Day by day, the western media cry wolf: “They are arriving, they are at three meters, two, one”. Cutting corners, Bloomberg, the top of the class, has already staged the invasion: why not anticipate the news? In reality, in Ukraine, we are as in the first image of Woody Allen’s 2005 movie Match Point where the shot remains frozen in the exact moment when the tennis ball is over the net. This suspension time, full of risks and opportunities, attracts some characters searching for a leadership role under the international spotlight and, of course, an image boost at home. Easy to guess we are speaking of the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In the last weeks, he succeeded in defending the sale of lethal Turkish drones to the Ukrainians that are using them to terrorise Donbas and, at the same time, proposing himself as a peace mediator between Moscow and Kiev. Erdogan’s political identity card is irregular enough to give him some room for manoeuvre. But Turkey’s unpredictability, the chance to see the country in a soft version of non-alignment, stems more from its weakness and contradictions than from a position of strength that could support its credibility.

Although Ankara is the second-largest military force in Nato, after the U.S., it is buying the S-400 air defence system from Russia, rejecting the American Patriot. A little bit over rhetorically, someone in the country hailed the choice as a “country’s liberation from the West”. The gas import from Russia is crucial, and the economic ties include industrial, construction investments and tourism. Russian President Vladimir Putin has just accepted President Erdogan’s invitation to visit his country. The Turkish are expecting that the Kremlin will announce the date of his visit this month, after his return from the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Therefore, the relations with Moscow aren’t always good; sometimes, they are horrible. In Syria, Turkey downed a Russian Su-24 bomber in November 2015. Turkish weapons (the drones again) helped Azerbaijan blitz to retake Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia in the 2020 war. A strategic area for Russia. Ali Akbar Velayati, the international affairs adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that Turkey is “adding fuel to the fire”. More recently, some reports suggested the Turkish secret services not so covert involvement in Kazaksthan’s violent upheaval on December’s beginning.

After many years of Bruxelles’ closed-door politics, the love and hate engagement with Europe is fading in resentment. So, in the last decade, the Asian soul of Turkey has grown dramatically at the expense of the European one.

The NATO links are still strong, but Ankara prefers to gather Asia’s Turkish populations under its Pan-Turkish flag than under America’s Global Police. The recent killing in Syria of the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, is also seen as an American message to its eastern NATO ally. In the words of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Turkey “turned the areas of northern Syria into a safe zone for Daesh leaders”.

Ankara disowned the statement of its sworn enemies but its initial choice to sit out the war against ISIS speaks volumes.

The relationship with Tel Aviv has seen the same zigzag. Israeli-Turkish relations have been tense, especially since the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident in which IDF’s fire killed nine Turkish nationals. In May 2018, Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador in Ankara after deadly clashes between the Israeli Army and Palestinians on the Gaza border. The Turkish diplomatic counterpart had to leave Israel. For the last two years, Turkey has been trying to reactivate its ties with Israel. A few days ago, Erdogan announced an official visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog for mid-March. Pushed by its economic difficulties, Turkey may see normalisation with Israel to improve its economy and, at the same time, its political status in the Middle East and with the US. Especially in the new climate, real or not is too early to say, produced by the Abraham Accords, Ankara is betting on an economic opening to the Gulf countries.

Erdogan’s regard for Turkey’s geopolitical stance is conditioned partially by the wishful thinking of the pan-Turkish-New Ottoman ideology. Still, his action is more substantially guided by the urge to exit the deep Turkish economy’s crisis. Turkey’s annual inflation has just risen at nearly 49%, hitting a near 20-year high and further eroding people’s ability to buy even basic things like food. The Turkish Statistical Institute stated that the consumer price index increased by just over 11% in January from the previous month. According to the data, the yearly increase in food prices was more than 55%.

The Turkish opposition parties have repeatedly questioned the Statistical Institute’s independence and data. The independent Inflation Research Group put Turkey’s actual annual inflation at a stunning 114.87%. As financial hardship has spread, the crisis has prompted criticism of the president’s recent accumulation of authority, from appointing bank policymakers to university rectors to high court judges.

Ankara’s so-called “drones diplomacy” is easier to understand in this context. Its first success was in Libya in 2020. The Bayraktar TB2, purchased by Qatar and operated by Turkish personnel, helped the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) stop Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s assault on Tripoli. The drones are manufactured by Istanbul-based Baykar, owned by Erdogan’s son-in-law Selcuk Bayraktar. Federico Borsari of the European Council on Foreign Relations noted that the Bayaktars had become a major asset: “Their most significant effects may be in the economic opportunities and political leverage they have provided Turkey”.

Further irritating Moscow, Turkey now is planning to build near Kiev a drones factory to produce the long-endurance Anka drone, made by Turkish Aerospace Industries.

Drones are not invincible; above all, their most significant advantage is comparatively low cost. Electronic countermeasures are one of the most used defences against them. Russia has the new Tor-M2 SAM; a lethal short-range air defence missile system developed expressly against drones. But in many cases, it is like “take a hammer to crack a nut”. General Oleg Salyukov, the commander of Russia’s ground forces, told Rossiyskaya Gazeta: “The cost of one guided air defence missile is way above the cost of a small-size drone. For this reason, a relatively inexpensive small missile is being developed for this system”.

President Erdogan’s peacekeeping attempt is welcome but challenging to pursue, not recognising the Russian incorporation of Crimea as legal (still, in 2008, he rushed to recognise Kosovo’s independence) and arming the Ukrainians to the teeth. More than everything, he seems not in a position to extract any concessions from NATO. His diplomatic stunts appear more aimed to protect his business while the ball is precisely over the net than an actual peace-building process.

The New York Times should give Daniel Hale proper credit and call for Biden to immediately pardon him. As long as he’s in prison, there is no justice.

By Sam CARLINER

The New York Times recently came through with a display of reporting that should be commended. On December 18, the paper announced its release of hundreds of the Pentagon’s confidential reports of civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East. This followsits high profile investigations into the U.S. drone murder of the Ahmadi family during the Afghanistan withdrawal, and an American strike cell in Syria that killed dozens of civilians with airstrikes.

Daniel Hale joined the fight to hold the Pentagon seriously accountable. He joined years before the New York Times did, and was treated like a criminal for it.

Many journalists will, rightfully, praise the New York Times for its reporting on U.S. airstrikes and the civilian cost. Far fewer will point out how the inhumanity of U.S. airstrikes were first revealed in 2013 by whistleblower Daniel Hale.

Hale used his first hand experience identifying targets for the drone program to highlight how it relies on faulty criteria, and as a result, kills civilians. Later, Hale worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, where he had access to documents on how the drone program operates. Hale provided those documents to the Intercept which published them as The Drone Papers in 2015. While Hale’s documents were not as comprehensive as the trove recently published by the New York Times, they did provide much of the same core revelations, particularly the faulty nature of how intelligence is gathered and the high civilian-toll of air campaigns. Most notably, Hale’s documents revealed that 90% of the drone program’s victims were not the intended targets. Up until the recent reporting by the New York Times, Hale’s revelations were the most comprehensive proof of how U.S. air warfare functions.

To be fair, the Times’ reporting on the brutal nature and high civilian cost of U.S. airstrikes is not insignificant. Americans could have easily ignored the Pentagon’s violence now that the “boots on the ground” approach to intervention has largely ended with Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal. In fact, the use of airstrikes was championed by Obama so as to avoid anti-war sentiments from Americans. The Times actually highlights this, writing:

“The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away.”

Still, as much as the Times’ reporting already seems to be provoking conversation around U.S. air warfare, it is concerning that this conversation comes with the risk of Hale’s own heroic actions being disregarded. The Times makes no mention of Hale’s actions, even as they receive accolades for supposedly breaking to the world the violence of U.S. airstrikes. More damning is how little the Times has commented on the fact that Hale was sentenced to nearly four years in prison earlier this year for exposing the drone program. Aside from a standard article about his sentencing published in July, Daniel Hale is absent from the New York Times’ pages. Azmat Khan, the reporter behind the “Civilian Casualty Files” has not mentioned Daniel Hale once on Twitter.

It’s not like there have not been updates in Hale’s story since he was sentenced. After his sentencing, Hale was kept languishing in a jail for over two months even though he was supposed to be transferred in a matter of weeks. Once finally transferred, Hale’s situation was made worse. He was supposed to be sent to a prison that would provide care for his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis, but instead he is now being held in a communication management unit (CMU). CMU’s are designed for terrorists and “high-risk inmates” and detainees have highly restricted contact with the outside world. The American Civil Liberties Union has called on the U.S. government to end its use of CMUs, arguing that these “secretive housing units inside federal prisons in which prisoners are condemned to live in stark isolation from the outside world are unconstitutional, violate the religious rights of prisoners and are at odds with U.S. treaty obligations.”

