The
Pentagon has finally published its first Airpower
Summary
since
President Biden took office nearly a year ago. These monthly reports
have been published since 2007 to document the number of bombs and
missiles dropped by U.S.-led air forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and
Syria since 2004. But President Trump stopped publishing them after
February 2020, shrouding continued U.S. bombing in secrecy.
Over
the past 20 years, as documented in the table below, U.S. and allied
air forces have dropped over 337,000 bombs and missiles on other
countries. That is an average of 46 strikes per day for 20 years.
This endless bombardment has not only been deadly and devastating for
its victims but is broadly recognized as seriously undermining
international peace and security and diminishing America’s
standing in the world.
The
U.S. government and political establishment have been remarkably
successful at keeping the American public in the dark about the
horrific consequences of these long-term campaigns of mass
destruction, allowing them to maintain the illusion of U.S.
militarism as a force for good in the world in their domestic
political rhetoric.
Now,
even in the face of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, they are
doubling down on their success at selling this counterfactual
narrative to the American public to reignite their old Cold War with
Russia and China, dramatically and predictably increasing the risk of
nuclear war.
The
new Airpower
Summary
data
reveal that the United States has dropped another 3,246 bombs and
missiles on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria (2,068 under Trump and 1,178
under Biden) since February 2020.
The
good news is that U.S. bombing of those three countries has
significantly decreased from the over 12,000 bombs and missiles it
dropped on them in 2019. In fact, since the withdrawal of U.S.
occupation forces from Afghanistan in August, the U.S. military has
officially conducted no air strikes there, and only dropped 13 bombs
or missiles on Iraq and Syria – although this does not preclude
additional unreported strikes by forces under CIA command or control.
Presidents
Trump and Biden both deserve credit for recognizing that endless
bombing and occupation could not deliver victory in Afghanistan. The
speed with which the U.S.-installed government fell to the Taliban
once the U.S. withdrawal was under way confirmed how 20 years of
hostile military occupation, aerial bombardment and support for
corrupt governments ultimately served only to drive the war-weary
people of Afghanistan back to Taliban rule.
Biden’s
callous decision to follow 20 years of colonial occupation and aerial
bombardment in Afghanistan with the same kind of brutal economic
siege warfare the United States has inflicted on Cuba, Iran, North
Korea and Venezuela can only further discredit America in the eyes of
the world.
There
has been no accountability for these 20 years of senseless
destruction. Even with the publication of Airpower Summaries, the
ugly reality of U.S. bombing wars and the mass casualties they
inflict remain largely hidden from the American people.
How
many of the 3,246 attacks documented in the Airpower Summary since
February 2020 were you aware of before reading this article? You
probably heard about the drone strike that killed 10 Afghan civilians
in Kabul in August 2021. But what about the other 3,245 bombs and
missiles? Whom did they kill or maim, and whose homes did they
destroy?
The
December 2021 New
York Times
exposé
of
the consequences of U.S. airstrikes, the result of a five-year
investigation, was stunning not only for the high civilian casualties
and military lies it exposed, but also because it revealed just how
little investigative reporting the U.S. media have done on these two
decades of war.
In
America’s industrialized, remote-control air wars, even the
U.S. military personnel most directly and intimately involved are
shielded from human contact with the people whose lives they are
destroying, while for most of the American public, it is as if these
hundreds of thousands of deadly explosions never even happened.
The
lack of public awareness of U.S. airstrikes is not the result of a
lack of concern for the mass destruction our government commits in
our names. In the rare cases we find out about, like the murderous
drone strike in Kabul in August, the public wants to know what
happened and strongly supports U.S. accountability for civilian
deaths.
So
public ignorance of 99% of U.S. air strikes and their consequences is
not the result of public apathy, but of deliberate decisions by the
U.S. military, politicians of both parties and corporate media to
keep the public in the dark. The largely unremarked 21-month-long
suppression of monthly Airpower Summaries is only the latest example
of this.
Now
that the new Airpower Summary has filled in the previously hidden
figures for 2020-21, here is the most complete data available on 20
years of deadly and destructive U.S. and allied air strikes.
