Obama’s War Crimes in Afghanistan—A Simple and Quick Reminder

March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

 

On 9/11, in 2001, the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon came under attack. The U.S., under George W. Bush, attacked Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, and then invaded and occupied the country. After declaring “victory” in 2004, Bush was forced to steadily increase troop levels as the overthrown Taliban grew stronger partly due to the brutal, oppressive nature of the U.S. occupation.

It was Barack Obama, who had encouraged people to delude themselves into thinking he was a peace candidate, who carried out one of the biggest and bloodiest escalation of the entire Afghan war. Starting in 2009 Obama tripled troop levels from 30,000 to 100,000, and implemented a new strategy to defeat Al Qaeda,¹ reverse the Taliban’s momentum, and build up the oppressive Afghan government, particularly its military forces. The heart of this new strategy was a brutal “counterinsurgency” campaign aimed at holding key areas and killing more Taliban: it included stepped-up bombings, drone strikes, nighttime raids, assassinations, and detentions.

Under Obama, U.S. air attacks skyrocketed. In his first five years, the U.S. dropped 21,000 bombs and missiles—six and a half times the number dropped in Bush’s last five years.² Obama convinced many that U.S. air strikes were “exceptionally surgical and precise.”³ In reality, some of the war’s worst atrocities and war crimes took place under his command. Between 2009 and 2014, over 1,000 civilians were killed by U.S. air strikes,⁴ which obliterated homes, wedding parties, and villages, and thousands more in ground assaults and targeted assassinations:⁵

• In May 2009, between 26 and 140 Afghan civilians, mainly women and children, “perished in the blink of an eye,” in the villages of Shiwan and Granai, in western Afghanistan when their homes were destroyed by U.S. bombs.⁶
• In February 2010, U.S. Special Operations Forces murdered five Afghan civilians celebrating a birth in the village of Gardez, then tried to cover up their crimes by removing the bullets from the dead bodies.⁷
• In October 2015, the U.S. destroyed a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 19, and wounding dozens of patients and staff.⁸

Under Obama, U.S. forces and their Afghan clients stepped up dead-of-night house searches and detentions in the U.S.’s network of more than 36, often secret, prisons and detention centers, which terrorized whole swaths of the population. Since the war began at least 15,000 Afghans have been detained on little or no evidence, brutally beaten, tortured, and sometimes killed.⁹

After Obama withdrew most U.S. ground forces in 2014 and bragged about ending the war, he continued U.S. drone and air attacks, with U.S. forces dropping 1,337 bombs, missiles and other munitions in 2016 alone—a 40 percent increase over 2015,¹⁰ and forged a strategy of drone warfare in Afghanistan that reduced the risk of U.S. casualties but still led to murderous “collateral damage,” i.e., assassinations of civilians not linked to any “terrorist” related activity, a broad catchall categorization to include any and all of the U.S.’s enemies at any given time—between 65 and 105 deaths in 2016 alone.¹¹

“Turns out I’m really good at killing people,” Obama bragged in a cold-blooded moment of candor. “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”¹²

The U.S. promised to improve life for the Afghan people, but over half Afghanistan’s 35 million people remain impoverished, a quarter of them severely, constantly facing hunger. Chronic malnutrition has stunted the growth of a staggering 60 percent of Afghanistan’s children under five. Over 98 percent of the working population makes less than $3.10 a day.¹³

For all their bombings, killings, torture, and atrocities, the U.S. and its allies were never able to defeat the Taliban (which was aided by Pakistan¹⁴) or get control of Afghanistan. Instead, their war crimes and imperialist occupation fueled the growth of the oppressive Islamist forces they were fighting. At this writing, the U.S. is negotiating with the Taliban for an end to the war, a negotiation which could well return the Taliban to power. This is a stark illustration of how imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism are both reactionary forces, which reinforce each other, even as they clash.¹⁵

In this situation, Barack Obama played a key role in continuing—and legitimizing among a wide swath of the U.S. population—the overall U.S. “war on terror” even as U.S. rulers felt compelled to scale back some of their grandest ambitions. Obama continued and escalated the war in Afghanistan in order to attempt to preserve U.S. global credibility, defeat the Taliban, and maintain U.S. imperialist dominance in the Middle East and Central Asia. He returned U.S. forces to Iraq when ISIS emerged as a major force, and he greatly expanded the number and breadth of the overall U.S. drone war across the region—launching 10 times as many strikes on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia as Bush had.¹⁶ And he did all this while claiming the U.S. was winding down its wars, and that the actions it was taking were surgically targeted against enemy forces.

