By Wayne White
An excellent October 18 article, “The Myth of ‘Surgical Strikes’ on Iran“, by David Isenberg highlighted many of the conclusions of a sobering study by industrialist Khosrow Semnani on the potentially steep human cost of even a relatively selective attack against Iran’s diverse nuclear infrastructure. Semnani maintains that if the most important facilities [...]]]>By Wayne White
An excellent October 18 article, “The Myth of ‘Surgical Strikes’ on Iran“, by David Isenberg highlighted many of the conclusions of a sobering study by industrialist Khosrow Semnani on the potentially steep human cost of even a relatively selective attack against Iran’s diverse nuclear infrastructure. Semnani maintains that if the most important facilities are hit during work shifts, on site casualties could be as high as 10,000. Additionally, since a few of the most important Iranian nuclear installations are located near population centers, toxic nuclear materials unleashed by the attacks could possibly inflict an even higher number of casualties on civilians. Yet, Semnani focused most of his attention on the the casualties stemming from attacks focused on just one critical slice of the nuclear sector, with less detailed references to other targets (which he notes could involve a grand total of “400″) that might be struck in an especially robust air campaign against Iran. Indeed, if the US in particular decided to carry out such attacks, some detail on the potential — in fact likely — impact far beyond Iran’s most high-profile nuclear facilities and their immediate surroundings needs to be added to this picture to gain a full appreciation of the extent of potential Iranian casualties.Yet, as opposed to the relatively limited scope of any Israeli attack dictated by the extreme range involved and the smaller aerial strike package that could be deployed (in terms of extending casualties beyond those outlined in the article and Semnani’s study, both nuclear and civilian), many expect that any US attack on Iran’s nuclear capabilities would be far more comprehensive. Specifically, the US would be able to muster a much larger force of aircraft (and cruise missiles) with which to operate, and at far closer range. In order to clear paths to the targets cited, I am among those observers who anticipate in such a scenario waves of parallel US strikes against Iranian military communications, land-based anti-ship missile sites, any Iranian naval forces that could pose a potential threat to US warships operating offshore (as well as the Strait of Hormuz more generally), Iranian air force aircraft and bases, as well as Iranian anti-aircraft defenses. Finally, there might also be an attempt to take out as much of Iran’s ballistic missile testing, manufacturing, storage, and basing assets as possible. After all, Iran’s ambitious missile program relates directly to Iran’s ability to retaliate and might be associated with any eventual Iranian intent to weaponize and deliver nuclear weapons.
In other words, not only could a US assault (much as outlined in 2006 by the US military in its briefings of the Bush Administration, including potentially several thousand missions by combat aircraft) extend far beyond anything any reasonable individual could possibly regard as ”surgical,” the overall attack probably would more closely resemble a flat-out war. And, naturally, in the context of such a considerably more dire scenario, those attempting to estimate potential casualties (nuclear industry workers, civilians, as well as Iranian military personnel) would be advised to hike them up quite a bit higher.
- Wayne White is a Policy Expert with Washington’s Middle East Policy Council. He was formerly the Deputy Director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia (INR/NESA) and senior regional analyst. Find his author archive here.
In what is hopefully a wake-up call for US news media, the New York Time’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, has called on the paper to challenge its sources on the vagueness of the information they provide on drone strikes:
Some of the most important reporting on drone strikes has been done [...]]]>
In what is hopefully a wake-up call for US news media, the New York Time’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, has called on the paper to challenge its sources on the vagueness of the information they provide on drone strikes:
]]>Some of the most important reporting on drone strikes has been done at The Times, particularly the “kill list” article by Scott Shane and Jo Becker last May. Those stories, based on administration leaks, detailed President Obama’s personal role in approving whom drones should set out to kill.
Groundbreaking as that article was, it left a host of unanswered questions. The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed Freedom of Information requests to learn more about the drone program, so far in vain. The Times and the A.C.L.U. also want to know more about the drone killing of an American teenager in Yemen, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, also shrouded in secrecy.
