Jeremy Scahill talking:
Djibouti is one of the tiniest countries in the world, and it’s positioned conveniently for U.S. counterterrorism operations next to Somalia, and it’s sort of a stone’s throw across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen. And the U.S. started using this toward the end of the Bush administration, Camp Lemmonier, which is a former French army outpost. And they basically built that up as the epicenter of these emerging twilight wars or covert wars in Somalia and Yemen, and it’s just grown and grown and grown over the years.
And what the documents show is that JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, had a really impressive cache of firepower there. They had drones, they had medium fixed-wing aircraft. They also had eight F-15s, which can drop these massive 5,000-pound bunker buster bombs. And then they had other operatives, commandos positioned throughout that region. They have a base in Kenya called Manda Bay, where actually some of the SEALs that did the rescue operation of Captain Phillips were based. They’ve also done interdictions into Somalia.
One of the slides just shows where they have all of these drone bases, including in Ethiopia and elsewhere. Nick Turse did a great piece for us that people should look at, where he maps out sort of the spread of all these new bases on the African continent. You know, this is a sort of undertold story, that the U.S. is quietly just sort of spreading its footprint around Africa with a focus on drone technology. And so, Djibouti has been the main hub for striking Yemen and striking Somalia. And that’s—
These are places where the U.S. has not declared war. this is a big issue of contention, in that it’s—you know, does the Authorization for the Use of Military Force give them the right to go after people who were toddlers on 9/11, you know, if you have some of these younger people in militant groups? And there’s a debate about that right now. And that’s why the president is trying to put it back on Congress and say, “OK, you guys decide then.”
the longest war in American history has been indefinitely extended. As we reported earlier, on Thursday, President Obama reversed plans to withdraw most U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the time he leaves office. Instead, the current deployment of 9,800 soldiers will remain through 2016. When Obama’s term ends in 2017, the U.S. will keep at least 5,500 troops at four bases across Afghanistan.
But after 14 years of war, the Taliban now holds more of Afghanistan than at any point since the 2001 U.S. invasion. Some estimates put them in control of half the country. The Islamic State has also emerged in Afghanistan with a presence that grows by the day. Addressing the American people, Obama said while he does not favor endless war, it’s in the U.S.’s national security interest to stay in Afghanistan.
One of the most controversial U.S. attacks in the war’s 14 years came just this month, when the U.S. bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, killing at least 22 people. Another more than 30 are missing. On Thursday, the Associated Press reported U.S. forces were monitoring the hospital for alleged Taliban activity before the bombing and knew it was a medical facility. The intelligence included maps of the region with a circle drawn around the hospital. Thursday marked the second time this year Obama has delayed an Afghan withdrawal, and assures that despite previous pledges, the war will continue under his successor.
Ryan Devereaux talking:
I looked at this special operations campaign that lasted from 2011 to 2013, and all the statistics that you cited were accurate. And what’s interesting about this campaign is it’s really emblematic in a lot of ways, both of what the administration has sort of outlined in their plan in terms of how to deal with Afghanistan going forward and sort of the experience of the United States in Afghanistan and Afghan experience of the United States in Afghanistan throughout the course of this war.
So, this campaign was aimed at taking out specific people—right?—and using airstrikes, particularly drone strikes, to take them out. And what the documents show is the sort of breakdown of who some of these targets were. And while there are sort of al-Qaeda-affiliated guys and Taliban-affiliated guys in there, there are also local forces guys who took up arms after the United States arrived in 2002 in their province, you know, who for decades had resisted the presence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in their province, who took up arms after the United States partnered with local power brokers who would point to their business rivals and say, “Hey, this guy’s a Talib, this guy’s al-Qaeda,” and then the United States would bomb those guys, and then all of a sudden you have an insurgency in these provinces. So this is a—it’s a campaign that really reveals the story of the war in Afghanistan.
And what it breaks down is how these operations, which aim to sort of decapitate these groups, you know, even when they have the best sort of intelligence assets that they need—this campaign, they actually had informants on the ground, they actually had the whole area sort of mapped with signals intelligence—the results were still pretty terrible. They had marginal disruption of al-Qaeda and Taliban presence in the area, and now, in 2015, a recent report found that al-Qaeda’s presence in of one of the valleys that this campaign focused on specifically is greater than it was in 2002.
So, we’re talking about—these are the sort of operations that are going to continue as the Obama administration continues to fight this war. We know that airstrikes, in particular, the kind of—the kind of things that are detailed in these documents are going to be the sort of tip of the spear in what the United States does in Afghanistan. We know that there has been a rise in civilian casualties resulting from airstrikes in Afghanistan. We know that a number of those airstrikes are airstrikes that are carried out by drones. We know that in 2013, research—a report found—a report that was contracted by the U.S. military found that drone strikes in Afghanistan were 10 times more dangerous to civilian populations. I mean, the story of this campaign is the story of the United States’ experience in Afghanistan. And it’s the story of what the war will look like going forward.
