’ Then you said it’s being looked into, but you couldn’t discuss it because it’s a personnel issue, even though the programming office and standards editor are involved, not HR. Now, you indicate that action will be taken in the future, but staff may not know about it when it happens.”
López’s reply was opaque. “I’m not indicating that action will be taken in the future or has been taken in the past,” she wrote. “I can continue assuring you that we are taking this issue very seriously and doing our due diligence.”
López did not respond to an interview request sent to her VOA email account.
On Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution calling on all parties to the war in Ethiopia to “cease all hostilities, protect human rights, allow unfettered humanitarian access, and cooperate with independent investigations of credible atrocity allegations.”
“It’s ironic to say the least that while the U.S. Congress has passed a resolution aimed at reducing suffering in Tigray, it has also been funding a sustained propaganda effort in support of the parties blamed for most of that suffering,” Patinkin told The Intercept.
Reporters with the Africa Division told The Intercept that they want a full-scale, transparent investigation, real accountability, and tangible action to correct previous biased reporting, as well as safeguards to ensure that it doesn’t continue. “Right now, I feel helpless,” said one of those journalists. “We want a way to speak out without risking our jobs.”
Patinkin joined his former colleagues in a call for immediate action.
“I can’t imagine a more toxic workplace,” he told The Intercept. “VOA needs to be transparent, to issue corrections, and to stop doing the work of an oppressive government. People who allowed and directed the worst breach of journalistic ethics that I’ve ever seen should be held accountable.”
Do you have information about bias at Voice of America? Send tips through encrypted email to nickturseTI@protonmail.com.
In the predawn hours of March 1, 2020, more than 50 Cameroonian soldiers entered the village of Ebam and conducted an atrocity-filled raid that included the rape of at least 20 women, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch. Over three hours, the soldiers systematically broke into 75 homes, looting money and goods, arrested 36 men, and later tortured a number of them. The soldiers also executed one of those men.
This raid appears to be the worse case of mass rape committed by a U.S. ally in Africa in recent years. Over the last decade, the United States aided Cameroon’s security forces to the tune of almost $224 million, according to Security Assistance Monitor, which tracks U.S. security aid and arms sales. Over that same span, U.S. troops trained elite Cameroonian forces and even saw combat alongside them. The U.S. military also built up a network of outposts integral to drone operations in the region.
In the wake of revelations of atrocities by Cameroonian forces in recent years, the U.S. government continued to voice strong support for its military partners there. More recently, however, the U.S. scaled back security assistance due in part to Cameroon’s troubled human rights record. Documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act also show that two U.S. bases in Cameroon may be closed. The documents show that U.S. Africa Command recommended the closure of the outposts in the north of the country — a drone base at Garoua and a separate outpost in Maroua. The documents are vague about the reasons, noting only that the bases were “no longer operationally required” due to a “termination of activities or lack of requirements.”
Ebam, where the 2020 attack took place, lies about 570 miles south of Garoua. The Human Rights Watch report provides graphic evidence from survivors.
“One of them removed my dress and raped me on the ground,” a 45-year-old woman from Ebam told HRW. “He abused me for over 15 minutes. He searched my clothes, took my phone and money, and left.” She was one of 35 people — 20 of them rape survivors — with direct knowledge of the crimes to speak to HRW. There has reportedly been no Cameroonian government investigation, much less accountability, for these atrocities.
“One year on, survivors of the Ebam attack are desperate for justice and reparations, and they live with the disturbing knowledge that those who abused them are walking free and have faced no consequences whatsoever.”
“Sexual violence and torture are heinous crimes that governments have an obligation to immediately, effectively, and independently investigate and to bring those responsible to justice,” said Ida Sawyer, deputy director of HRW’s Africa division. “One year on, survivors of the Ebam attack are desperate for justice and reparations, and they live with the disturbing knowledge that those who abused them are walking free and have faced no consequences whatsoever.”
The Cameroonian government did not respond to questions from HRW about the abuses. The Cameroonian Embassy in Washington, D.C., similarly ignored The Intercept’s repeated requests for comment.
The attack on Ebam occurred in Cameroon’s South-West region, which, like the North-West, has been engulfed in violence since 2017, when armed separatists from the nation’s minority Anglophone regions launched a war for independence.
Four men from Ebam who were arrested by government forces said they were taken to a military base in Besongabang, about five miles from their village, and tortured by soldiers in an effort to force them to admit to supporting the armed separatists. “The military beat us with their hands and other objects,” one of the victims told HRW. “I was hit many times. While they beat us, they accused us of sheltering the Amba boys [separatists]. We had no answers to give about the Amba, so they beat us even more strongly. I had bruises on my back and buttocks for over two weeks and was in pain.”