Daniel Hale deserves freedom for revealing proof of the very crimes the New York Times is now being praised for exposing. His support team and anti-war activists have been working hard to grow concern and action for his cause, but that is a daunting task considering Hale is a person who the U.S. government, and U.S. military in particular, want silenced. But as the Times has shown with its own reporting of U.S. airstrikes, they have a platform that can cut through Pentagon-imposed silence. A single editorial calling for Hale’s release would do wonders for his cause.

Presumably, the Times reporters who have been investigating the violence of U.S. airstrikes are doing so because they believe the victims of U.S. air campaigns deserve justice. The Pentagon’s refusal to hold anyone accountable for their deadly Kabul airstrike in August signals that it will be an uphill battle holding anyone accountable for the newly-exposed airstrikes. Daniel Hale joined the fight to hold the Pentagon seriously accountable. He joined years before the New York Times did, and was treated like a criminal for it. The New York Times should give Daniel Hale proper credit and call for Biden to immediately pardon him. As long as he’s in prison, there is no justice.

commondreams.org

By Scott RITTER

On Aug. 29, the United States murdered ten Afghan civilians in a drone strike. The U.S. Air Force Inspector Gen., Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said, was appointed on Sept. 21, to lead an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the attack. On Nov. 3, Gen. Said released the unclassified findings of his investigation, declaring that while the incident was “regrettable,” no crimes were committed by the U.S. forces involved.

The reality, however, is that the U.S. military engaged in an act of premeditated murder violative of U.S. laws and policies, as well as international law. Everyone involved, from the president on down committed a war crime.

Their indictment is spelled out in the details of what occurred before and during the approximately eight hours a U.S. MQ-9 “Reaper” drone tracked Zemari Ahmadi, an employee of Nutrition and Education International, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that has been operating in Afghanistan since 2003, working to fight malnutrition among women and children who live in high-mortality areas in Afghanistan.

During those eight hours, the U.S. watched Ahmadi carry out mundane tasks associated with life in war-torn Kabul circa Aug. 2021. The U.S. watched until the final minutes leading up to the decision to fire the hellfire missile that would take Ahmadi’s life, and that of nine of his relatives, including seven children.

“The investigation,” Gen. Said concluded in his report, “found no violation of law, including the Law of War.” One of the unanswered questions relating to this conclusion was the precise nature of the framework of legal authorities at play at the time of the drone strike, in particular the rules and regulations being followed by the U.S. military regarding drone strikes, and issues pertaining to Afghan sovereignty when it came to the use of deadly force by the U.S. military on Afghan soil

Policies in Flux

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis speaks to President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence July 20, 2017, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., following a meeting of the National Security Council. (DOD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro)

At the time of the drone strike that murdered Zemari Ahmadi and his family, the policies governing the use of armed drones was in a state of extreme flux. In an effort to gain control over a program which, by any account, had gotten out of control in terms of killing innocent civilians, then-President Barack Obama, in May 2013, promulgated a classified Presidential Policy Guidance (P.P.G.) document entitled “Procedures for Approving Direct Action Against Terrorist Targets Located Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities.”

The 2013 P.P.G. directed that, when it came to the use of lethal action (a term which incorporated direct action missions by U.S. Special Operation forces as well as drone strikes), U.S. government departments and agencies “must employ all reasonably available resources to ascertain the identity of the target so that the action can be taken.” The document also made clear that “international legal principles, including respect for sovereignty and the law of armed conflict, impose important constraints on the ability of the United States to act unilaterally—and the way in which the United States can use force.”

The standards for the use of lethal force set forth in the 2013 P.P.G. contain two important preconditions. First, “there must be a legal basis for using lethal force.” A key aspect of this legal basis is a requirement that the U.S. have the support of a host government prior to the initiation of any lethal force on the territory of that nation. This support is essential, as it directly relates to the issue of sovereignty commitments under the U.N. Charter.

When the 2013 P.P.G. was published, the U.S. had the express permission of the Afghan government to carry out lethal drone strikes on its territory for the purposes of targeting both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Later, this authorization would extend to encompass the Islamic State-Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K.

In 2017, then-President Donald Trump issued new guidance which loosened the conditions under which lethal force could be used in Afghanistan, including the use of armed drones. The Afghan government continued to provide host nation authorization for these strikes. When President Biden assumed office, in January, he immediately directed his National Security Council to begin a review of the policies and procedures surrounding the use of armed drones in Afghanistan.

One of the issues addressed in this review was whether the Biden administration would return to the Obama-era rules requiring “near certainty” that no women or children are present in an area targeted for drone attack or retain the Trump-era standard of only ascertaining to a “reasonable certainty” that no civilian adult men were likely to be killed.

Complicating matters was the fact that the Biden administration was preparing for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, which required that the rules and procedures for use of armed drones in Afghanistan be altered to reflect a new reality where U.S. forces were no longer being directly supported, and that the armed drone program would be conducted in an environment where the Afghan government was the exclusive recipient of armed drone support. These new rules and procedures were part of what the Biden administration called its “over the horizon” (OTH) counterterrorism strategy.

Before the new OTH policies and procedures directive could be issued, however, the reality on the ground in Afghanistan changed completely, making the policy document obsolete before it was even issued. The rapid advance of the Taliban, coupled with the complete collapse of the Afghan government, threw into question the legal underpinnings regarding the authority of the U.S. government to conduct armed drone operations in Afghanistan.

Taliban fighters in Kabul, Aug. 17, 2021. (VOA, Wikimedia Commons)

The new rulers of Afghanistan, the Taliban, did not approve of U.S. armed drone operations. Instead, the Taliban had executed a secret annex to the February 2020 peace agreement reached with the Trump administration regarding its commitment to dealing with counterterrorism issues in Afghanistan once the U.S. withdrew. President Biden determined that his administration would be bound by the terms of that agreement.

Two points emerge from this new environment—first, from a legal standpoint, the U.S. military remained bound by the “reasonable certainty” of the Trump-era policies regarding the use of armed drones, and second, from the standpoint of international law as it relates to sovereignty commitments, the U.S. had no legal authority to conduct armed drone operations over Afghanistan.

While the U.S. had not formally recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, President Biden’s commitment to adhere to commitments made under the terms of the February 2020 peace agreement, coupled with the fact that the U.S. was engaged in active negotiations with the Taliban in Doha and in Kabul regarding issues pertaining to security of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan and Kabul, make clear that for all sense and purpose, the U.S. treated the Taliban as if they were the sovereign authority in Afghanistan.

In Order to Be Legal

For U.S. drone operations on Aug. 29, to be legal in Afghanistan, the U.S. government had to either gain public approval for these operations from a sovereign authority, gain private approval from a sovereign authority, or else demonstrate that a sovereign authority was unable or unwilling to act, in which case the U.S. could, under certain conditions, consider unilateral action.

Gen. Said does not provide any information as to how he ascertained U.S. compliance under international law. Public statements by the Taliban appear to show that they did not approve of U.S. drone strikes on the territory of Afghanistan. Indeed, when the U.S. carried out a similar drone attack, on Aug. 27, targeting what it claimed were ISIS-K terrorists, the Taliban condemned the strike as a “clear attack on Afghan territory.”

The second precondition set forth in the 2013 P.P.G. authorizing the use of lethal action was that the target must pose “a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.” In his presentation on the Aug. 29, drone strike, Gen. Said stated that “[i]ndividuals directly involved in the strike…believed at the time that they were targeting an imminent threat. The intended target of the strike, the vehicle, its contents and occupant, were genuinely assessed at the time as an imminent threat to U.S. forces.”

When promulgating its 2013 P.P.G. on drone strikes, the Obama administration adopted an expanded definition of what constituted an “imminent threat” published by the Department of Justice in 2011, which eschewed the notion that in order to be considered “imminent”, a threat had to be a specific, concrete threat whose existence must first be corroborated with clear evidence.

Instead, the Obama administration adopted a new definition that held that an imminent threat was inherently continuous because terrorists are assumed to be continuously planning attacks against the U.S.; all terrorist threats are considered both “imminent” and “continuing” by their very nature, removing the need for the military to gather information showing precisely when and where a terrorist threat was going to emerge.

To make the case of an “imminent” (and, by definition, “continuing”) threat, all the U.S. needed to do in the case of Zemari Ahmadi was create a plausible link between him and potential terrorist activity. According to Gen. Said, “highly classified” (i.e., Top Secret) intelligence was interpreted by U.S. personnel to ascertain the existence of a terrorist threat.