Because without really understanding where you are, without understanding—the story of the province of Kunar, specifically, where a lot of these operations took place, is the story of the United States finding itself in a place that it didn’t understand and being sort of pulled into these internecine local conflicts, and then, as a result, sort of fomenting an insurgency that goes on and on and on. It’s hard to see an end to this. And especially if these sorts of operations are going to be the face of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan going forward, it’s hard to see any end in sight.
the mountain range in which these operations took place. So this is a—the province of Kunar, specifically, is a historically rebellious province. This is the region of Afghanistan that first rose up during the Soviet occupation. So this is a very, very complex and complicated area. This was an area that, like I said, resisted Taliban and al-Qaeda presence, until the United States came to their province.
Jeremy Scahill talking:
the Taliban as it exists today is not the Taliban that existed on 9/11. And, you know, Taliban is a generic term at this point. It’s like Kleenex is a brand, but everyone calls it that, even if the brand isn’t Kleenex, you know, that you’re buying facial tissue or something. And so, Taliban now is being used by the U.S., in particular, as a much sort of broader term. I think part of it has to do with the fact that people are sick of the occupation, that the Taliban are actually, you know, Muslims rather than white guys in camouflage kicking down doors. And I think part of it is that the Taliban actually do have indigenous support in some parts of the country—large swaths of the country, actually. And they’re also brutal thugs, gangsters, murderers. But I think, in part, the U.S. has dramatically misread, as it did in Iraq, how ordinary people were going to respond. And I think that opened the door for the Taliban to retake power in parts of the country. You know, so it’s—the idea that the president thinks that by just sort of extending this, that there’s going to be some markedly different outcome, I think it’s a bankrupt belief.
if you look at what’s fueling ISIS right now, I mean, they took a bunch of U.S. weapons systems and ordnance and everything, and combined it with military expertise of former Baathists. And, you know, I mean, look, the Bush administration, in invading Iraq, created this whole situation, and Obama is sort of replicating that now by further extending the Afghan War.
Ryan Devereaux talking:
there was a prospect for truce when the United States invaded more than a decade-and-a-half ago and really blew that opportunity. You know, we’re looking at—like Jeremy said, we’re looking at a different situation now. One would hope that the United States pursues a way forward in Afghanistan that isn’t just trying to kill its way to victory.
Cora Currier talking:
I think that the sort of frank admission about the over—the military’s own admission that the intelligence that was behind drone strikes was—and other airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia—was so limited and of such a inferior quality than the intelligence that they wanted, just to see that frank admission and to see it laid out in their technical terms, in their charts, in their own things. Because this is something that you hear from people on all sides of the debate about counterterrorism campaigns like these, is, like, “Well, drone strikes are only good as the intelligence that goes into them. You know, you can—drones strikes can be precise, but they can also be precisely wrong.” And I think that seeing the military’s own admissions about the faulty—the flawed intelligence collection systems that they have in these countries was remarkable.
Ryan Devereaux talking:
Haymaker is the campaign in Afghanistan that I looked into. And it breaks down the number of jackpots—so, a jackpot is removing, either through killing or capturing a target from the battlefield—and the number of strikes that the U.S. conducted, airstrikes. And it presents, in the far right side, a percentage, right? Seventy-some percent. Out of the airstrikes that they conducted, you know, they hit their—they got their jackpots this number of times, right? Seventy percent. All right. Except, in their calculation, they completely leave out the 155 people in the EKIA—enemy killed in action—column. So the calculation doesn’t take into account the number of bystanders killed in these operations, or the intelligence opportunities lost by failing to capture people, failing to interrogate people. They just solely calculate the number of jackpots killed in airstrikes.
Jeremy Scahill talking:
I think that people should look at the kind of cold, corporate language in the sort of vocabulary of assassination. If people want a really good, quick way to understand the scope of all of this, but also to see the banality of kind of the language of assassination, you should really start with Josh Begley’s amazing contribution to this series, which is this—the glossary of it. And it’s a visual tour through these documents and what they reveal. And, you know, I would encourage people to take the time to read all of these pieces. We have an incredible group of journalists at The Intercept, and I’m really proud of our entire team for all the work that they did on this.
we’re not calling for anything. Amnesty International is calling for an independent investigation into this, a congressional inquiry into it. ACLU is basically saying the same thing.
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Jeremy Scahill
co-founder of the TheIntercept.com and co-author of the “Drone Papers” series. His latest book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, is out in paperback.
Cora Currier
staff reporter for The Intercept. Her contributions to The Intercept’s “The Drone Papers” series include the pieces “The Kill Chain” and “Firing Blind.”
Ryan Devereaux
staff reporter at The Intercept. His contributions to The Intercept’s “The Drone Papers” series includes the piece “Manhunting in the Hindu Kush.”
— source democracynow.org