Democratic take-over of the White House in 2009 brought little alteration in American imperial policy. Continuity was signalled from the start by the retention or promotion of key personnel in the Republican war on terror: Gates, Brennan, Petraeus, McChrystal. Before entering the Senate, Obama had opposed the war in Iraq; in the Senate, he voted $360 billion for it. Campaigning for the Presidency, he criticized the war in the name of another one. Not Iraq, but Afghanistan was where US fire-power should be concentrated. Within a year of taking office, US troops had been doubled to 100,000 and Special Forces operations increased six-fold, in a bid to repeat the military success in Iraq, where Obama had merely to stick to his predecessor’s schedule for a subsequent withdrawal. But Afghanistan was not Iraq, and no such laurels were in reach. The country was not only half as large again in size, but much of it mountainous, ideal guerrilla terrain. It abutted onto a still larger neighbour, forced to permit American operations across its soil, but more than willing to provide sub rosa cover and aid to resistance against the occupying forces across the border. Last but not least, American support in the country was confined to minority groups—Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek—while the Afghan resistance was based on the Pathan plurality, extending deep into the North-West Frontier. Added to all these obstacles was the impact of the war in Iraq itself. In the Hindu Kush it mattered, as in Brussels, Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, it did not. The Iraqi resistance, divided and self-destructive, had been crushed. But it had taken five years and a quarter of a million troops to quell it, and by giving the Taliban breathing-space to become fighters for something closer to a national war of liberation, allowed the Afghan guerrilla to regroup and strike back with increasing effect at the occupation. Desperate to break this resistance, the Democratic Administration escalated the war in Pakistan, where its predecessor had already been launching covert attacks with the latest missile-delivery system. The RMA had flourished since Kosovo, now producing unmanned aircraft capable of targeting individuals on the ground from altitudes of up to thirty thousand feet. Under Obama, drones became the weapon of choice for the White House, the Predators of ‘Task Force Liberty’ raining Hellfire missiles on suspect villages in the North-West Frontier, wiping out women and children along with warriors in the ongoing battle against terrorism: seven times more covert strikes than launched by the Republican Administration. Determined to show he could be as tough as Bush, Obama readied for war with Pakistan should it resist the US raid dispatched to kill Bin Laden in Abbottabad, for domestic purposes the leading trophy in his conduct of international affairs. Assassinations by drone, initiated under his predecessor, became the Nobel laureate’s trademark. In his first term, Obama ordered one such execution every four days—over ten times the rate under Bush. The War on Terror, now rebaptized at Presidential instruction ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’—a coinage to rank with the ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ of the Bush period—has proceeded unabated, at home and abroad. Torturers have been awarded impunity, while torture itself, officially disavowed and largely replaced by assassination, could still if necessary be outsourced to other intelligence services, above suspicion of maltreating captives rendered to them. Guantánamo, its closure once promised, has continued as before. Within two years of his election in 2008, Obama’s Administration had created no less than sixty-three new counter-terrorism agencies. --Perry Anderson, Imperium
Posted on: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 02:27:49 +0000
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