The testimony echoes a 2017 investigation conducted by The Intercept and the London-based research firm Forensic Architecture which found that a Cameroonian military base known as Salak, which was home to American personnel and drones, was also the scene of illegal imprisonment, brutal torture, and even killings by Cameroonian troops. Nearly 60 victims held there described being subjected to water torture, beaten with electric cables and boards, or tied and suspended with ropes, among other abuses.
Last year, the U.S. Department of State issued a report that chronicled “unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings” by Cameroon’s security forces as well as atrocities by separatists. But the State Department did not respond to questions by The Intercept about the Ebam attack prior to publication.
“We call on the United States, as well as on Cameroon’s other international partners, to express concern about the human rights abuses we documented, including sexual violence, and urge Cameroon’s government to ensure a rights-respecting counterinsurgency strategy in the Anglophone regions,” Ilaria Allegrozzi, the senior Central Africa researcher at HRW said. “As a member of the United Nations Security Council, the U.S. should press to add the situation in the Anglophone regions as a priority item into the agenda of the Security Council so that human rights abuses committed by soldiers and by armed separatists can be addressed and perpetrators held accountable.”
In the predawn hours of March 1, 2020, more than 50 Cameroonian soldiers entered the village of Ebam and conducted an atrocity-filled raid that included the rape of at least 20 women, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch. Over three hours, the soldiers systematically broke into 75 homes, looting money and goods, arrested 36 men, and later tortured a number of them. The soldiers also executed one of those men.
This raid appears to be the worse case of mass rape committed by a U.S. ally in Africa in recent years. Over the last decade, the United States aided Cameroon’s security forces to the tune of almost $224 million, according to Security Assistance Monitor, which tracks U.S. security aid and arms sales. Over that same span, U.S. troops trained elite Cameroonian forces and even saw combat alongside them. The U.S. military also built up a network of outposts integral to drone operations in the region.
In the wake of revelations of atrocities by Cameroonian forces in recent years, the U.S. government continued to voice strong support for its military partners there. More recently, however, the U.S. scaled back security assistance due in part to Cameroon’s troubled human rights record. Documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act also show that two U.S. bases in Cameroon may be closed. The documents show that U.S. Africa Command recommended the closure of the outposts in the north of the country — a drone base at Garoua and a separate outpost in Maroua. The documents are vague about the reasons, noting only that the bases were “no longer operationally required” due to a “termination of activities or lack of requirements.”
Ebam, where the 2020 attack took place, lies about 570 miles south of Garoua. The Human Rights Watch report provides graphic evidence from survivors.
“One of them removed my dress and raped me on the ground,” a 45-year-old woman from Ebam told HRW. “He abused me for over 15 minutes. He searched my clothes, took my phone and money, and left.” She was one of 35 people — 20 of them rape survivors — with direct knowledge of the crimes to speak to HRW. There has reportedly been no Cameroonian government investigation, much less accountability, for these atrocities.
“One year on, survivors of the Ebam attack are desperate for justice and reparations, and they live with the disturbing knowledge that those who abused them are walking free and have faced no consequences whatsoever.”
“Sexual violence and torture are heinous crimes that governments have an obligation to immediately, effectively, and independently investigate and to bring those responsible to justice,” said Ida Sawyer, deputy director of HRW’s Africa division. “One year on, survivors of the Ebam attack are desperate for justice and reparations, and they live with the disturbing knowledge that those who abused them are walking free and have faced no consequences whatsoever.”
The Cameroonian government did not respond to questions from HRW about the abuses. The Cameroonian Embassy in Washington, D.C., similarly ignored The Intercept’s repeated requests for comment.
The attack on Ebam occurred in Cameroon’s South-West region, which, like the North-West, has been engulfed in violence since 2017, when armed separatists from the nation’s minority Anglophone regions launched a war for independence.
Four men from Ebam who were arrested by government forces said they were taken to a military base in Besongabang, about five miles from their village, and tortured by soldiers in an effort to force them to admit to supporting the armed separatists. “The military beat us with their hands and other objects,” one of the victims told HRW. “I was hit many times. While they beat us, they accused us of sheltering the Amba boys [separatists]. We had no answers to give about the Amba, so they beat us even more strongly. I had bruises on my back and buttocks for over two weeks and was in pain.”