But The Times has not been without fault. Since the article in May, its reporting has not aggressively challenged the administration’s description of those killed as “militants” — itself an undefined term. And it has been criticized for giving administration officials the cover of anonymity when they suggest that critics of drones are terrorist sympathizers.
Americans, according to polls, have a positive view of drones, but critics say that’s because the news media have not informed them well. The use of drones is deepening the resentment of the United States in volatile parts of the world and potentially undermining fragile democracies, said Naureen Shah, who directs the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia University’s law school.
“It’s portrayed as picking off the bad guys from a plane,” she said. “But it’s actually surveilling entire communities, locating behavior that might be suspicious and striking groups of unknown individuals based on video data that may or may not be corroborated by eyeballing it on the ground.”
I’ve been meaning to write about this report on the multifold human costs of militarily striking Iran’s nuclear facilities and am happy to find that it’s already been noted by Golnaz Esfandiari as well as Gordon Lubold, among others. (Marsha Cohen’s well-read Lobe Log post on [...]]]>
I’ve been meaning to write about this report on the multifold human costs of militarily striking Iran’s nuclear facilities and am happy to find that it’s already been noted by Golnaz Esfandiari as well as Gordon Lubold, among others. (Marsha Cohen’s well-read Lobe Log post on the same topic was the closest thing to such a study that I’ve come across so far.) “The Ayatollah’s Nuclear Gamble” is sponsored by Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics and was authored by Khosrow B. Semnani, an Iranian-American engineer by training and philanthropist. It will be featured this week at a joint event by the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Iran Task Force at the Atlantic Council. With the study Semnani endeavors to scientifically prove something which seems obvious: attacking nuclear facilities in Iran could have devastating effects on possibly hundreds of thousands of Iranians who would be exposed to highly toxic chemical plumes and even radioactive fallout. Case studies were conducted on the Iranian cities of Isfahan, Natanz, Arak, and Bushehr. In Isfahan, a military strike on the nuclear facility there “could be compared to the 1984 Bhopal industrial accident at the Union Carbide plant in India”:
In that accident, the release of 42 metric tons (47 U.S. tons) of methyl isocyanate turned the city of Bhopal into a gas chamber. Estimates of deaths have ranged from 3,800 to 15,000. The casualties went well beyond the fatalities: More than 500,000 victims received compensation for exposure to fumes.
The environmental consequences would also be wide-ranging:
With the high likelihood of soluble uranium compounds permeating into the groundwater, strikes would wreak havoc on Isfahan’s environmental resources and agriculture. The Markazi water basin, one of six main catchment areas, which covers half the country (52%), provides slightly less than one-third of Iran’s total renewable water (29%) (Figure 26). According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the groundwater discharge in the basin from approximately 155,000 wells, 22,000 channels and 13,500 springs is the primary water source for agricultural and residential uses.106 It is almost certain that the contamination of groundwater as a result of strikes would damage this important fresh-water source.
The report also touches on the unintended consequences of militarily striking Iran, such as a “short or prolonged regional war” and explains, as reputable analysts have, why the Israeli strike on Iraq’s Osirak facility is a “false analogy”:
The Osirak analogy is the fantasy that there will be no blowback from strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. It discounts the complexity, severity, scale, consequences, and casualties such an operation would entail. Iran’s nuclear program is not an empty shell, nor is it a single remote target. The facilities in Iran are fully operational, they contain thousands of personnel, they are located near major population centers, they are heavily constructed and fortified, and thus difficult to destroy. They contain tons of highly toxic chemical and radioactive material. To grasp the political and psychological impact of the strikes, what our estimates suggest is that the potential civilian casualties Iran would suffer as a result of a strike — in the first day — could exceed the 6,731 Palestinians and 1,083 Israeli’s reported killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past decade. The total number of fatalities in the 1981 Osirak raid was 10 Iraqis and one French civilian, Damien Chaussepied.
