It’s also unrealistic to assume that America’s shadow wars in Africa, which increased heavily under both Obama and Trump, will decrease. In Afghanistan, for example, Biden might continue outgoing President Donald Trump’s withdrawal plans, but it is hard to imagine that clandestine forces and Predators will stop operating and killing people there. Compared to the Bush era, drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen increased tenfold under Obama, while his “kill list,” which he personally signed off on each “Terror Tuesday,” became notorious.Īs a former member of Obama’s administration, President-elect Joe Biden might be keen to carry on the drone program, in a manner not too different from that of his onetime boss. Bush’s controversial counterterrorism doctrine. Yet in his memoir Obama ignores these facts while praising “more targeted, nontraditional warfare” and, “unlike some on the left,” as he writes, embracing parts of his predecessor George W. It’s a similar story with other figures like Ayman al-Zawahiri of al Qaeda or Jalaluddin Haqqani of the Taliban. military base in southern Afghanistan, with the rest of the world only finding out two years later. Many years later, in 2013, he died of natural causes not too far from a U.S. history in late 2001, was never killed by any of the Predators and Reapers that hunted him. Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, the target of the very first drone strike in U.S. Contrary to the imagination of Obama and many other politicians and military officials, drones are not precise weapons that only kill arbitrarily defined “bad guys.” In fact, the vast majority of designated terrorists, like al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, were not killed. Leading human rights organizations from all over the world regularly criticized the effects of drone strikes and the massive civilian casualties they caused. Obama’s self-righteous words do not reflect on-the-ground realities. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead,” Obama wrote. Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them-send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. “They were dangerous, these young men, often deliberately and casually cruel. president prefers to defend and whitewash his drone campaign by solely describing those killed as “dangerous.” In Obama’s recently published memoir, A Promised Land, even readers who search extensively will be hard-pressed to find any mention of innocent victims or feelings of remorse. Momina Bibi, a grandmother torn to pieces by Obama’s drones in her backyard in front of her grandchildren, was another such case. Tariq Aziz, a 16-year-old anti-drone activist from North Waziristan who was killed while driving a car, was one. The cases of Obama’s many innocent victims remain unknown. In 2014, the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that less than 4 percent of all identified drone victims in Pakistan were actually militants affiliated with al Qaeda. In Pakistan’s tribal areas, adjacent to the porous border with Afghanistan, most drone strikes did not kill militants. In 2015, the United Nations reported that Obama’s drones had killed more civilians in Yemen that year than al Qaeda did. In most of these countries, Obama’s drone wars fueled more extremism, militancy, and anti-American sentiment. President Barack Obama also expanded clandestine wars in countries where the United States was not officially at war, such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Under the Obama administration, Afghanistan became the world’s most drone-bombed country. Most of the drones, however, did not kill the insurgents, but civilians: farmers, merchants, miners, or-most disturbingly-children. Like many other rural parts of Afghanistan, Aluzai’s home district was controlled by the Taliban. They are traumatized-we all are,” he added. They know when to play outside and when not. “They can distinguish between drones, helicopters, and fighter jets. Even most of his bones were gone,” Aluzai recalled.Īluzai introduced some of the village children around him and added that all of them knew the sound of Predator drones. drone strike in 2013 while on his way to sell watermelons in Afghanistan’s Wardak province, near Kabul. Aluzai described how his brother, Kareem, was killed in a U.S. In 2017, I met Kabir Aluzai, a tall man with big hands and facial features that reminded me of the late Sean Connery.
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