The testimony echoes a 2017 investigation conducted by The Intercept and the London-based research firm Forensic Architecture which found that a Cameroonian military base known as Salak, which was home to American personnel and drones, was also the scene of illegal imprisonment, brutal torture, and even killings by Cameroonian troops. Nearly 60 victims held there described being subjected to water torture, beaten with electric cables and boards, or tied and suspended with ropes, among other abuses.
Last year, the U.S. Department of State issued a report that chronicled “unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings” by Cameroon’s security forces as well as atrocities by separatists. But the State Department did not respond to questions by The Intercept about the Ebam attack prior to publication.
“We call on the United States, as well as on Cameroon’s other international partners, to express concern about the human rights abuses we documented, including sexual violence, and urge Cameroon’s government to ensure a rights-respecting counterinsurgency strategy in the Anglophone regions,” Ilaria Allegrozzi, the senior Central Africa researcher at HRW said. “As a member of the United Nations Security Council, the U.S. should press to add the situation in the Anglophone regions as a priority item into the agenda of the Security Council so that human rights abuses committed by soldiers and by armed separatists can be addressed and perpetrators held accountable.”
“This is a different kind of war, which we will wage aggressively and methodically to disrupt and destroy terrorist activity,” President George W. Bush announced a little more than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks. “Some victories will be won outside of public view, in tragedies avoided and threats eliminated. Other victories will be clear to all.”
This year will mark the 20th anniversary of the war on terror, including America’s undeclared conflict in Afghanistan. After that war’s original moniker, Operation Infinite Justice, was nixed for offending Muslim sensibilities, the Pentagon rebranded it Operation Enduring Freedom. Despite neither a clear victory, nor the slightest evidence that enduring freedom had ever been imposed on that country, “U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan ended,” according to the Defense Department, in 2014. In reality, that combat simply continued under a new name, Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, and grinds on to this very day.
Like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, known as Operation Iraqi Freedom, Enduring Freedom and Freedom’s Sentinel failed to live up to their names. Nor did any of the monikers slapped on America’s post-9/11 wars ever catch the public imagination; the battlefields spread from Afghanistan and Iraq to Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, Syria, Niger, Burkina Faso, and beyond — at a price tag north of $6.4 trillionand a human toll that includes at least 335,000 civilians killed and at least 37 milliondisplaced from their homes. Meanwhile, those long promised clear victories never materialized even as the number of terrorist groups around the world proliferated.
Last month, America’s top general offered an assessment of the Afghan War that was as apt as it was bleak. “We believe that after two decades of consistent effort, we’ve achieved a modicum of success,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley. “I would also argue over the last five to seven years at a minimum, we have been in a condition of strategic stalemate.” Milley’s soundbites provided appellations far more apt than those the Pentagon dreamt up over the years. Had the Defense Department opened the post-9/11 wars with names like Operation Modicum of Success or Operation Strategic Stalemate, Americans would at least have had a realistic idea of what to expect in the ensuing decades as three presidents waged undeclared wars without achieving victories anywhere across the Greater Middle East or Africa.
What the future will bring in terms of this country’s many armed conflicts is murkier than ever as the Trump administration pursues an array of 11th-hour efforts interpreted as last-minute attempts to make good on pledges to end this country’s “endless wars” or simply as sour-grapes shots at upending, undermining, and sabotaging the “deep state” (the CIA in particular), while handcuffing or kneecappingthe incoming Biden administration’s future foreign policy. As it happens, however, President Trump’s flailing final gambits, while by no means ending America’s wars, provide the Biden administration with a unique opportunity to put those conflicts in the history books, should the president-elect choose to take advantage of the inadvertent gift his predecessor provided.
The Third President Not to End the War on Terror
For four years, the Trump administration has waged a multifront war, not only in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and elsewhere around the globe, but with the Pentagon as well. Donald Trump entered the White House vowing to stop America’s ceaseless foreign interventions and repeatedly teased ending those “endless wars.” He didn’t. Instead, he and his administration continued to wage America’s many conflicts, surged troops into Afghanistan and Syria, and threatened nuclear strikes against enemies and allies alike.
When the president finally began making halting gestures toward curtailing the country’s endless conflicts and attempted to draw down troops in various war zones, the Pentagon and State Department slow walked, slow rolled, and stymied their commander-in-chief, deceiving him, for example, when it came to something as basic as the actual number of U.S. troops in Syria. Even after striking a 2020 deal with the Taliban to settle the Afghan War and ordering significant troop withdrawals from that country and others as he became a lame-duck president, he failed to halt a single armed intervention that he had inherited.