According to Greg Thielmann of the Arms Control Association, the report makes a “valuable contribution to “colorizing” the bloodless discussions of the “military option.” Thielmann, who formerly worked on assessments of ballistic missile threats at the State Department’s intelligence bureau, told Lobe Log that he had not seen “a more serious look at the medical consequences for the Iranian population” than provided by this report.
While Thielmann calls the report an “impressive effort”, he also offered criticism. “I take strong exception to the author’s introductory assertion that diplomacy with the Islamic Republic “requires a willful act of self-deception,” and that regime change is the only way to achieve an acceptable resolution to the challenges of Iran’s nuclear program,” he said.
Thielmann was also “surprised” that the strike scenario analyzed in the study includes the Bushehr facility, “which is of much less proliferation concern than the other nuclear facilities mentioned, and which, because of the extensive use of Russian personnel in operating the reactor there, would carry high political costs to attack. ”
“Such an attack would also violate Additional Protocol I of the 1949 Geneva Conventions,” said Thielmann, who provided the following excerpt from Article 56 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I:
1. Works and installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population. Other military objectives located at or in the vicinity of these works or installations shall not be made the object of attack if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces from the works or installations and consequent severe losses among the civilian population.
It will be interesting to see whether the report gets mainstream media attention following the Wilson Center event and if it will spark further examination of this integral — but otherwise barely mentioned — aspect of using the “military option” on Iran.
]]>I wrote last week about the worthwhile new Stanford/NYU study on the civilian impact of the drone war in Pakistan. Today brought the release of another new study of the drone war, this one conducted by the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human [...]]]>
I wrote last week about the worthwhile new Stanford/NYU study on the civilian impact of the drone war in Pakistan. Today brought the release of another new study of the drone war, this one conducted by the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights clinic. (I’ll refer to these as the “Stanford” and “Columbia” studies respectively for ease of reference.) This study is similarly worth reading, and its authors provide still more reasons to be skeptical of the Obama administration’s rosy claims about the civilian toll of drone attacks.
However, for reasons that seem mostly to do with the Internet punditocracy’s thirst for novelty and contrarianism, the Columbia study is being held up as if it refuted the pessimistic take of the Stanford study. Thus Wired‘s Noah Shachtman suggests that whereas the Stanford study claims that drones are “covered in children’s blood,” the Columbia study provides a more “nuanced view” that “doesn’t fit neatly into the dominant narratives about the drone campaign, pro or con.” The main piece of evidence for this claim is that the Columbia team stresses the impossibility of knowing how many people have been killed by drones.
Of course, as the reader may have guessed, the claim that drones are “covered in children’s blood” appears nowhere in the Stanford report; it’s Shactman’s hyperbolic gloss on the report’s conclusion (following the Bureau of Investigative Journalism) that 176 Pakistani children have been killed by drone strikes. (Since we can reliably assume that children are civilians, but can’t always do so for adults, it’s easier to accurately assess the number of children killed than civilians as a whole.) However, the Stanford study is keen to stress the unreliability of all the available data, since it comes primarily from US and Pakistani government sources with incentives to fudge the body count. The study explains why the Bureau of Investigative Journalism numbers — which show a significantly higher civilian death toll — are more reliable than those provided by the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal: while all three sources are reliant on government reports, the Bureau is the only one that attempts to supplement these with on-the-ground follow-up investigations. But they certainly make no claims that their numbers are completely exact or sacrosanct; what’s important is that whatever the precise toll, it’s far higher than the Obama administration is claiming.
The Columbia report makes no attempt to delve into the numbers and come at an estimated death toll, but it similarly examines all the factors which suggest that the official civilian body counts may be grossly understated. It also, like the Stanford report, takes note of all the ways that drones negatively impact even those civilians who aren’t killed or injured by strikes — for instance, the devastating impact on the mental health of residents (particularly children) who hear drones hovering above them at all hours of the day and never know if and when they will be hit. On the basic question of whether drones have been as precise and miraculous as advertised, or whether on the contrary they enact a high price upon the lives of civilians, the two studies are completely in agreement.
