Obama’s Undeclared War Against Pakistan Continues, Despite His Attempt to Downplay It

In a new interview, Obama said he has “no intention” of sending US troops into Pakistan. But US troops are already in the country and US drones attack Pakistan regularly.

By Jeremy Scahill

Three days after his inauguration, on January 23, 2009, President Barack Obama ordered US predator drones to attack sites inside of Pakistan, reportedly killing 15 people. It was the first documented attack ordered by the new US Commander in Chief inside of Pakistan. Since that first Obama-authorized attack, the US has regularly bombed Pakistan, killing scores of civilians. The New York Times reported that the attacks were clear evidence Obama “is continuing, and in some cases extending, Bush administration policy.” In the first 99 days of 2009, more than 150 people were reportedly killed in these drone attacks. The most recent documented attack was reportedly last Thursday in Waziristan. Since 2006, the US drone strikes have killed 687 people (as of April). That amounts to about 38 deaths a month just from drone attacks.

The use of these attack drones by Obama should not come as a surprise to anyone who followed his presidential campaign closely. As a candidate, Obama made clear that Pakistan’s sovereignty was subservient to US interests, saying he would attack with or without the approval of the Pakistani government. Obama said if the US had “actionable intelligence” that “high value” targets were in Pakistan, the US would attack. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, echoed those sentiments on the campaign trail and “did not rule out U.S. attacks inside Pakistan, citing the missile attacks her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, ordered against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998. ‘If we had actionable intelligence that Osama bin Laden or other high-value targets were in Pakistan I would ensure that they were targeted and killed or captured,’ she said.”

Last weekend, Obama granted his first extended interview with a Pakistani media outlet, the newspaper Dawn:

Responding to a question about drone attacks inside Pakistan’s tribal zone, Mr Obama said he did not comment on specific operations.

‘But I will tell you that we have no intention of sending US troops into Pakistan. Pakistan and its military are dealing with their security issues.’

There are a number of issues raised by this brief response offered by Obama. First, the only difference between using these attack drones and using actual US soldiers on the ground is that the soldiers are living beings. These drones sanitize war and reduce the US death toll while still unleashing military hell disproportionately on civilians. The bottom line is that the use of drones inside the borders of Pakistan amounts to the same violation of sovereignty that would result from sending US soldiers inside the country. Obama defended the attacks in the Dawn interview, saying:

“Our primary goal is to be a partner and a friend to Pakistan and to allow Pakistan to thrive on its own terms, respecting its own traditions, respecting its own culture. We simply want to make sure that our common enemies, which are extremists who would kill innocent civilians, that that kind of activity is stopped, and we believe that it has to be stopped whether it’s in the United States or in Pakistan or anywhere in the world.”

Despite Obama’s comments about respecting Pakistan “on its own terms,” this is how Reuters recently described the arrangement between Pakistan and the US regarding drone attacks:

U.S. ally Pakistan objects to the U.S. missile strikes, saying they violate its sovereignty and undermine efforts to deal with militancy because they inflame public anger and bolster support for the militants.

Washington says the missile strikes are carried out under an agreement with Islamabad that allows Pakistani leaders to publicly criticise the attacks. Pakistan denies any such agreement.

Pakistan is now one of the biggest recipients of US aid with the House of Representatives recently approving a tripling of money to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for five years. Moreover, US special forces are already operating inside of Pakistan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in Baluchistan. According to the Wall Street Journal, US Special Forces are:

training Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force responsible for battling the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, who cross freely between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said. The U.S. trainers aren’t meant to fight alongside the Pakistanis or accompany them into battle, in part because there will be so few Special Forces personnel in the two training camps.

A senior American military officer said he hoped Islamabad would gradually allow the U.S. to expand its training footprint inside Pakistan’s borders.

In February, The New York Times reported that US forces are also engaged in other activities inside of Pakistan:

American Special Operations troops based in Afghanistan have also carried out a number of operations into Pakistan’s tribal areas since early September, when a commando raid that killed a number of militants was publicly condemned by Pakistani officials. According to a senior American military official, the commando missions since September have been primarily to gather intelligence.

It is clear—and has been for a long time— that the Obama administration is radically expanding the US war in Afghanistan deeply into Pakistan. Whether it is through US military trainers (that’s what they were called in Vietnam too), drone attacks or commando raids inside the country, the US is militarily entrenched in Pakistan. It makes Obama’s comment that “[W]e have no intention of sending US troops into Pakistan” simply unbelievable.