Far from ending endless wars, President Trump escalated the most endless of them: the conflicts in Afghanistan and Somalia where America has been intermittently involved since the 1970s and 1990s, respectively. Air strikes in Somalia have, for instance, skyrocketed under the Trump administration. From 2007 to 2017, the U.S. military conducted 42 declared air attacks in that country. Under President Trump, 37 strikes were conducted in 2017, 48 in 2018, and 63 in 2019. Last year, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) acknowledged 53 air strikes in Somalia, more than during the 16 years of the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
The reasons for that increase remain shrouded in secrecy. In March 2017, however, President Trump reportedly designated parts of Somalia as “areas of active hostilities,” while removing Obama-era rules requiring that there be near certainty that airstrikes will not injure or kill noncombatants. Although the White House refuses to explicitly confirm or deny that this ever happened, retired Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who headed Special Operations Command Africa at the time, told the Intercept that the “burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically.” That change, he noted, led AFRICOM to conduct strikes that previously would not have been carried out.
The uptick in airstrikes has been disastrous for civilians. While Africa Command recently acknowledged five deaths of noncombatants in Somalia from all such airstrikes, an investigation by Amnesty International found that, in just nine of them, 21 civilians were killed and 11 others injured. According to the U.K.-based monitoring group Airwars, evidence suggests that as many as 13 Somali civilians have been killed by U.S. strikes in 2020 alone, and Trump’s recent decision to withdraw U.S. forces from there will not end those air attacks, much less America’s war, according to the Pentagon. “While a change in force posture, this action is not a change in U.S. policy,” reads a Defense Department statement that followed Trump’s withdrawal order. “The U.S. will retain the capability to conduct targeted counterterrorism operations in Somalia and collect early warnings and indicators regarding threats to the homeland.”
The war in Afghanistan has followed a similar trajectory under President Trump. Far from deescalating the conflict as it negotiated a peace deal with the Taliban and pursued troop drawdowns, the administration ramped up the war on multiple fronts, initially deploying more troops and increasing its use of U.S. air power. As in Somalia, civilians suffered mightily, according to a recent report by Neta Crawford of Brown University’s Costs of War project.
During its first year in office, the Trump administration relaxed the rules of engagement and escalated the air war in an effort to gain leverage at the bargaining table. “From 2017 through 2019, civilian deaths due to U.S. and allied forces’ air strikes in Afghanistan dramatically increased,” wrote Crawford. “In 2019, airstrikes killed 700 civilians — more civilians than in any other year since the beginning of the war in 2001 and 2002.” After the U.S. and the Taliban reached a tentative peace agreement last February, U.S. air strikes declined, but never completely ceased. As recently as last month, the U.S. reportedly conducted one in Afghanistan that resulted in civilian casualties.
As those civilian deaths from air power were spiking, an elite CIA-trained Afghan paramilitary unit known as 01, in partnership with U.S. Special Operations forces, was involved in what Andrew Quilty, writing at the Intercept, termed “a campaign of terror against civilians,” including a “string of massacres, executions, mutilation, forced disappearances, attacks on medical facilities, and air strikes targeting structures known to house civilians.” In all, the unit killed at least 51 civilians in Afghanistan’s Wardak province between December 2018 and December 2019. As Akhtar Mohammad Tahiri, the head of Wardak’s provincial council, told Quilty, the Americans “step on all the rules of war, human rights, all the things they said they’d bring to Afghanistan.” They are, he said, “conducting themselves as terrorists. They show terror and violence and think they’ll bring control this way.”
President Biden’s Choice
“We are not a people of perpetual war — it is the antithesis of everything for which we stand and for which our ancestors fought,” Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller wrote as part of a two-page memo to Defense Department employees last November, adding, “All wars must end.” His predecessor, Mark Esper, was reportedly fired, at least in part, for resisting President Trump’s efforts to remove troops from Afghanistan. Yet neither Miller nor Trump turned out to be committed to actually ending America’s wars.
After losing his bid for reelection in November, the president did issue a series of orders drawing down some troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Virtually all military personnel are to be withdrawn from Somalia. There, however, according tothe Pentagon, some or all of those forces will simply be “repositioned from Somalia into neighboring countries in order to allow cross-border operations,” not to speak of continuing “targeted counterterrorism operations” in that country. This suggests that the long-running U.S. air war will continue uninterrupted.