The way that the Columbia study in being spun seems to reflect the baleful influence of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand Beltway centrism: government officials say that drones have no civilian toll, outside groups say that they have a high one, so the answer must lie somewhere in the middle. This kind of empty “moderation” is no more useful in navigating the drone war than it is anywhere else.
]]>It Couldn’t Happen Here, It Does Happen There
The Value of American — and Afghan — Lives
By Tom Engelhardt
via Tom Dispatch
“Do you do this in the United States? There is police action every day in the United States… They don’t call in airplanes to bomb the place.” – Afghan President Hamid Karzai denouncing U.S. air strikes on homes in his country, June 12, 2012
It was almost closing time when the siege began at a small Wells Fargo Bank branch in a suburb of San Diego, and it was a nightmare. The three gunmen entered with the intent to rob, but as they herded the 18 customers and bank employees toward a back room, they were spotted by a pedestrian outside who promptly called 911. Within minutes, police cars were pulling up, the bank was surrounded, and back-up was being called in from neighboring communities. The gunmen promptly barricaded themselves inside with their hostages, including women and small children, and refused to let anyone leave.
The police called on the gunmen to surrender, but before negotiations could even begin, shots were fired from within the bank, wounding a police officer. The events that followed — now known to everyone, thanks to 24/7 news coverage — shocked the nation. Declaring the bank robbers “terrorist suspects,” the police requested air support from the Pentagon and, soon after, an F-15 from Vandenberg Air Force Base dropped two GBU-38 bombs on the bank, leaving the building a pile of rubble.
All three gunmen died. Initially, a Pentagon spokesman, who took over messaging from the local police, insisted that “the incident” had ended “successfully” and that all the dead were “suspected terrorists.” The Pentagon press office issued a statement on other casualties, noting only that, “while conducting a follow-on assessment, the security force discovered two women who had sustained non-life-threatening injuries. The security force provided medical assistance and transported both women to a local medical facility for treatment.” It added that it was sending an “assessment team” to the site to investigate reports that others had died as well.
Of course, as Americans quickly learned, the dead actually included five women, seven children, and a visiting lawyer from Los Angeles. The aftermath was covered in staggering detail. Relatives of the dead besieged city hall, bitterly complaining about the attack and the deaths of their loved ones. At a news conference the next morning, while scenes of rescuers digging in the rubble were still being flashed across the country, President Obama said: “Such acts are simply unacceptable. They cannot be tolerated.” In response to a question, he added, “Nothing can justify any airstrike which causes harm to the lives and property of civilians.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey immediately flew to San Diego to meet with family members of the dead and offer apologies. Heads rolled in the local police department and in the Pentagon. Congress called for hearings as well as a Justice Department investigation of possible criminality, and quickly passed a bill offering millions of dollars to the grieving relatives as “solace.” San Diego began raising money for a memorial to the group already dubbed the Wells Fargo 18.
One week later, at the exact moment of the bombing, church bells rang throughout the San Diego area and Congress observed a minute of silence in honor of the dead.
The Meaning of “Precision”
It couldn’t have been more dramatic and, as you know perfectly well, it couldn’t have happened — not in the U.S. anyway. But just over a week ago, an analogous “incident” did happen in Afghanistan and it passed largely unnoticed here. A group of Taliban insurgents reportedly entered a house in a village in Logar Province, south of Kabul, where a wedding ceremony either was or would be in progress. American and Afghan forces surrounded the house, where 18 members of a single extended family had gathered for the celebration. When firing broke out (or a grenade was thrown) and both U.S. and Afghan troops were reportedly wounded, they did indeed call in a jet, which dropped a 500-pound bomb, obliterating the residence and everyone inside, including up to nine children.
This was neither an unheard of mistake, nor an aberration in America’s Afghan War. In late December 2001, according to reports, a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, using precision-guided weapons, wiped out 110 out of 112 wedding revelers in a small Afghan village. Over the decade-plus that followed, American air power, piloted and drone, has been wiping out Afghans (Pakistanis and, until relatively recently, Iraqis) in a similar fashion — usually in or near their homes, sometimes in striking numbers, always on the assumption that there are bad guys among them.
