1.
Yemen
In the aftermath of
the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S., the Bush
administration intensified partnerships with a host of
countries ruled by unsavory regimes. Yemen is one such
country.
After 9/11, the US government ramped up its support for
the Yemeni government, which was ruled by President Ali
Abdullah Saleh, a strongman who had been in power for
over three decades.
Under the Bush administration, this
support mostly took the form of security assistance, as
the US gave Yemen,
“advanced tactical training, weapons
and surveillance equipment as well as armored vehicles,
airplanes, helicopters and sea vessels,” according to a
Middle East Policy Council journal article.
But the destabilization of Yemen has intensified amidst
the Obama administration’s stepped-up campaign of drone
strikes. The Bush administration
launched one drone strike on Yemen in 2002.
By
contrast, the Obama administration has expanded the
drone war immensely, and has launched
scores of drone strikes on Yemen. The Saleh
government has claimed at times that its own air force
carries out the strikes.
But
WikiLeaks cables show that Saleh welcomed the US
drone strikes while assuring the US that his regime
would take credit for the strikes in a bid to quell any
dissent against US meddling.
The intensification of a militarized approach to Yemen
carried out by the US military and CIA came as drone
strikes reportedly decimated Al Qaeda’s leadership in
Pakistan. Concurrently, US officials turned their
attention to Yemen, warning of the threat emanating from
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Al Qaeda
spin-off group based in Yemen.
But if the Obama
administration hoped drone strikes would pacify Yemen’s
most radical anti-American forces, they were dead wrong.
Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin
Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute, has
done the best on-the-ground investigation of how
Washington’s war on Yemen has backfired.
Scahill’s
February 2012 dispatch from Yemen reported on the
takeover of a Yemeni town, Zinjibar, by radical
militants who declared themselves part of Ansar al-Sharia,
a group that espouses an extreme Islamist ideology.
The
Yemeni government claims that Ansar al-Sharia is linked
to AQAP.
It’s unclear whether the Yemeni government’s
claims are true, but what is certain is that,
“the
group’s significance...extend[s] well beyond Al Qaeda’s
historically limited spheres of influence in Yemen while
simultaneously popularizing some of AQAP’s core tenets,”
as Scahill writes.
The takeover of Zinjibar was
no fluke. What gave radical Islamists the fuel to beat
back the Yemeni government for a time was “its message
of a Sharia-based system of law and order.”
This
message, Scahill writes, was,
“welcomed by many in Abyan
[a region in Yemen where Zinjibar is located] who viewed
the Saleh regime as a US puppet. The US missile strikes,
the civilian casualties, an almost total lack of
government services and a deepening poverty all
contributed.”
In the years preceding the 2012 takeover
of Zinjibar, “cruise missile and drone attacks” have
killed civilians throughout Abyan - including a 2009
drone strike that killed 40 people, many of them women
and children.
The US strategy of funneling
cash and military equipment to Saleh and bombing Yemen
with unmanned drones has caused the varied tribes in
Yemen, which hold a lot of power in the country, to brim
with anger at the US. Scahill reports:
“US policy has enraged
tribal leaders who could potentially keep AQAP in
check and has, over the past three years of regular
bombings, taken away the motivation for many leaders
to do so.
Several southern leaders angrily told me
stories of US and Yemeni attacks in their areas that
killed civilians and livestock and destroyed or
damaged scores of homes.
If anything, the US
airstrikes and support for Saleh-family-run
counterterrorism units has increased tribal sympathy
for Al Qaeda.”
The cycle of violence has
continued. In May, the Yemeni government launched a
military campaign to retake Zinjibar.
As part of that
campaign,
“Central Security forces opened fire with
assault rifles in a crowded market in Zinjibar, killing
six merchants and shoppers and wounding three dozen
others,”
according to Human Rights Watch.
And those Central Security Forces were armed, trained
and funded by the U.S. to combat terrorism.
But the CSF
has also turned its guns on pro-democracy protesters
who, inspired by the Tunisian revolution, led an
uprising seeking to bring Saleh’s regime down.
