Joe Biden has pledged to conduct “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan to pursue terrorists while reducing the toll of the war on terror on Americans
Mr Biden has pledged to conduct “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism operations, chiefly using armed drones, in Afghanistan, to pursue terrorists while reducing the toll of the war on terror on Americans. Yet as the experience of Mr Obama and his successor, Donald Trump, suggests, drone strikes have hardly proved a strategic success. As Samuel Moyn of Yale University argues in his recently published book “Humane,” such attempts to make the war less lethal may have made it harder to end.
Keen to withdraw troops from Iraq and, eventually, Afghanistan, Mr Obama directed more drone strikes in his first year than Mr Bush had in his entire presidency. A brief prepared in March of 2009 by the Department of Justice laid out the administration’s contorted legal justification. It declared that the war on terror operated on a global battlefield. Nor would it be limited to al-Qaeda and “associated forces”: even those with tenuous ties like al-Shabab in Somalia, were fair game.
It helped stem the worst excesses: by 2016, strikes caused fewer than ten civilian deaths in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen combined. On the battlefield in Afghanistan, Iraq and, after 2014, Syria, military lawyers counselled commanders on targeting decisions—above a certain threshold for predicted civilian casualties, a strike would require permission from higher authorities. Mr Obama expressed hope that this “legal architecture” could ensure “any president’s reined in.
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