For more than a decade, incident after incident, any one of which, in the U.S., would have shaken Americans to their core, led to “investigations” that went nowhere, punishments to no one, rare apologies, and on occasion, the offering of modest “solatium” payments to grieving survivors and relatives. For such events, of course, 24/7 coverage, like future memorials, was out of the question.
Cumulatively, they indicate one thing: that, for Americans, the value of an Afghan life (or more often Afghan lives) obliterated in the backlands of the planet, thousands of miles from home, is next to nil and of no meaning whatsoever. Such deaths are just so much unavoidable “collateral damage” from the American way of war — from the post-9/11 approach we have agreed is crucial to make ourselves “safe” from terrorists.
By now, Afghans (and Pakistanis in tribal areas across the border) surely know the rules of the road of the American war: there is no sanctity in public or private rites. While funerals havebeen hit repeatedly and at least one baby-naming ceremony was taken out as well, weddings have been the rites of choice for obliteration for reasons the U.S. Air Force has, as far as we know, never taken a moment to consider, no less explain. This website counted five weddingsblown away (one in Iraq and four in Afghanistan) by mid-2008, and another from that year not reported until 2009. The latest incident is at least the seventh that has managed, however modestly, to make the news here, but there is no way of knowing what other damage to wedding parties in rural Afghanistan has gone uncounted.
Imagine the uproar in this country if a jet took out a wedding party. Just consider the attention given every time some mad gunman shoots up a post office, a college campus, or simply anoff-campus party, if you want to get an idea. You might think then that, given the U.S. record of wedding carnage in Afghanistan, which undoubtedly represents some kind of modern wedding-crasher record, there might have been a front-page story, or simply a story, somewhere, anywhere, indicating the repetitive nature of such events.
And yet, if U.S. carnage in that country gets attention at all, it’s usually only to point out, in self-congratulatory fashion, that the Taliban — with their indiscriminate roadside bombs and their generally undiscriminating suicide bombers — are far worse. If an American college campus is shot up, what are the odds that the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech won’t be mentioned? And yet not a single report on the recent deaths in Logar Province has even noted that this is not the first time part of an Afghan wedding party has been taken out by the U.S. Air Force.
Over the years, such incidents, when they rose individually to the level of news, almost invariably followed the same pattern: initial denials by U.S. military or NATO spokespeople that any civilian casualties had occurred and then, if outrage in Afghanistan ratcheted up or the news reports on the incident didn’t die down, a slow back-peddling under pressure, and the launching of an “investigation” or, as in the case of the Logar bombing, a “joint investigation” with Afghan authorities, that seldom led anywhere and often was never heard from or about again. In the end, in some circumstances, apologies were offered and modest “solatium” payments made to the survivors.
And yet, over the years, amid all the praise for the “precision” of American air power, for the ability of the Air Force to bring a bomb or a missile to its target in a fashion that we like to call “surgical,” it is no small thing — explain it as you will — to wipe out parts or all of seven weddings. You might almost think that our wars on the Eurasian continent had been launched as an assault on “family values.” At the very least, the Afghan War has given a different meaning to the ceremonial phrase “till death do us part.”
The Country Crasher
For years, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has bitterly complained about similar air strikes that kill and wound civilians in or near their homes and repeatedly demanded that they be stopped. In this particular case, he cut short a trip to China and returned to Afghanistan to denounce the attack as “unacceptable.” Ordinarily, this has meant remarkably little.