Central
Security has been,
“implicated in deadly attacks on
protesters during last year’s unrest” and “in abuses
including unlawful detention and torture of opposition
protesters during the uprising,”
according to Human Rights Watch.
2. Somalia
In the popular
American imagination, Somalia, a country beset by
corruption, poverty and famine, was left behind in the
early 1990s after the Battle of Mogadishu, made famous
by the movie Black Hawk Down.
But recent
history shows that the US continues to intervene in
Somalia, making a bad situation even worse.
Predictably, U.S. policy towards Somalia is now
formulated by viewing the war-torn country through the
prism of the “war on terrorism.” The US-backed Ethiopian
invasion of Somalia in 2006 is one prominent example.
As the Union of Islamic Courts gained power and
territory and challenged Somalia’s government,
Ethiopia’s military invaded and started a
three-year-war.
According to Foreign Policy in Focus,
WikiLeaks cables show that,
“the Bush Administration
pushed Ethiopia to invade Somalia with an eye on
crushing the Union of Islamic Courts.”
The consequences
were devastating:
“It resulted in 20,000 deaths and
according to some reports, left up to 2 million Somalis
homeless. The 50,000-strong Ethiopian invasion force,
which had expected a cake walk, instead ran into a buzz
saw of Somali resistance, got bogged down and soon
withdrew with its tail between its legs.”
And the end
result was that the more moderate Islamist forces that
were defeated were replaced by,
“more radical and
militant Islamic groups with a more openly anti-American agenda.”
Scahill’s recent on-the-ground reports from Somalia
add more to the picture. Despite the fact that a
full-blown war was waged to defeat Islamist forces in
Somalia, the most radical faction, Al Shabaab, which is
linked to Al Qaeda, was “in control of a greater swath
of Somalia” than the central government in 2010.
Just as
in Yemen, US-backed forces’ brutality had turned many
Somalis away from the US, allowing radical,
anti-government forces to step into the void, which led
to more conflict with the central government.
Drone strikes, too,
have had a similar effect.
Scahill explains the Obama
administration’s actions on Somalia:
“When President
Obama took office in 2009, the United States increased
its covert military involvement in and around Somalia,
as the CIA and JSOC intensified air and drone strikes in
Somalia and Yemen... But as the United States began
striking in Somalia, the Shabab’s influence was
spreading.”
Scahill reports that US government action against
Somalia emanates from Camp Lemonier, in Djibouti.
This
camp,
“serves as a command center for covert US action in
the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and as the
launch pad for operations by the CIA and the elite Joint
Special Operations Command (JSOC) to strike Al Qaeda
targets outside the declared battlefield of
Afghanistan.”
But as anti-drone activist
Nick Mottern noted on Truthout,
“the drone
experiment is not working...Factional fighting has also
increased in Yemen and Somalia, where drone strikes are
creating rage against the United States.”
3. Honduras
Manuel Zeyala’s
election as president of Honduras in 2006 was cut short
by a coup d'état three years later.
Zeyala’s alliance
with other Latin American leftist leaders, and his moves
to provide free education to children and to lessen
income inequality, angered the conservative elite. In
2009, Zeyala was awoken at gunpoint by the military,
whisked onto a waiting plane and flown to Costa Rica.
Initially, the United States condemned the coup. But the
Obama administration’s tune quickly changed.
As Dana
Frank, professor of history and an expert on Honduras,
writes in the Nation,
“After almost all the
opposition candidates (as well as international
observers) boycotted the post-coup election that brought
Lobo to power, heads of state throughout the region
refused to recognize his presidency; but the United
States hailed him for 'restoring democracy' and
promoting 'national reconciliation.'”
The US now firmly
backs the presidency of Porfirio Lobo.
The regime has
systematically violated the human rights of many
Hondurans.
“The coup has unleashed a wave of violence
against political opposition, journalists, small farmers
and others, with impunity for the security forces that
have been implicated in these killings,” as
Mark Weisbrot noted in the Guardian.
But instead of threatening
the regime with aid cutoffs, the Obama administration
has instead asked for more money to help Honduras fight
the “war on drugs.”