Numbers
of bombs and missiles dropped on other countries by the United States
and its allies since 2001:
|
Iraq
(& Syria*)
|
Afghanistan
|
Yemen
|
Other
Countries**
|
2001
|
214
|
17,500
|
|
|
2002
|
252
|
6,500
|
1
|
|
2003
|
29,200
|
|
|
|
2004
|
285
|
86
|
|
1
(Pk)
|
2005
|
404
|
176
|
|
3
(Pk)
|
2006
|
310
|
2,644
|
|
7,002
(Le,Pk)
|
2007
|
1,708
|
5,198
|
|
9
(Pk,S)
|
2008
|
1,075
|
5,215
|
|
40
(Pk,S)
|
2009
|
126
|
4,184
|
3
|
5,554
(Pk,Pl)
|
2010
|
8
|
5,126
|
2
|
128
(Pk)
|
2011
|
4
|
5,411
|
13
|
7,763
(Li,Pk,S)
|
2012
|
|
4,083
|
41
|
54
(Li,
Pk,S)
|
2013
|
|
2,758
|
22
|
32
(Li,Pk,S)
|
2014
|
6,292*
|
2,365
|
20
|
5,058
(Li,Pl,Pk,S)
|
2015
|
28,696*
|
947
|
14,191
|
28
(Li,Pk,S)
|
2016
|
30,743*
|
1,337
|
14,549
|
529
(Li,Pk,S)
|
2017
|
39,577*
|
4,361
|
15,969
|
301
(Li,Pk,S)
|
2018
|
8,713*
|
7,362
|
9,746
|
84
(Li,Pk,S)
|
2019
|
4,729*
|
7,423
|
3,045
|
65
(Li,S)
|
2020
|
1,188*
|
1,631
|
7,622
|
54
(S)
|
2021
|
554*
|
801
|
4,428
|
1,512
(Pl,S)
|
|
|
|
|
|
Total
|
154,
078*
|
85,108
|
69,652
|
28,217
|
Grand
Total = 337,055 bombs and missiles.
**Other
Countries: Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia.
These
figures are based on U.S.
Airpower
Summaries
for
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism’s count of
drone
strikes
in
Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; the
Yemen
Data Project‘s
count
of bombs and missiles dropped on Yemen (only through September 2021);
the New America Foundation’s database of foreign
air strikes
in
Libya; and other sources.
There
are several categories of air strikes that are not included in this
table, meaning that the true numbers of weapons unleashed are
certainly higher. These include:
Helicopter
strikes: Military Times published
an
article in February 2017
titled,
“The U.S. military’s stats on deadly air strikes are
wrong. Thousands have gone unreported.” The largest pool of
air strikes not included in U.S. Airpower Summaries are strikes by
attack helicopters. The U.S. Army told the authors its helicopters
had conducted 456 otherwise unreported air strikes in Afghanistan in
2016. The authors explained that the non-reporting of helicopter
strikes has been consistent throughout the post-9/11 wars, and they
still did not know how many missiles were fired in those 456 attacks
in Afghanistan in the one year they investigated.
AC-130
gunships:
The U.S. military did not destroy the Doctors Without Borders
hospital
in Kunduz,
Afghanistan, in 2015 with bombs or missiles, but with a
Lockheed-Boeing AC-130 gunship. These machines of mass destruction,
usually manned by U.S. Air Force special operations forces, are
designed to circle a target on the ground, pouring howitzer shells
and cannon fire into it until it is completely destroyed. The U.S.
has used AC-130s in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Syria.
Strafing
runs: U.S. Airpower Summaries for 2004-2007 included a note that
their tally of “strikes with munitions dropped… does
not include 20mm and 30mm cannon or rockets.” But the
30mm
cannons
on
A-10 Warthogs and other ground attack planes are powerful weapons,
originally designed to destroy Soviet tanks. A-10s can fire 65
depleted uranium shells per second to blanket an area with deadly
and indiscriminate fire. But that does not appear to count as a
“weapons release” in U.S. Airpower Summaries.
“Counter-insurgency”
and “counter-terrorism” operations in other parts of the
world: The United States formed a military coalition with 11 West
African countries in 2005, and has built a drone base in Niger, but
we have not found any systematic accounting of U.S. and allied air
strikes in that region, or in the Philippines, Latin America or
elsewhere.
The
failure of the U.S. government, politicians and corporate media to
honestly inform and educate the American public about the systematic
mass destruction wreaked by our country’s armed forces has
allowed this carnage to continue largely unremarked and unchecked for
20 years.
It
has also left us precariously vulnerable to the revival of an
anachronistic, Manichean Cold War narrative that risks even greater
catastrophe. In this topsy-turvy, “through the looking glass”
narrative, the country actually bombing cities
to rubble
and
waging wars that kill
millions
of
people, presents itself as a well-intentioned force for good in the
world. Then it paints countries like China, Russia and Iran, which
have understandably strengthened their defenses to deter the United
States from attacking them, as threats to the American people and to
world peace.
The
high-level
talks
beginning
on January 10th in Geneva between the United States and Russia are a
critical opportunity, maybe even a last chance, to rein in the
escalation of the current Cold War before this breakdown in East-West
relations becomes irreversible or devolves into a military conflict.
If
we are to emerge from this morass of militarism and avoid the risk of
an apocalyptic war with Russia or China, the U.S. public must
challenge the counterfactual Cold War narrative that U.S. military
and civilian leaders are peddling to justify their ever-increasing
investments in nuclear weapons and the U.S. war machine.