In this case, however, the Afghan president, who lacks much real power (hence his old nickname, “the mayor of Kabul”), seems to have the wind at his back. Perhaps because the Obama administration is on edge about its disintegrating relations with Pakistan (thanks, in part, to its unwillingness to offer an apology for cross-border U.S. air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November); perhaps because the list of recent U.S. blunders and disasters in Afghanistan has grown long and painful — the urinating on bodies of dead enemies, the killing of civilians “for sport,” the burning of Korans, the slaughter of 16 innocent villagers by one American soldier, the rise of green-on-blue violence (that is, Afghan army and policeattacks on their American allies); perhaps because of its need to maintain a façade of — if not success, then at least — non-failure in Afghanistan as drawdowns begin there in an election year at home; or perhaps thanks to a combination of all of the above, Karzai’s angry initial response to the Logar wedding killings did not go unnoticed in Washington.
In fact, the initial denials that any civilian deaths had occurred were quickly dropped, the head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen, promptly apologized to the president, and then, in what might have been a unique act in the Afghan War record, went to Logar Province to meet with the provincial governor and apologize directly to grieving relatives. (“The faces of the people were very sad,” said Mohammad Akbar Stanekzai, a parliamentarian member of a delegation Karzai appointed to investigate the incident. “They told [General Allen], ‘These incidents don’t just happen once, but two, three, four times and they keep happening.’”)
At the same time, it was announced that there would be a change in the American policy of calling in air strikes on homes and villages in support of U.S. operations. The Afghans promptly claimed that the Americans had agreed to stop calling in air power at all in their country. The Americans offered a far vaguer version of the policy change. Anonymous U.S. military officials in Kabul quickly suggested that it represented only “a subtle shift in the ground realities of the war against the Taliban.” In fact, it did contain loopholes big enough to slip a B-52 through. As General Allen put it, “What we have agreed is that we would not use aviation ordnance on civilian dwellings. Now that doesn’t obviate our inherent right to self-defense. We will always… do whatever we have to do to protect the force.”
It’s easy enough, however, to sense an urge in Washington to calm the waters, not to have one more thing go truly wrong anywhere. At this very moment, the president and his top officials are undoubtedly praying that the Eurozone doesn’t collapse and that the Af-Pak theater of operations doesn’t disintegrate into chaos or burst into flames in the early months of a planned drawdown of U.S. troops; that, in fact, nothing truly terrible happens — until at least November 7, 2012.
Karzai has clearly grasped the Obama administration’s present feeling of vulnerability and frustration in the region and, gambler that he is, he promptly upped the ante. While the Americans were speaking of those “subtle” changes, he branded American air strikes in Afghanistan an “illegitimate use of force” and demanded that, when it came to air attacks on Afghan homes, the planes simply be grounded, whatever the dangers to U.S. or Afghan troops.
Back in 2009, then war commander General Stanley McChrystal ordered a somewhat similar reining in of American air strikes, a position countermanded by the next commander, General David Petraeus, who called the planes back in force. Now, those air strikes will, to one degree or another, once again be a limited option. But realistically, air power remains essential to the American way of war, whatever Karzai may demand. So count on one thing: before this is all over, it will be called in again — and in Afghanistan, weddings will still be celebrated.
In the meantime, after more than a decade of our most recent Afghan War, the Obama administration and the U.S. military are clearly willing to hang out a temporary sign saying: “Washington at work. Afghans, thank you for your patience…” Just across the border in Pakistan, however, “kill lists” are in effect and the air campaign there is being ratcheted up.
In the process, one thing can be said about American firepower: it has been remarkably precise in the way it has destabilized the region. In December 2001, we first took on the role of wedding crashers. More than 10 years later, it couldn’t be clearer that we’ve been country crashers, too.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Engelhardt discusses drone warfare and the Obama administration, click here or download it to your iPod here.
[Note for Readers: For their remarkable usefulness (to me) in keeping track of American war-making in the Greater Middle East, I would like to offer a special bow of thanks to three invaluable websites: Antiwar.com, Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog, and Paul Woodward’s The War in Context. On military matters, I always keep an eye on Noah Shachtman’s provocative and informative Danger Room blog. For Afghanistan and Pakistan in particular, it’s well worth checking out Foreign Policy’s AfPak Daily Brief, a particularly useful summary of press reports on the region.]
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Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt
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