This assessment was used to create a linkage with Ahmadi, and the subsequent “observed movement of the vehicle and occupants over an 8-hour period” resulted in confirmation bias linking Ahmadi to the assessed terrorist threat.

Who Was in Command?

Part of Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar. (U.S. National Archives)

Zemari Ahmadi’s actions on Aug. 29, did not trigger the drone attack. Instead, the U.S. appeared to be surveilling a specific location in Kabul, looking for a White Toyota Corolla (ironically, the most prevalent model and color of automobile operating in Kabul) that was being converted by ISIS-K terrorists into a weapon to be used against U.S. forces deployed in the vicinity of Kabul International Airport.

This safe house was located about five kilometers west of Kabul International Airport, in one of Kabul’s dense residential neighborhoods. The specific source of this information is not known but given Gen. Said’s description of it as “highly classified”, it can be assumed that this information involved the interception of specific communications on the part of persons assessed as being affiliated with ISIS-K, and that these communications had been geolocated to a specific area inside Kabul.

One of the issues confronting the U.S. during this time was the absolute chaotic nature of the command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) infrastructure that would normally be in place when carrying out any military operations overseas, including something as politically sensitive as a lethal drone strike. It wasn’t just the policy guidelines for the use of lethal drone strikes that were in limbo on Aug. 29, 2021, but also who, precisely, oversaw what was going on regarding the employment of drones in Afghanistan.

The U.S. military and C.I.A. had completely withdrawn from Afghanistan when the decision was made to begin noncombatant evacuation operations (N.E.O.) operating from Kabul International Airport. The deployment of some 6,000 U.S. military personnel was accompanied by an undisclosed number of C.I.A. and Special Operations forces who were tasked with sensitive human and technical intelligence collection, including intelligence sharing and coordination with the Taliban.

To support this activity, an expeditionary joint operations center (JOC) was established by U.S. forces, led by Rear Admiral Peter Vasely, a Navy SEAL originally dispatched to Afghanistan to lead Special Operations, but who took over command of all forces when the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Scott Miller, left in July 2021.

Admiral Vasely was assisted by Major Gen. Chris Donahue, a former Delta Force officer who commanded the 82^nd Airborne Division. While both Vasey and Donahue were experienced combat commanders, they were singularly focused on the issue of securing the airport and evacuating personnel under a very constrained timeline. Managing drone operations would be handled elsewhere.

As part of President Biden’s vision for Afghanistan post-U.S. evacuation (and pre-Afghan government collapse), the Department of Defense had established what was known as the Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism Headquarters at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar. Commanded by Brigadier Gen. Julian C. Cheater, Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism, comprised of 544 personnel, was tasked with planning and executing missions in support of Special Operations Command-Central across four geographically-separated locations in the United States Central Command area of responsibility, including Afghanistan.

But Gen. Cheater had only assumed command in July, and his organization was still getting settled into its new quarters (Brigadier Gen. Constantin E. Nicolet, the deputy commanding general for intelligence for the Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism headquarters, did not arrive until Aug. 11.) As such, much of the responsibility for coordinating drone operations into the overall air campaign operating in support of the Kabul N.E.O. (which, in addition to multiple C-17 and C-130 airlift missions per day, included AC-130 gunships, B-52 bombers, F-15 fighters, and multiple MQ-9 Reaper drones) was handled by Central Command’s Combined Air Operations Center (C.A.O.C.), located at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar.

The Video Source

Capt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman 1st Class Mike Eulo perform function checks after launching MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle Aug. 7 at Balad Air Base, Iraq. (U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve Horton)

Gen. Said, in his presentation, made mention of “multiple video feeds” when speaking of the information being evaluated by U.S. military personnel regarding the strike that killed Ahmadi and his family. This could imply that more than one MQ-9 drone was operating over Kabul that day, or that video feeds from other unspecified sources were also being viewed.

It also could be that the MQ-9 that fired the Hellfire missile that killed Ahmadi and his nine relatives was flying by itself; the MQ-9 carries the Multi-Spectral Targeting System, which integrates an infrared sensor, color, monochrome daylight TV camera, shortwave infrared camera, the full-motion video from each which can be viewed as separate video streams or fused together. In this way, one drone can provide several distinct video “feeds”, each of which can be separately assessed for specific kinds of information.

The MQ-9 is also capable of carrying an advanced signals intelligence (SIGINT) pod, producing yet another stream of data that would need to be evaluated. It is not known if this pod was in operation over Kabul on Aug. 29. However, according to The New York Times, U.S. officials claim that that the U.S. intercepted communications between the white corolla and the suspected ISIS-K safehouse (in actuality, the N.I.E. country director’s home/N.I.E. headquarters) instructing the driver (Ahmadi) to make several stops.

Logic dictates that the U.S. military kept at least one, and possible more, MQ-9’s over Kabul at all times, providing continuous intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance overwatch during the conduct of the evacuation operation. The primary MQ-9 unit operating in the Persian Gulf region at the time was the 46^th Expeditionary Attack Squadron, which operated out of Ali Al Salem Air Base, in Kuwait.

Given the logistical realities associated with drone operations over Afghanistan, which required a lengthy flight down the Persian Gulf, skirting Iran, and then over Pakistan, before reaching the central Afghanistan region, the 46^th Expeditionary Attack Squadron more than likely forward deployed a ground control station used to take off and recover the MQ-9 drones, along with an undisclosed number of drone aircraft, to Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar.

The time of flight from Al Udeid to Kabul for an MQ-9 drone is between 5 and 6 hours; a block 5 version of the MQ-9, such as those operated by the 46^th Expeditionary Attack Squadron, can operate for up to 27 hours. It is possible that a single MQ-9 drone was on station for the entire period between when Ahmadi was first taken under surveillance until the decision to launch the Hellfire missile that killed him was made; it is also very possible that there was a turnover between one MQ-9 and another at some point during the mission. In either instance, a long-duration mission such as that being conducted on Aug. 29, would have been logistically and operationally challenging.

The crew from the 46^th Expeditionary Attack Squadron was responsible for launching and recovering the MQ-9 drone from its operating base; once in the air, control of the drone was turned over to drone crews assigned to the 432^nd Expeditionary Air Wing, based out of Creech Air Base, in Nevada. These crews work with the Persistent Attack and Reconnaissance Operations Center, or PAROC, also located at Creech Air Base.

The PAROC coordinates between the 432nd Wing Operations Center, which serves as the focal point for combat operations, and the Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism Headquarters and Central Command Combined Air Operations Center, both out of Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The PAROC serves as a singular focal point for mission directors, weather analysis, intelligence analysis and communications for drone operations over Afghanistan.

At each node in this complex command and control system, the video feeds from the drone(s) involved can be monitored and assessed by personnel. Such an overlapping network of agencies was implied by Gen. Said in his presentation, when he spoke of interviewing “29 individuals, including 22 directly involved in the strike” for his report.

Given that Gen. Said’s remit is limited to the military forces involved, it is not known if he interviewed another party reportedly involved in the drone strike—the C.I.A. Multiple sources have indicated that C.I.A. analysts were involved in evaluating the video feeds associated with the drone strike of Aug. 29, and that they provided input regarding the nature of the target.

C.I.A. Involvement

Aerial view of C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia. (Carol M. Highsmith, Wikimedia Commons)

The C.I.A. operates what is known as the Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Center out of its Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. There, a fusion cell of intelligence analysts drawn from across the U.S. intelligence community monitor a wall of flat screen monitors that beamed live, classified video feeds from drones operating from around the world, including Afghanistan.

The C.I.A.’s involvement suggests that because of the confusion surrounding the legality of drone operations in Afghanistan following the collapse of the Afghan government, the Biden administration opted to conduct drone operations under Title 50, covering covert C.I.A. activities, as opposed to Title 10, which cover operations conducted under traditional military chain of command.

In any event, what is known is that an MQ-9 drone, flown by pilots from the 432^nd Expeditionary Wing operating out of Creech Air Base, in Nevada, was surveilling a specific neighborhood in Kabul on the morning of Aug. 29, where intelligence sources indicated an ISIS-K terrorist cell was in the process of converting a white Toyota Corolla into a weapon—perhaps a car bomb—that was to be used against U.S. forces operating at Kabul International Airport.

The U.S. forces operating in Afghanistan were on high alert—on Aug. 26, ISIS-K fighters had launched a coordinated attack using suicide bombers and gunmen on a U.S. checkpoint at the airport, killing 13 U.S. service members and some 170 Afghans, including nearly 30 Taliban fighters.

According to a timeline put together by The New York Times, Zemari Ahmadi left his home, located in a neighborhood about two kilometers west of the airport, in a white Toyota Corolla owned by his employer, Nutrition and Education International (N.E.I.). Ahmadi had worked with N.E.I. since 2006 as an electrical engineer and volunteer, helping distribute food to Afghans in need.