The drug war remains
the primary prism for how the US views Latin America,
and in Honduras it has led to disastrous consequences.
DEA agents have set up shop in the country, and the US
government has helped train Honduran police in an effort
to militarize aspects of the police.
(It’s important to
note, though, that the US government recently announced
it was cutting off aid to units supervised by the new
national police chief, who is suspected of human rights
violations dating back to 1998.)
DEA agents were involved in a May 2012, operation that
went awry. In an indigenous area of Honduras, the
police, working alongside DEA agents, opened fire on a
boat thought to be trafficking drugs. But local
residents claim that the four villagers who were killed
were civilians and had nothing to do with drugs; two of
the dead were pregnant women.
The DEA operation drew widespread attention to how the
US government is helping to militarize the Ahuas region
in Honduras.
As Sandra Cuffe and
Karen Spring
reported,
“the presence of Honduran and
US security forces has dramatically increased over the
past several years and even more so since the June 2009
coup, particularly in communities along the Patuca River
where recent DEA-led operations have occurred.”
The operations have greatly angered indigenous
villagers.
“We resolve to declare members of the
Honduran and US armed forces persona non grata in the
territory of the Moskitia due to their invasion and
effect on security, creating situations of intimidation
and fear,” one group of indigenous Hondurans wrote in a
declaration made at an emergency assembly to address the
killings.
4. Mexico
Latin American leaders have
increasingly spoken up about the failure of the war on
drugs.
Despite massive amounts of money spent on
prohibition, Latin America and the world is no closer to
winning the decades-old “war.” Some leaders have taken
to calling for legalization or decriminalization of
drugs.
But in Mexico, the
US-backed drug-war rolls on - and a horrific death toll
keeps rising.
The US has poured money into and helped train Mexican
security forces to battle drug cartels in the country.
The centerpiece of US policy on Mexico is the Merida
Initiative, a US government program that has spent $1.3
billion on,
“training and equipping Mexican security
forces engaged in counterdrug efforts,” according to the
Congressional Research Service.
Initiated by the Bush administration in 2007, the Obama
administration has extended the Merida Initiative
indefinitely.
This money has gone to federal police and
the military, which have been deployed throughout Mexico
to crackdown on drug cartels.
But these very same
Mexican security forces have been accused of massive
human rights violations.
“Instead of reducing violence, Mexico’s ‘war on drugs’
has resulted in a dramatic increase in killings,
torture, and other appalling abuses by security forces,
which only make the climate of lawlessness and fear
worse in many parts of the country,” the
Americas director of Human Rights Watch stated in 2011.
The militarized effort to root out drugs in Mexico has
failed miserably.
Drug violence continues to increase;
from 2010-2011 there was an 11 percent increase in
drug-related murder in Mexico - a number the
government touted as a success (the previous year
the increase was 70 percent).
The total death toll in Mexico is staggering: an
estimated 50,000 people have died from drug war-related
violence. And the failed strategy of militarizing the
effort to root out drug cartels has arguably increased
this violence.
For example, as
Mexico expert Laura Carslen noted on Democracy Now!,
from 2007-2008, drug-related deaths went up more than
two-fold.
“This violence is predictable: when you fight
violence with violence, what you get is more violence,”
said Carlsen.
5. Pakistan
This country bordering
Afghanistan has borne the brunt of US drone strikes.
Forty-four strikes occurred during the Bush
administration, But the Obama administration has
launched over 300. Many of the strikes have taken place
in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas
(FATA), a semi-autonomous region near Afghanistan that
hosts elements of the Pakistani Taliban.
The Obama administration’s
strategy has “decimated” the Taliban in Pakistan,
according to CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen.
But that’s not all the drone strikes have done.
The American drones that regularly pound Pakistan have
killed a growing number of civilians, and Pakistanis are
furious about the bloodshed. Since 2004,
according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism,
which closely tracks drone strikes, between 474 and 881
civilians have been killed by US drone attacks; 176 of
the dead were children.
Over 1,000 people have been
injured.
As the
Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald noted recently, US drone
strikes have also targeted Pakistanis going to remove
the wounded and dead after an initial attack.