Obama is nothing less than a war criminal, and far too many liberals continue to delude themselves and engage in willful denial.

 

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1. Al Qaeda is the reactionary Islamic jihadist organization founded by Osama bin Laden, which has had camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. [back]

2. “War-related Death, Injury, and Displacement in Afghanistan and Pakistan 2001-2014,” Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, May 22, 2015 [back]

3. “Obama’s covert drone war in numbers: ten times more strikes than Bush,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 17, 2017 [back]

4. According to a 2016 article in the Atlantic magazine, “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent… this counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths… The absurdly low figures cited by Obama administration figures were lies.” “Obama's Weak Defense of His Record on Drone Killings,” Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, December 23, 2016. [back]

5. “War-related Death, Injury, and Displacement in Afghanistan and Pakistan 2001-2014,” Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, May 22, 2015 [back]

6. Bob Dreyfuss, “Mass-Casualty Attacks in the Afghan War,” The Nation, September 19, 2013; “Afghanistan: The MASSACRE and The LIES,” revcom.us, May 17, 2009 [back]

7. Larry Everest, “Made in America: The Gardez Massacre,” revcom.us, April 4, 2010 [back]

8. “Massacre at Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan-U.S. Bombs Send a Bloody Message to the World,” revcom.us, October 3, 2015. See also, “The Massacre in Kandahar, Afghanistan And the Terror of U.S. Occupation,” revcom.us, April 1, 2012 [back]

9. “Pentagon Seeks to Overhaul Prisons in Afghanistan,” New York Times, July 19, 2009. There have been widespread reports that U.S. forces tortured and abused hundreds of detainees at firebases or other installations, and that the CIA has operated secret detention centers holding “ghost prisoners” (detainees who are not given any legal rights or access to counsel and who are likely not reported or seen by the International Red Cross). [back]

10. Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars – The World Is A Battlefield (Nation Books 2013), pp. 328-330. Obama began to slowly withdraw most U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2011 claiming the U.S. was meeting its goals. In December 2014, the U.S. formally ended combat operations, but continues to carry out air and drone attacks and engage in combat along with Afghan security forces. “War-related Death, Injury, and Displacement in Afghanistan and Pakistan 2001-2014,” Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, May 22, 2015 [back]

11. “Obama’s covert drone war in numbers: ten times more strikes than Bush,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 17, 2017. Because of the U.S.'s misleading categorizations and disinformation, independent observers have had difficulty determining exact estimates of collateral deaths. We are in the midst of sorting through such estimates and will keep readers posted. [back]

12. Micah Zenko, “Obama’s Final Drone Strike Data,” Blog Post, Council on Foreign Relations, January 20, 2017 [back]

13. United Nations Human Development Report, 2018: Country Profiles, Composite Index; “10 Facts About Hunger In Afghanistan,” United Nations World Food Programme, November 2015 [back]

14. See, Steve Coll, Directorate S – The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Penguin Press 2018): starting around 2005, Directorate S went back into action, this time not to defeat the Soviets, but to undermine the American project in Afghanistan. [back]

15. See, “Under Peace Plan, U.S. Military Would Exit Afghanistan Within Five Years,” New York Times, February 28, 2019; “700 Afghan Women Have a Message: Don’t Sell Us Out to the Taliban,” New York Times, February 28, 2019 [back]

16. “Obama’s covert drone war in numbers: ten times more strikes than Bush,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 17, 2017 [back]