The country director for N.E.I. had called Ahmadi at around 8:45 am, asking him if he could stop by the country director’s home and pick up a laptop computer. Ahmadi left his home at around 9 am, and drove to the country director’s home, located about five kilometers northwest of the airport. The drone operators were surveilling the compound where the country director lived, having assessed that it was an ISIS-K safe house.

It is at this point the intelligence failures that led to the murder of Ahmadi and his family began. The country director, whose name has been omitted for security reasons, is a well-known individual whose biometric information, including place of work and residence, has been captured by a highly classified Department of Defense biometric system called the Automatic Biometric Identification System, or ABIS. ABIS, part of what the U.S. calls its strategy of “Identity Dominance”, was specifically set up to help identify targets for drone strikes and was said to contain more than 8.1 million records.

The ABIS, when integrated with other data bases such as the Afghanistan Financial Management Information System, which held extensive details on foreign contractors, and an Economy Ministry database that compiled all international development and aid agencies (such as N.E.I.) into a singular searchable Geographic Information System, or G.I.S., gives an analyst the ability to scroll a cursor over a map of Kabul, coming to rest over a given building, and immediately accessing information about who resides there.

Both the country director and Ahmadi, as Afghans affiliated with western aid organizations who moved with relative freedom around Kabul, were included in these data bases.

Massive Intelligence Failure

The MQ-1 Predator unmanned aircraft. (U.S. Air Force, Leslie Pratt)

The fact that a U.S. intelligence analyst could confuse the known residence/headquarters of a U.S.-funded aid organization with an ISIS-K safe house is inexcusable, if indeed these data bases were available for query.

It is possible that (because of the transitional environment) the events of Aug. 29 transpired with no definitive rules of engagement in place, and that the command and control structure was in a high state of flux, so that the data base was either shut down or otherwise inaccessible. In any case, the inability to access data that had been collected over the course of many years by the United States for the express purpose of helping facilitate the counterterrorism-associated targeting of armed drones represents an intelligence failure of the highest order.

The community of analysts, spread across several time zones and distinct geographical regions, representing agencies with differing legal and operational frameworks, began monitoring the movement and activities of Ahmadi. He picked up a laptop computer from the country director, which was stored in a black carrying case of the kind typically used to carry laptop computers. Unfortunately for Ahmadi, the ISIS-K suicide bombers who attacked the U.S. position at Kabul International Airport on Aug. 26 carried bombs that had been placed in similar black carrying cases, reinforcing what Gen. Said called a chain of “confirmation bias.”

Ahmadi then went on a series of excursions, picking up coworkers at their homes, dropping them off at various locations, stopping for lunch, and distributing food. Near the end of the day, Ahmadi returned to the N.E.I. headquarters where he used a hose to fill up plastic containers with water to bring home (there was a water shortage throughout Kabul, and Ahmadi’s home had no running water.)

Zemari Ahmadi. (Ptipti/Wikimedia Commons)

Analysts watching Ahmadi’s actions somehow mistook the act of using a garden hose to fill plastic jugs with water as him picking up plastic containers containing high explosives that could be used in a car bomb—another case of “confirmation bias.”

At least 22 sets of eyes were watching this, using multi-spectral cameras capable of ascertaining movement of water, temperature variations, all in high-resolution video feeds. How not a single pair of eyes picked up on what was really happening is, yet again, a huge failure of intelligence, either in terms of training as an imagery analyst, poor analytical skills, or both.

But even with all of this “confirmation bias” weighing in favor of classifying Ahmadi as an “imminent threat”, neither he nor his family were condemned to die. Under International Human Rights Law, lethal force is legal only if it is required to protect life (making lethal force proportionate) and there is no other means, such as capture, of preventing that threat to life (making lethal force necessary).

If Ahmadi’s car, upon leaving the country director’s home, had headed toward a U.S.-controlled checkpoint around Kabul International Airport, then U.S. personnel monitoring the drone feed would have had every right, under the procedures then in place, to consider Ahmadi a “continuing imminent threat” to American life, thereby freeing the drone crew to fire a Hellfire missile at the vehicle to destroy it.

Instead, he drove home, pulling into the interior courtyard of his building complex. At this juncture, Ahmadi and his vehicle could not, under any circumstance, be considered an active threat to American life. Moreover, with the vehicle immobile and still under observation, options could now be considered for “other means”, such as capture, to remove the vehicle and Ahmadi as a potential future threat.

While the U.S. and the Taliban had an implicit agreement that U.S. forces would not operate outside the security perimeter of Kabul International Airport, the Taliban were fully capable of sending a force to investigate and, if necessary, detain Ahmadi and his vehicle. The U.S. admits to actively sharing intelligence with the Taliban and acknowledge that the Taliban had proven itself capable of acting decisively to neutralize threats based upon the information provided by the U.S.

The Taiban interest in stopping a suicide bomber was manifest—they had suffered twice as many killed than the U.S. in the Aug. 26 attack on the Airport, and were sworn enemies of ISIS-K. All the U.S. had to do was pass the coordinates of Ahmadi’s home to the Taliban, and then sit back and watch as the Taliban responded. If the Taliban failed to act, or Ahmadi attempted to drive away from his home in the white corolla, then the U.S. would be within its rights under international law to attack the car using lethal force.

However, to get there the U.S. first needed to cross the legal hurdle of exhausting “other means” of neutralizing the potential threat posed by Ahmadi’s car. They did not, and in failing to do so, were in violation of international law when, instead, they opted to launch a Hellfire missile.

Ignoring the Children

The decision to fire the Hellfire missile was made within two minutes of Ahmadi arriving at his home. According to The New York Times, when he arrived, his car was swarmed by children—his, and those of his brother, who lived with him. For some reason, the presence of children was not picked up by any of the U.S. military personnel monitoring the various video feeds tracking Ahmadi.

The drone crew determined that there was a “reasonable certainty”—the Trump-era standard, not the “near certain” standard that would have been in place had the Biden administration published its completed policy guidance document regarding drone strikes—that there were no civilians present. How such a conclusion can be reached when, on review, the video clearly showed the presence of children two minutes before the Hellfire missile was launched—has not been explained.

But Gen. Said wasn’t the only one who saw children on the video feed. At the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Center in Langley, at least one analyst working in the fusion cell there saw the children as well. According to media reports, the C.I.A. was only able to communicate this information to the drone operators who fired the Hellfire after the missile had been launched, part of the breakdown in communications that Gen. Said attributed to the chain of mistakes that led to the deaths of Ahmadi and his family.

Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said. (U.S. Air Force)

What Gen. Said failed to discuss was the communications channels that the C.I.A. information had to travel to get to the drone operators. Did the C.I.A. have a direct line to the pilots of the 432^nd Expeditionary Wing? Or did the C.I.A. need to go through the Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism headquarters, the Central Command’s Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC), the Persistent Attack and Reconnaissance Operations Center, or PAROC, or the 432nd Wing Operations Center, which communicated directly with the drone crew?

According to The New York Times, the tactical commander made the decision to launch the Hellfire missile, another procedural holdover from the Trump-era, which did away with the need for high-level approval of the target before lethal force could be applied.

The professionalism of those involved in reviewing the drone feed was further called into question when the analysts, observing a post-strike explosion of a propane tank in the courtyard of Ahmadi’s apartment complex, mistook the visual signature produced as being that of a car bomb containing significant quantities of high explosive.

Gen. Said’s report covers up a multitude of mistakes under the guise of “confirmation bias.” In his report he notes that “[t]he overall threat to U.S. forces at [Kabul International Airport] at the time was very high,” with intelligence indicating that follow-on attacks were “imminent.” Perhaps most importantly, Gen. Said writes that “[t]hree days prior, such an attack resulted in the death of 13 service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians. The events that led to the strike and the assessments of this investigation should be considered with this context in mind.”

If that is indeed the standard, then Gen. Said must consider the words of President Biden at a press conference held on Aug. 26, after the ISIS-K attack on Kabul International Airport. “We will hunt you down and make you pay,” Biden said. “We will not forgive, we will not forget.”

Revenge was clearly a motive, with the drone operators leaning forward to put into action the President’s directive to hunt the enemy down and make them pay. Did the drone operators see children in the video feed? They say no, even though the C.I.A. analysts saw them prior to the launching of the Hellfire missile, and Gen. Said saw them after the fact.

These same drone operators were riding high on four years of “hands off” operations, where they were free to launch drone strikes under a “reasonable certainty” standard which was put in place knowing that the result would be more innocent civilians killed.