The same goes for the other war zones where American troops are slated to remain and no cessation of air strikes has been announced. “You’re still going to have the ability to do the missions that we’ve been doing,” a senior Pentagon official said last month regarding Afghanistan. Miller echoed this during a recent trip to that country when he said: “I especially want to see and hear the plan for our continued air support role.” Ironically enough, Miller’s all-wars-must-end November memo actually championed a forever-war mindset by insisting on the necessity of “finishing the war that al-Qaida brought to our shores in 2001.”
In classic the-U.S.-has-finally-turned-the-corner fashion, Miller asserted that America is “on the verge of defeating al-Qaida and its associates” and “must avoid our past strategic error of failing to see the fight through to the finish.” To anyone who might have thought he was signaling that the war on terror was coming to a close, Miller offered a message that couldn’t have been more succinct: “This war isn’t over.”
At the same time, Miller and several other post-election Trump political appointees, including his chief of staff Kash Patel and Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Ezra Cohen-Watnick, have sought to make significant last-minute policy changes at the Pentagon, rankling members of the national security establishment. Last month, for example, Trump administration officials delivered to the Joint Chiefs of Staff a proposal to decouple the leadership of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command. Miller also sent a letter to CIA Director Gina Haspelinforming her that a longstanding arrangement in which the Pentagon offered support to the Agency is in jeopardy.
News reports indicated that the Department of Defense is reviewing its support for the CIA. The reason, former and current administration and military officials told Defense One, was to determine whether Special Operations forces should be diverted from the Agency’s counterterrorism operations to missions “related to competition with Russia and China.” The New York Times suggested, however, that the true purpose could be to “make it difficult” for the CIA to conduct operations in Afghanistan.
The troop drawdowns and eleventh-hour policy changes have been cast by pundits and national security establishment boosters as the spiteful final acts of a lame-duck president. Whatever they may be, they also represent a genuine opportunity for a president-elect who has voiced support for a shift in national security policy. “Biden will end the forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, which have cost us untold blood and treasure” reads the plan for “Leading the Democratic World” at JoeBiden.com. There, too, in the fine print, however, lurk a set of Miller-esque fight-to-the-finish loopholes, as the italicized words in this sentence suggest: “Biden will bring the vast majority of our troops home from Afghanistan and narrowlyfocus our mission on al-Qaeda and ISIS.”
Under an agreement the Trump administration struck with Taliban negotiators last year, the United States promised to remove all remaining troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, if that group upholds its commitments. Were the Biden team to take advantage of both the Trump administration’s withdrawal pact and its last-ditch effort to handcuff the CIA, a significant part of the American war there would simply expire later this spring. While this would undoubtedly elicit anguished howls from supporters of that failed war, President Biden could defer to Congress’s constitutionally assigned war powers, leaving it to the legislative branch to either declare war in that country after all these years or simply allow the conflict to end.
He could also use the bully pulpit of the presidency to call for sunsetting the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, a 60-word resolution passed by Congress three days after the September 11th attacks, which has been used to justify 20 years of war against groups like the Islamic State that didn’t even exist on 9/11. He could do the same with the 2002 Iraq Authorization for Use of Military Force, which authorized the war against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, but was nonetheless cited last year in the Trump administration’s justification for the drone assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Suleimani.
Almost two decades after President George W. Bush launched “a different kind of war”; more than a decade after President Barack Obama entered the White House promising to avoid “stupid wars” (while promising to win the “right war” in Afghanistan); six months after President Trump committed to “ending the era of endless wars,” President-elect Biden enters the White House with an opportunity to begin to make good on his own pledge to “end the forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East.”
As President Bush put it in 2001: “Some victories will be won outside of public view, in tragedies avoided and threats eliminated.” America’s twenty-first-century wars have, instead, been tragedies for millions and have led to a proliferation of threats that damaged the United States in fundamental ways. President-elect Biden has recognized this, noting that “staying entrenched in unwinnable conflicts only drains our capacity to lead on other issues that require our attention, and it prevents us from rebuilding the other instruments of American power.”
Failed forever wars are, however, also a Joe Biden legacy. As a senator, he voted for that 2001 AUMF, the 2002 AUMF, and then seconded a president who expanded America’s overseas interventions — and nothing in his personal history suggests that he will take the bold actions necessary to follow through on putting an end to America’s overseas conflicts. “It’s long past time we end the forever wars,” he announced in 2019. As it happens, on entering the Oval Office he will be faced with a monumental choice: to be either the first U.S. president of this century not to double down on doomed overseas conflicts or the fourth to find failure in wars that can never be won.
