{"id":131993,"date":"2021-04-22T08:58:27","date_gmt":"2021-04-22T08:58:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=189345"},"modified":"2021-04-22T08:58:27","modified_gmt":"2021-04-22T08:58:27","slug":"bidens-drone-wars-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/04\/22\/bidens-drone-wars-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden\u2019s Drone Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Photograph Source: CasparGirl \u2013 CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

On Thursday, April 15, the New York Times<\/em> posted an article<\/a> headed, \u201cHow the U.S. Plans to Fight From Afar After Troops Exit Afghanistan,\u201d just in case anyone misunderstood the previous day\u2019s headline<\/a>, \u201cBiden, Setting Afghanistan Withdrawal, Says \u2018It Is Time to End the Forever War\u2019\u201d as indicating the U.S. war in Afghanistan might actually come to an end on September 11, 2021, almost 20 years after it started.<\/p>\n

We saw this bait and switch tactic before in President Biden\u2019s earlier announcement about ending U.S support for the long, miserable war in Yemen. In his first major foreign policy address, on February 4, President Biden announced<\/a> \u201cwe are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen,\u201d the war waged by Saudi Arabia and its allies since 2015, the war he called \u201ca humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.\u201d Biden declared \u201cThis war has to end.\u201d<\/p>\n

As with last week\u2019s announcement that the U.S. war in Afghanistan would end, \u201cclarification\u201d came the following day. On February 5th<\/sup>, the Biden administration dispelled the impression that the U.S. was getting out of the business of killing Yemenis completely and the State Department issued a statement,<\/a> saying \u201cImportantly, this does not apply to offensive operations against either ISIS or AQAP.\u201d In other words, whatever happens in regard to the war waged by the Saudis, the war that the U.S. has been waging in Yemen since 2002, under the guise of the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by congress authorizing the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against those responsible for the September 11 attacks, will continue indefinitely, despite the fact that neither ISIS nor Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula existed in 2001. These other <\/strong>\u201coffensive operations\u201d by the U.S. that will continue unabated in Yemen include drone strikes, cruise missile attacks and special forces raids.<\/p>\n

While what President Biden actually said regarding the war in Afghanistan last week was \u201cWe will not take our eye off the terrorist threat,\u201d and \u201cWe will reorganize our counterterrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the region to prevent re-emergence of terrorist threat to our homeland,\u201d the New York Times<\/em> could not be far off as they interpreted those words to mean, \u201cDrones, long-range bombers and spy networks will be used in an effort to prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist base to threaten the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

It appears from his statements and actions regarding the war in Yemen in February and regarding the war in Afghanistan in April, that Biden is not so much concerned with ending the \u201cforever wars\u201d as he is with handing these wars over to drones armed with 500 pound bombs and Hellfire missiles operated by remote control from thousands of miles away.<\/p>\n

In 2013, when President Obama promoted drone wars claiming that \u201cby narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life\u201d it was already known that this was not true. By far, most victims of drone attacks are civilians, few are combatants by any definition and even those targeted as suspected terrorists are victims of assassination and extrajudicial executions.<\/p>\n

The validity of Biden\u2019s claim that U.S. \u201ccounter terrorism capabilities\u201d such as drones and special forces can effectively \u201cprevent re-emergence of terrorist threat to our homeland\u201d is taken for granted by the New York Times<\/em>\u2013 \u201cDrones, long-range bombers and spy networks will be used in an effort to prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist base to threaten the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the Ban Killer Drones<\/em><\/a> \u201cinternational grassroots campaign working to ban aerial weaponized drones and military and police drone surveillance,\u201d was launched on April 9, I was asked in an interview if there is anyone in the government, military, diplomatic or intelligence communities who supports our position that drones are no deterrent to terrorism. I do not think that there is, but there are many people formerly holding those positions who agree with us. One example of many is retired General Michael Flynn,<\/a> who was President Obama\u2019s top military intelligence officer before he joined the Trump administration (and was subsequently convicted and pardoned). He said in 2015, \u201cWhen you drop a bomb from a drone\u2026 you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good,\u201d and \u201cThe more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just\u2026 fuels the conflict.\u201d Internal CIA documents published by WikiLeaks document that the agency had similar doubts about its own drone program- \u201cThe potential negative effect of HVT (high value targets) operations,\u201d the report<\/a> states, \u201cinclude increasing the level of insurgent support [\u2026], strengthening an armed group\u2019s bonds with the population, radicalizing an insurgent group\u2019s remaining leaders, creating a vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or de-escalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking of the effect of drone attacks in Yemen, the young Yemeni writer Ibrahim Mothana told Congress<\/a> in 2013, \u201cDrone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants.\u201d The drone wars the Biden administration seems hell bent on expanding clearly damage and set back security and stability in the countries being attacked and increase the danger of attacks on Americans at home and abroad.<\/p>\n

Long ago, both George Orwell and President Eisenhower foresaw today\u2019s \u201cforever wars\u201d and warned of nations\u2019 industries, economies and politics becoming so dependent on the production and consumption of armaments that wars would no longer be fought with an intention of winning them but to ensure that they never end, that they are continuous. Whatever his intentions, Joe Biden\u2019s calls for peace, in Afghanistan as in Yemen, while pursuing war by drone, ring hollow.<\/p>\n

For a politician, \u201cwar by drone\u201d has obvious advantages to waging war by ordering \u201cboots on the ground.\u201d \u201cThey do keep the body bag count down,\u201d writes Conn Hallinan in his essay, Day of the Drone<\/a>, \u201cbut that raises an uncomfortable moral dilemma: If war doesn\u2019t produce casualties, except among the targeted, isn\u2019t it more tempting to fight them? Drone pilots in their air-conditioned trailers in southern Nevada will never go down with their aircraft, but the people on the receiving end will eventually figure out some way to strike back. As the attack on the World Trade towers and recent terrorist attacks in France demonstrate, that is not all that hard to do, and it is almost inevitable that the targets will be civilians. Bloodless war is a dangerous illusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

The war is never the way to peace, the war always comes home. With the exception of four known \u201cfriendly fire\u201d casualties, every one of the many thousands of drone attack victims has been a person of color and drones are becoming another military weapon passed on from war zones to urban police departments. Technical advances and proliferation of drones as a cheaper, more politically safe way for many countries to make war on their neighbors or across the globe make forever wars more intractable.<\/p>\n

Talk of peace in Afghanistan, Yemen, the streets of the U.S., is not coherent while waging wars with drones. We must urgently demand a ban on the production, trade and use of weaponized drones and an end to military and police drone surveillance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photograph Source: CasparGirl \u2013 CC BY 2.0 On Thursday, April 15, the New York Times posted an article headed, \u201cHow the U.S. Plans to Fight From Afar After\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2068,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131993"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2068"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131993"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131994,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131993\/revisions\/131994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}