“Some of the Obama administration rules were getting in the way of good strikes,” one U.S. official is quoted saying about the need for looser restrictions. Gen. Said makes no reference to the impact the Trump-era policy had on conditioning drone operators to be more tolerant of civilian casualties, even to the extent that they looked the other way if acknowledgement of their presence could prevent a “good strike.”

What’s Wrong With the Program

A BQM-74E drone launches from the flight deck of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen (U.S. Navy photo by Cryptologic Technician 1st Class Carl T. Jacobson/Released)

The drone strike that killed Ahmadi and his family in many ways embodies all that was wrong with the U.S. lethal drone program as it was implemented in Afghanistan and elsewhere, failing to further legitimate U.S. national security objectives while harming U.S. credibility by wantonly killing innocent civilians.

A case can be made for criminal negligence on the part of all parties involved in the murder of Ahmadi and his family. But it is unlikely that any such charges will ever be put forward. The attack clearly violates international law, although the Biden administration will claim otherwise.

Gen. Said acknowledges so-called “confirmation bias” without getting to the bottom of what caused those involved in the drone strike to get it so wrong. Gen. Said alludes to systemic problems, such as the need to “enhance sharing of overall mission situational awareness during execution” and review “pre-strike procedures used to assess presence of civilians.”

But systemic (i.e., procedural) errors can only explain away so much. At some point the professionalism of the individuals involved must come under scrutiny, both in terms of their technical qualifications to carry out their respective assigned missions, as well as their moral character in willingly tolerating the deaths of innocent civilians in the name of mission accomplishment. Gen. Said leaves open the possibility that someone, somewhere, in the chain of command of these individuals can decide that the events of that day was a byproduct of “subpar performance” resulting in some form of “adverse action.”

That, however, is just another way of excusing murder, of tolerating a war crime committed in the name of the United States.

The day after Ahmadi and his family were murdered by U.S. forces, ISIS-K, operating from a safe house near to where the N.E.I. country director lived, used a modified white Toyota Corolla to launch rockets toward the U.S. positions in and around Kabul International Airport.

Fortunately, there were no causalities. But neither was the ISIS-K attack thwarted by a U.S. drone program that had been tipped off in advance about the nature and location of the attack. The ability to kill innocent civilians while failing to interdict genuine security threats is perhaps the most accurate epitaph one could ascribe to the U.S. lethal drone program in Afghanistan.

consortiumnews.com

Russia is investigating reports of Turkish attack drones being deployed for the first time in Ukraine’s eight-year civil war. The Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) under the command of the Kiev regime claimed that the drones were used earlier this week in combat against ethnic Russian rebels.

This is a potentially dramatic escalation in the smoldering war. For it marks the direct involvement of NATO member Turkey in the conflict. Up to now, the United States and other NATO states have been supplying lethal weaponry to the Kiev regime to prosecute its war against the breakaway self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

American, British and Canadian military advisors are also known to have carried out training missions with UAF combat units. Britain is in negotiations to sell Brimstone missiles to the Ukrainian navy.

But the apparent deployment of Turkish attack drones is a potential game-changer. Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov hinted at the graveness when he announced Wednesday that Moscow was carrying out urgent investigations about the purported participation of Turk-made Bayraktar TB2 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

Previously, Lavrov rebuked Turkey to stay out of the conflict and to not feed Ukrainian hostilities.

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that NATO’s support to the Kiev regime was posing a direct threat to Russia’s national security. The Kremlin’s assessment can only be more alarmed on the back of NATO member Turkey being now implicated as one of the war’s protagonists. In all likelihood, Turkish military personnel would be required to assist in operating the drone flights.

The war in the Eastern Ukraine region known as Donbass has persisted for nearly eight years. It was triggered after a NATO-backed coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014 against an elected government that had been aligned with Russia. The new regime was characterized by anti-Russian politics and Neo-Nazi ideology. The ethnic Russian population of Donbass rejected the Western-backed regime, leading to a war. The ethnic Russian people of Crimea likewise voted in a referendum in March 2014 to secede from Ukraine and to join the Russian Federation with which it has centuries of shared history. Kiev’s forces are accused of aggression and potential war crimes from shelling civilian homes and infrastructure. This week an oil depot in Donetsk was bombed by a drone. It is not clear if the drone was one of the Turkish weapons.

Western governments and NATO accuse Russia of invading Eastern Ukraine and of annexing Crimea. Moscow rejects that as an absurd distortion of reality. Such vilification is no doubt partly why Russia cut off diplomatic links last week with NATO.

Russia says it is not a direct party to the Ukraine conflict. It points to the Minsk Accord negotiated in 2015 with France and Germany which clearly states that Russian is not a party to the conflict. The accord obliges Kiev to grant autonomy to the Donbass region. However, the Kiev regime has stubbornly refused to implement the Minsk deal, even though the incumbent President Volodymyr Zelensky was elected in 2019 on election promises to pursue a political settlement.

The emerging Kiev-Ankara axis is not out of the blue. Turkey has been voicing increasing support for Ukraine. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently made provocative declarations about not recognizing Crimea as Russian territory and returning the peninsula to Ukraine.

Last week too saw the visit to Kiev by US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin during which the Pentagon chief lambasted Russia as the “aggressor” in the Ukraine conflict. Austin also truculently told Moscow that the latter’s red line about Ukraine joining NATO was null and void. As if to underline the Pentagon’s determination, two nuclear-capable B-1B bombers flew from Texas to the Black Sea where they were warded off by Russian fighter jets.

Then there was also the NATO defense ministers’ summit in Brussels last week out of which a new “master plan to contain Russia” was unveiled. German defense minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer went on to say nuclear weapons were needed in Europe to contain Russia. Her comments provoked a furious response from Moscow which summoned the German military chargé d’affaires in protest.

Moreover, it is highly pertinent that France and Germany – the two other guarantors of the Minsk Accord along with Russia – have remained silent despite the continual violations of the ceasefire in Donbass by the Kiev regime’s forces. Every week, there are offensive shelling and mortar attacks across the Contact Line hitting civilian sites in Donetsk. Yet Paris and Berlin keep a stony silence. This is but a silent complicity in condoning aggression.

All in all, the signals amount to a bright green light from Washington and its NATO allies to the Kiev regime to step up hostilities against the Donbass. That ultimately means Russia.

Now with reports of Turkish drones augmenting the firepower of the Ukrainian Armed Forces that evinces NATO effectively at war on Russia’s doorstep.

Turkey’s drones have been deployed in several recent conflicts: in Libya in support of the Tripoli-based government against the Russian-backed forces of Khalifa Haftar; in Syria against the Russian-backed Syrian government forces; in Nagorno-Karabakh in support of Azerbaijan against Armenia. In the latter war, Ankara’s drones were believed to have played a decisive role in giving Azerbaijan the upper hand.

Ironically, when Russian leader Vladimir Putin hosted Erdogan last month in Sochi the two appeared to engage in an amicable exchange. The Turkish president has also recently chafed at relations with NATO over alleged interference in Turkey’s internal affairs. There has been chatter of Ankara moving towards Moscow in geopolitical alignment. That seems way off the mark.

For as far as Ukraine goes, Ankara seems to be setting the pace for NATO’s deepening involvement in the country’s war. Given NATO’s collective defense pact and already fraught relations with Moscow, mercurial Erdogan is tempting a very dangerous fate.

So hey they’ve started mounting sniper rifles on robodogs, which is great news for anyone who was hoping they’d start mounting sniper rifles on robodogs.

At an exhibit booth in the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting and exhibition, Ghost Robotics (the military-friendly competitor to the better-known Boston Dynamics) proudly showed off a weapon that is designed to attach to its quadruped bots made by a company called SWORD Defense Systems.

“The SWORD Defense Systems Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle (SPUR) was specifically designed to offer precision fire from unmanned platforms such as the Ghost Robotics Vision-60 quadruped,” SWORD proclaims on its website. “Chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor allows for precision fire out to 1200m, the SPUR can similarly utilize 7.62×51 NATO cartridge for ammunition availability. Due to its highly capable sensors the SPUR can operate in a magnitude of conditions, both day and night. The SWORD Defense Systems SPUR is the future of unmanned weapon systems, and that future is now.”

Latest lethality 6.5 #creedmoor sniper payload from @SWORDINT. Check out the latest partner payloads @AUSAorg Wash DC. Keeping US and allied #sof #warfighter equipped with the latest innovations. @USSOCOM #defense #defence #NationalSecurity #drone #robotics pic.twitter.com/Dvk6OvL3Bu

— Ghost Robotics (@Ghost_Robotics) October 11, 2021

Back in May the US Air Force put out a video on the “Robotic Ghost Dog” these weapons are designed to be used with, showing the machines jogging, standing up after being flipped over, and even dancing. All of which becomes a lot less cutesy when you imagine them performing these maneuvers while carrying a gun designed to blow apart skulls from a kilometer away.