For a sense of how significant US operations are and will continue to be for years and years to come, just look at the US plan to build an almost $1 billion massive US “embassy” in Islamabad, which is reportedly modeled after the imperial city they call a US embassy in Baghdad. As we know very clearly from Iraq, such a complex will result in an immediate surge in the deployment of US soldiers, mercenaries and other contractors.

Time Magazine’s “Reporting” on Pakistan Drone Attacks is Pentagon Propaganda

Time pushes a Pentagon story about the Taliban’s “human shields,” but doesn’t mention the hundreds of civilian deaths caused by US attacks.

By Jeremy Scahill

A new report in Time magazine on the US attack drone bombing campaign against Pakistan would not read any different if it was an official press release from the Pentagon. The report, “The Taliban’s Low-Tech Defense Against U.S. Drones” by Mark Thompson presents—unchallenged and not independently verified—allegations that the Taliban are using civilians as “human shields.” It is a one source story and that source is an Air Force Intelligence officer:

For Taliban commanders along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, death often arrives without warning from the skies, on missiles fired by U.S. Predator and Reaper drones that lurk out of sight, unheard by their targets on the ground. As such strikes become more commonplace, the militants are forced to seek countermeasures. And it’s not as if they have a research-and-development budget to draw on. According to a top Air Force intelligence officer, some Taliban commanders on the ground have come up with a low-tech shield every bit as effective as the protective hardware on which the Pentagon has spent over $100 billion.

“Unfortunately, their countertactic against our air power in some cases seems to be to use noncombatants as human shields,” said Air Force Colonel Eric Holdaway. “Not all their commanders are doing this, but we have evidence of at least some that are.” Holdaway, the top Air Force intel officer assigned to Central Command, which is waging the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, suggested that the Taliban have few options on the ground if they want to stay alive. “You’d almost call it Taliban air defense,” he said. “They have not been able to prevent us from using [the drones], even though they’ve tried by rocketing our airfields and trying to shoot at our aircraft.”

Thompson does not mention anywhere in his article the recent reports from Pakistani officials that, since 2006, 687 civilians have been killed in US drone attacks against the country and only 14 “al Qaeda” operatives. There is no mention in Time of the Pakistani allegation that in just the first 99 days of 2009, US drone airstrikes against Pakistan have killed 152 people, averaging 38 killings per month and 11 killings per attack.

Thompson might say that these stats can’t be verified or that they are biased or distorted, but what about the allegations from a US military Intelligence officer? Somehow he is a source whose allegations should be printed unchallenged? There is a term for this kind of reporting. It is called propaganda.

The “human shields” allegation has been regularly carted out by both the US and Israeli governments—indeed many governments—to justify their killing of civilians. Instead of challenging the intelligence officer on the civilian deaths, Thompson repeats the age-old spin: “U.S. officials say they do not fire at targets near innocent civilians, but they note that it’s sometimes difficult to separate the bad guys from the good guys or to know who is inside a building with a target.”

Thompson’s article in Time magazine gets really Pentagon press release-y when he describes how “the drones have put time on the side of the U.S. military.” Well put, Mr. Thompson—Time (magazine) is on the side of the US military:

For decades, pilots and bombardiers got only brief chances to strike their targets, limited by the targets’ movements and leery of hanging over enemy territory too long. But drones don’t put pilots at risk, and their small engines and relatively large gas tanks allow them to loiter for hours. “They stay on station for a very long time,” Holdaway told defense bloggers on April 23. They patiently circle in lazy orbits far overhead, their belly-mounted sensors combing the ground for targets. “If we’re the ones taking the initiative, then typically we can afford to be patient,” Holdaway added. “If we lose an opportunity, we can be patient, keep working on the problem and keep working on the target and eventually get another opportunity. We see that fairly often.”

Then, Thompson gets really excited for the Pentagon in announcing what he calls “One more bit of good news for the drone corps:”

While the mujahedin downed Soviet aircraft using U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles in the 1980s, there doesn’t seem to be any similar hotshot weapon being used against U.S. drones in the current campaigns. Machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades are fired — usually without effect — at suspected drone sightings. “For some reason, we just have not seen the more sophisticated weapons showing up,” Holdaway said. “Knock on wood, so far.”

Wow. If Time magazine starts laying people off, Thompson may consider officially applying for a job at the Pentagon’s PR office. Apparently, it would really just be a change of offices, not a different job.