At one point in the video a Senior Master Sergeant explains to the host how these robodogs can be affixed with all kinds of equipment like communications systems, explosive ordnance disposal attachments, gear to test for chemicals and radiation, and the whole time you’re listening to him list things off you’re thinking “Guns. Yeah guns. You can attach guns to them, why don’t you just say that?”

The SPUR prototype is just one of many different weapons we’ll surely see tested for use with quadruped robots in coming years, and eventually we’ll likely see its successors tested on impoverished foreigners in needless military interventions by the United States and/or its allies. They will join other unmanned weapons systems in the imperial arsenal like the USA’s notorious drone program, South Korea’s Samsung SGR-A1, the Turkish Kargu drone which has already reportedly attacked human beings in Libya without having been given a human command to do so, and the AI-assisted robotic sniper rifle that was used by Israeli intelligence in coordination with the US government to assassinate an Iranian scientist last year.

And we may be looking at a not-too-distant future in which unmanned weapons systems are sought out by wealthy civilians as well.

In the new episode of Medium’s Playback podcast, @rushkoff reads his story ‘Survival of the Richest,’ about the billionaires plotting to survive the apocalypse while maintaining their power, then discusses it with host @manoushz. Listen: https://t.co/dQgRC9v4Ir pic.twitter.com/DYAYcqUpLC

— Medium (@Medium) September 5, 2018

In 2018 the influential author and professor Douglas Rushkoff wrote an article titled “Survival of the Richest” in which he disclosed that a year earlier he had been paid an enormous fee to meet with five extremely wealthy hedge funders. Rushkoff says the unnamed billionaires sought out his advice for strategizing their survival after what they called “the event”, their term for the collapse of civilization via climate destruction, nuclear war or some other catastrophe which they apparently viewed as likely enough and close enough to start planning for.

Rushkoff writes that eventually it became clear that the foremost concern of these plutocrats was maintaining control over a security force which would protect their estates from the rabble in a post-apocalyptic world where money might not mean anything. I encourage you to read the following paragraph from the article carefully, because it says so much about how these people see our future, our world, and their fellow human beings:

“This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.”

Something to keep in mind if you ever find yourself fervently hoping that the world will be saved by billionaires.

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has said that more than half of Silicon Valley’s billionaires have invested in some type of “apocalypse insurance” such as an underground bunker to ensure they survive whatever disasters ensue from the status quo they currently benefit so immensely from. The New Yorker has published an article about this mega-rich doomsday prepper phenomenon as well. We may be sure that military forces aren’t the only ones planning on having eternally loyal killing machines protecting their interests going forward.

We are ruled by warmongers and sociopaths, and none of them have healthy plans for our future. They are not kind, and they are not wise. They’re not even particularly intelligent. Unless we can find some way to pry their fingers from the steering wheel of our world so we can turn away from the direction we are headed, things will probably get very dark and scary.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

As the US was making its exit from Afghanistan, on August 26th, thirteen US servicemen and -women were killed in a terrorist bomb at the Kabul airport; 20 more were wounded. The President saluted the coffins at Dover Air Force Base. Given the nature of a war like Afghanistan, this bombing put pressure on US forces to respond in kind with some kind of tit-for-tat violent attack.

Three days after the bombing, the US military reported it had destroyed an ISIS target, a white Toyota Corolla. Drone operators had followed the car for some time. By late afternoon the drone operators and their chiefs made a determination that the man driving the Corolla was an ISIS operative who had been loading bombs into his trunk — ready to be delivered and detonated. It was a GO! to “take him out.” As the Corolla pulled up to a house, a Hellfire missile obliterated it. The military reported a secondary explosion — ie. evidence of those bombs in the trunk.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration was fighting tooth and nail against a right-wing Republican onslaught suggesting the President was suffering from dementia and was the worst kind of inept commander-in-chief imaginable. He was raked over the coals for “leaving behind” over 100 Americans and many Afghans who had worked for Americans or still worked for them in some capacity. The press pushed hard for the government to ease up on visas and mind-boggling red tape to get these Afghans away from the Taliban and to safety. For a brief moment, the drone hit on the white Corolla was seen as a positive act: We’d gotten revenge on the ISIS bombers.

[Marine General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the last commander of US forces in Afghanistan, making his mea culpa speech, and the little brother of one of the dead children in the drone attack.]

Then, in the September 11 issue of The New York Times, after the newspaper had investigated on the ground, we learned that the drone hit on an ISIS terrorist bomber was, in fact, a total screw-up; the person hit was, in fact, not an ISIS operator but a respected 43-year-old Afghan working for an American aid enterprise who was loading water and food into his trunk to aid refugees. To make matters worse, as this honorable US ally was pulling up to his home, his kids — glad to see him! — rushed out to meet him. At that point, the Hellfire missile hit, leaving ten dead, seven of them children. And many wounded.

The Pentagon soon accepted the Times’ story of their lethal screw-up, and the last commandant in Afghanistan — Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. — fell on his sword and apologized. Reparations are on the way.

What are we to make of this story? Think of it not as a tit-for-tat gotcha! tale, but as a very human story involving flawed human beings. Think of all the various pressures working on all the characters in the story, all with differing motives. There’s the 43-year-old Afghan working for Americans and, as the Americans are leaving, concerned about his own family and his own people. There’s the drone operator working in an air-conditioned hut with a Diet Pepsi on the table in steady contact with his or her superiors anxious for a revenge killing. Let’s imagine the operator is a 27-year-old African American woman from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She joined the Army because she had few options after high school, and the military looked like a good opportunity. She went from national hero to baby killer in the blink of an eye. Her head must be spinning; she’s maybe in counseling. Everyone in the story is operating under tremendous uncertainty and fear (the Fog of War?) that can begin to play tricks with the mind. Now that it’s clear you were wrong, what do you do? Do you rationalize and tell yourself the mistake cost only ten lives, but if you’d been right, it could have been 35 dead American warriors — maybe a lot more? Does that make the screw-up better?  Decisions are difficult, and second-guessing leads to psychological stress. Maybe it’s best just to move on and forget about it. The Afghan family in question, of course, will not forget about it. They’re reportedly quite angry.

Shooting First and Asking Questions Later

Think back to the beginnings of the war. Think of George W. Bush and the idea you’re either with us or you’re against us. Think how Dick Cheney felt the need to go to “the dark side.” Think of all the lies and the self-serving garbage told to the American people by Donald Rumsfeld as they exploited 9/11 and set in motion not one, but two full-fledged wars. Shoot first, ask questions later was too often the literal strategy in these wars. Thus, the story of the dead aid worker and the seven innocent dead kids is the perfect metaphor for both Bush wars, Afghanistan and Iraq. Metaphors are ever present in our language and lives because — by suggesting something familiar can help explain a larger, more confusing matter — they help us get a grip on complex things. They work in the realm of pattern recognition. As metaphor, the disastrous final drone hit is a very blunt punctuation.

In its coverage of the story, Times reporter Alissa J. Rubin wrote this: “Over much of the last 20 years, the United States has repeatedly targeted the wrong people in its efforts to go after terrorists. … [T]here is a well-documented record of strikes that killed innocents people from almost the very first months of its presence in Afghanistan.” Decisions were made and the “evidence” to back them up was too often either fabricated or it was inadequate and distorted — while good information that did not support the cavalier use of violence was ignored. Too often, the intelligence was back-filled to justify what they wanted to do — what they felt they had to do, which was to respond violently to the forces that had attacked the most powerful nation in the world. The point was to throw US military power around (Shock & Awe) until the local terrorist hierarchy realized opposition was futile and cried “uncle.”

So now the Afghan War is over and the United States is interred with the Brits and Russia in the famous Afghan Graveyard of Empires. It’s ungraceful to say “We told you so.” But the antiwar Left did just that starting 20 years ago. Some kind of response to 9/11 was certainly necessary. But two massive military invasions that evolved into a “nation building” boondoggle?

If having fewer costly, losing wars in the future matters at all (and it may not for some) then we need to fundamentally re-think — in a time of profound technological transformation — how Americans relate to other people in the world. The fact we are able to bomb a place into the Stone Age doesn’t mean we should. For one, morally, the world won’t let us get away with that. The place to start is to understand why Afghanistan went so wrong while focusing on the ongoing diplomatic negotiations with the Taliban government of Afghanistan. These negotiations are going on in Qatar, the nation that created and operates the legitimate news operations of Al Jazeera. They host a huge US base. And dialogue with Taliban leaders is hardly new. Before 9/11, Taliban leaders made a number of trips to Texas to speak with oil companies about oil deals; they met with Governor George W. Bush. This was OK, as long as the topic was oil deals and profits. Now, it’s how to work with the Taliban to make post-war Afghanistan a livable nation.

Reports suggest the current negotiations between the US and the Taliban are working. Americans and Afghans who worked with the US continue to trickle out through various routes, one being planes from airports other than the one in Kabul. When you think about it, a Taliban leadership that has, like the Vietnamese before them, successfully driven the powerful United States military from their land does not want the US to linger as it exits; it wants a clean exit. The more we linger the trickier things will get for them. While the Taliban may have “won” the war, they know the US can still cause great destruction and havoc if it wants to.

The Taliban of 2021 are not the Taliban of 2001. We’re told 70-percent of Afghans have a smart phone and 30-percent of them are on social media. Combatants learn a lot from their enemies over 20 years of war, and that goes for both sides. Taliban leaders are facing food shortages and other crises. Hard-ball negotiations in conjunction with food shipments would be wise; plus, we have billions of dollars of Afghan money locked up that we could negotiate with. As folk wisdom has it, you get more with sugar than with salt.

I recently listened to Texas Senator Ted Cruz demagogue the messy complexities of Biden’s exit plan from Afghanistan. Cruz was grilling Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a hearing; he was arrogant and belligerent and focused almost entirely on the 13 dead soldiers from an ISIS bomb. Although it had been made public, he made no mention of the 10 allies we killed with a US drone strike in response to those dead soldiers. Cruz was trying to employ the ISIS bombing of 13 dead US soldiers as his easy metaphor for the entire war; as if, the 9/11 attack itself could be used as a metaphor for understanding the 20-year war US leaders set in motion to revenge that terrorist act. Cruz and company want to make the original provocation a metaphor for the US response. Metaphor doesn’t work that way; propaganda and bullshit work that way.

As someone who has opposed the Afghan and Iraq Wars from the very beginning, the fact is at this late date we have a US administration with the courage to exit from the 20 year war. Meanwhile, on one extreme, ISIS opposes the US withdrawal and wants to stir up violence to keep the US in Afghanistan as the decadent western, imperial Boogie Man that justifies their existence. While on the other side, domestic extremists like Senator Cruz are doing exactly the same thing: Trying their best with rhetoric to keep US troops in Afghanistan — in the words of Fox’s Sean Hannity, to protect Americans and Afghans “stuck behind enemy lines.” It’s the right playing a classic Stabbed In The Back Myth blame game. The fact is Afghanistan’s borders are not the same thing as “enemy lines” — especially in the internet age.

In the US pursuit of American exceptionalism and self-interest, we conveniently forget how the Taliban came to leadership in Afghanistan. The United States funded and armed a mujahadeen force in Afghanistan to oppose the Russian occupation; some suggest the US, beginning under President Carter, sought to create a “Russian Vietnam.” When that worked and the Russians pulled out — so did the United States!  Afghanistan was left a roiling mess with a leadership vacuum. Importantly, it was the Taliban (the word means students or seekers) who filled that vacuum. Coming out of an especially brutal war and faced with a broken society, the Taliban managed the country with a very harsh hand. But the same goes for the Wahabi Bedouins in Saudi Arabia and leadership in many other places.

Everything changed with 9/11. A terrified and furious United States began to manage itself, not unlike the Taliban, with a harsh hand. Susan Sontag publicly said: “By all means let’s mourn together; but let’s not be stupid together.” But speaking truth to power at that juncture wasn’t encouraged. Sontag and others like her were damned and threatened to the point of silence. The need to project US imperial military violence was overwhelming, lest we lose the edge as the dominant world power.

Who’s To Blame?

In a recent New York Times column, Jamelle Bouie makes a very good case that, “The war on terror eroded the institutions of American democracy and fed our most reactionary impulses.” Thus, Bouie finds George W. Bush’s September 11, 2021, speech in Shanksville, PA, the site of Flight 93’s crash, to be disturbingly hypocritical. “The truth is that Bush is one of the leading architects of our present crisis.”

Former President Bush has been in hiding for a long time. His regime can arguably be seen as providing the US one of its worst foreign policy disasters. Since leaving office, he’s spent a lot of time developing a soft, human image as a painter of wounded veterans, the men and women he sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. One might argue he’s a wounded president looking for restitution. Now, with his Shanksville speech, he wants to have it both ways: He’s against Trump and Trumpism, while his regime arguably initiated many of the un-democratic problems that came to full flower in the Trump administration.

Let’s start with Bush’s election in 2000. Bush lost the popular vote; he only won the Florida recount because the Republican ground forces there were much more insistent and potentially more violent than Gore’s Democrats. The emotions went like this: Democrats had had their eight years; now it was the Republicans turn! The deal was sealed by a smelly Supreme Court ruling. Even the supreme court justices who sealed the deal seemed to know it smelled, because they said the ruling could not be used as precedent — as they sat in robes atop a legal system based entirely on precedent. Now, of course, Republicans have moved on to even more obnoxious and un-democratic postures, with the potential for violence and the possibility of more Supreme Court chicanery a looming reality.

In his column, Bouie quotes from Spencer Ackerman’s book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump:

“A war that never defined its enemy became an opportunity for the so-called MAGA coalition of white Americans to merge their grievances in an atmosphere of righteous emergency. . . . [T]his unlocked a panoply of authoritarian possibilities that extended far beyond the war on terror.” The idea of an enemy was shifted and shuffled around so that it now included US citizens. You’re either with us or against us. As a Trump sign in my neighborhood declares: “Make liberals cry again!”

In this sense, Donald Trump, Trumpism and the crippling of American democracy are not new phenomena. The roots are in the post WWII rise of US imperialist militarism and wars like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, corrupt election messes like 2000 in Florida and in the fundamental dishonesty of the George W. Bush administration and the preposterous idea of Mr. Bush as a “war president” appeasing scared citizens crying out for violent revenge. Like a bad prosecutor of a sensational murder needing an accused to execute, it didn’t seem to matter whether the target of the vengeful violence was guilty of the crime in question.

As such, George W. Bush and his administration provided the US with a suppurating disaster that no one until Joe Biden had the temerity to end. It left a terrible legacy. We need to apply the blame for the Afghan debacle where it belongs before we can even begin to get a grip on our wasteful militarism.

thiscantbehappening.net

(Click on the image to enlarge)

By Brian TERRELL

The world and its affairs have been turned upside down, and overnight the elite’s game plan was laid out bare for the world to see: the use of new coercive technologies, AI, automation, and transhumanism.

The public has experienced the roll-out of the new normal regime through a series of sudden changes such as lockdowns and requirements for new kinds of current medical documentation in order to preserve the right of travel and work.

With the ‘new normal’, the ‘great reset’, or ‘building back better’, are we fair in asking if this is their last, best, and final? It is certainly strange that Klaus Schwab, a man who presents so poorly and provokes such suspicion among the audience, would have been rolled out as best spokesman for this endeavor.

When smart cities entered the popular debate, it was clear that technical colleges and universities were being actively propagandized by vectors representing this agenda. These can be understood as a type of large-scale housing project for a post-labor economy that uses control over access to electrical power and proximity to delivery drones as its model.

Smart vehicles and drones are said to expedite delivery

The outlines of a new social contract such as Klaus Schwab’s; that an academic may have penned such a thing or that society might be discussing it, is normal and even important. But that his ideas are being rolled out as the new reality we must accept, is most surely an affront to civil society and human dignity. It is an attack on pluralism and constitutional systems around the world.

Yet a part of this agenda involves what is arguably the end of humanity as we have known it, perhaps the end of mankind itself if defined a certain way. We are naturally being assured that this is yet the beginning of a new kind of man.

All of this has the frightening look and feel of a ruling class that has just jumped from one way of doing things over to some grand new singular idea.

The particular publicly promoted culture of the elite, of the ruling class, necessarily bears the marks of social ‘good’ and social ‘permissibility’, because this whole public display is for popular consumption and has been selected just for that reason. As we have developed in past works, they merely use this discursive framework because it disarms the public. In developing on describing the aspirations and modus operandi of technocracy in rising, Alastair Crooke explains in Is the Era Finally Coming to an End?

“We are dealing here with the ideology of an aspirant ruling class that aims to hoard wealth and position, whilst flaunting its immaculate progressive and globalist credentials. Intractable culture wars, and an epistemic crisis, in which key factual and scientific questions have been politicised, is essentially nothing more than a bid to retain power, by those who stand at the apex of this ‘Creative Class’ – a tight circle of hugely wealthy oligarchs.

Even so, schools are pressured to teach a single version of history, private corporations sack employees for deviant opinions, and cultural institutions act as guardians of orthodoxy. The prototype for these practices is the U.S., which still proclaims its singular history and divisions as the source of emulation for every contemporary society.”

For much of the 20^th century the institutions implored us to believe that socially directed labor does not fundamentally produce the origin of value, only later to find that at the end of that era only this truth could explain the crisis that AI and automation bring.

Because Robots do not Eat or Own Things

So much of the economy is simply people washing each other’s clothes. The rise of automation and AI makes some great number of humanity, greater than some 9/10th’s of the population, entirely redundant in terms of labor force.

Therefore, the intentional slow-down of business not only accomplishes the obvious upwards redistribution of wealth and further consolidating corporate monopoly “capitalism”, but in the long-term establishes new efficiency matrixes regarding the actual optimal human population size at this particular time.

And yet we have a very serious problem. New coercive technologies have been developed, while other liberatory technologies have been suppressed, to control the great mass of humanity. Yet there’s much more, it is that a whole new period can be ushered in, within which population reduction is a goal. In relation to this is the birth of a new type of man, who is beyond man and also no longer man.

In Klaus Schwab’s book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016), it is clear that transhumanism is a project which aims to integrate cybernetic technologies and nano-tech to transform human beings at the level of DNA (ch. 2.1.3 Biological, Megatrends, The Fourth Industrial Revolution).

Schwab implores us in this section of the book to set-aside the admittedly grave and serious ethical questions these raise, and proceeds to the assertion that these hold the potential to solve the present economic and ecological problems decisively and positively.

If we take these at face value, perhaps the proposals such as smart cities can seem attractive as solutions. But there is high danger in this naiveté.

Because Schwab writes his text in the language of European center-left social-democracy, which is the legitimating ideology in the Trans-Atlantic sphere, the real and truly unspeakable conclusions which one would necessarily have to infer from the text, are left unsaid.

Yet we have large sectors of the staff and employees of the so-called humanitarian spheres, including health and education NGO’s, and the university systems, believing that the proposed changes are humanitarian. Schwab makes explicit overtures to this theme throughout the text.

We must understand to the contrary that the use of nano-tech, cybernetics, and other transhumanist technologies which are proposed to be integrated into the human organism are not what they seem. We are approached with the idea that these only enhance and do not direct thinking, and that these merely work to assist in the body’s functions, longevity, cognitive capacity and so forth.

But this would be true only for the elite themselves along with some other layer. For the rest of humanity, the use of oncoviruses through mandatory inoculation, as well as other forms of biological warfare as a class-war weapon could be the norm.

Whatever future population will remain after depopulation efforts, the resources at the disposal for this remaining population per capita will be less than presently enjoyed by those of the middle-class populations in 1st world countries. This seems counterintuitive, if one believes there is some aim of improving the living conditions for the population that remains. But here we confront smart cities.

As we have discussed previously, this involves using Tokyo as an example in terms of living spaces – 150 square foot apartments with low ceiling heights. There are even greater dangers to the development of so-called smart cities which like panopticons are large prison networks.

The development of these kinds of arrangements works against decentralized living models as well. They rely upon the same supply line frailties which in turn will justify the further development of the police state, using cyberterrorism as a pretext.

In addition, all energy consumed will be tracked in the apartment with ‘smart appliances’ that will send the data back to monitoring and enforcement agencies. The aim of smart cities is to create the hydraulic despotism as discussed in our past discussion of oriental despotism.

The Single-Minded Crisis

It all does seem like a new idea, indeed, has been decided upon and rolled out. Not an invitation for a conversation, not a proposal that we get a referendum on. Just rolled out over the heads of the public.

The disastrous result we have encountered through the formalization of anti-democratic technocratic institutions which want to rule indefinitely, is the erroneous belief that the technocratic elite today – who have ruled over the past century – are equipped to effect a social transformation that accounts for the new technologies. What the World Economic Forum publishes makes us aware that the elite are aware that their system is producing “undesired” inequities. Despite this, they are apparently aware of the limitations imposed on them by their position in relation to everything else.

The efforts and plans of the WEF assume and rely upon the existence of an interlocking directorate at the top level of Western society. Conversely, its vision is necessarily limited and its aims are directed in large part by the imposition of this directorate on a common vision. From this common vision, we begin to produce single-mindedness.

So they created semi-meritocratic educational institutions, recruiting and scouting fresh minds for the great new idea, so that the problem of single-mindedness can be overcome.

The Platonic-gnostic film ‘Dark City’ explains why these are attempts will fail. In this film, a dying alien race of strangers rules over abducted people on a small city-sized flat-earth island in deep-space, where the people believe they are living back on earth. This race is dying because they have a single consciousness and thought, and they are studying humans – for their diversity – to find the single-mind to emulate for the coming period.

What this race of strangers does is akin to what the elites today attempt to do with their think tanks and gestures towards meritocracy. The strangers are trying to distill from the collectivity of humanity the single new idea that will give them new life.

But the strangers are engaged in self-defeat, the solution they envision is at the root of their problem. A single consciousness cannot be used to replace the old consciousness of a single-minded entity if the problem is a single-consciousness problem. What makes humanity are the multiplicity of divergent consciousness and the differences through the diversity of their experiences.

The ruling class in the west presents itself like these strangers, having awareness of the crisis of their own making, but with a limited understanding of solutions to those things it can understand.

Concluding Thoughts

We can see that changes in the productive forces such as any sort of 4th Industrial Revolution must also come with vigorous public debate and referendums on planning for a post labor economy.

For humanity, a 4th Industrial Revolution is one that could promise to decentralize power because it decentralizes the entire cycle of commodity production and distribution. Therefore, we have the possibility of a new kind of elite, whose power is based upon more horizontally situated power vectors, flattened as a product of their localized domain of power. But the elites today are working against this idea of a 4IR.

We understand already that the elites have proposed smart cities and the use of these kinds of ‘hydraulic’ despotisms, as concentrations of power and society. They will control the power source and can control citizens’ access to amenities and rental objects to their smart apartment, based on social credit. Such a proposal is misanthropic and tyrannical in its essence, but is also the best that a single-minded consciousness can arrive at.

These kinds of smart cities will have a total size, that correspond to a total human population, a lower number to be sure – but what exactly to be determined by technocratic solutions that represent the sensibilities of the ruling class at the time.

Because there are any number of viable alternatives, all of which appear better than the best offer being made by the elites, the civilizational crisis in the west right now is a political crisis and one characterized by irreconcilable differences.

From the Ministry of Information:

U.S. airstrikes are helping to blunt Taliban advances across Afghanistan, although Pentagon officials warn American air power alone will not be enough to push back the insurgent offensive.

For weeks, the United States has been launching “over-the-horizon” strikes from its Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and from its carrier strike group in the Persian Gulf, hitting Taliban targets with a heavy mix of AC-130 gunships and MQ-9 Reaper drones.

But there have been questions regarding the effectiveness of the strikes, with Taliban officials claiming the group has captured seven provincial capitals over the past five days, and tweeting Tuesday that an eighth capital, Faizabad, in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province, was about to fall.

“We have every confidence that those strikes are hitting what we’re aiming at and are having an effect on the Taliban,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters Tuesday, saying additional strikes have been carried out “in just the last several days.”

I don’t believe the Pentagon. I think they are lying. The Afghan government has lost nine provinces in a week. The Pentagon has been lying to us for years about our prospects in Afghanistan. Why should we trust it now?

Oh look, we are literally begging the Taliban not to hurt us now:

American negotiators are trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the U.S. Embassy in Kabul if the extremist group overruns the capital in a direct challenge to the country’s government, two American officials said.

The effort, led by Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief American envoy in talks with the Taliban, seeks to stave off an evacuation of the embassy as the fighters rapidly seize cities across Afghanistan. The Taliban’s advance has put embassies in Kabul on high alert for a surge of violence in coming months, or even weeks, and forced consulates and other diplomatic missions elsewhere in the country to shut down.

American diplomats now are trying to determine how soon they may need to evacuate the U.S. Embassy should the Taliban prove to be more bent on destruction than a détente.

A reader who is a veteran of our Mideast wars writes:

It isn’t the Chinese that are kicking our asses. It is the Taliban that have completely shredded a government we spent trillion dollars to build up, and then lied about the progress and prowess of. And there will be no consequences for anyone, which is why the underlying issues won’t be fixed — and then the Chinese will kick our ass.

Nope, no consequences for anybody. It will shock us all how quickly this is forgotten, as our ruling class gets us ready to start another war we can’t win. Sure do wish we had listened to Pat Buchanan and the “unpatriotic conservatives” (in David Frum’s wording) who tried to keep us out of that region. Well, at least this frees up our military brass to fight the only war they seems to be able to win now: the culture war against its own non-woke soldiers.

theamericanconservative.com