Obama and the drone war.

After the Bush administration ended in 2008, people assumed that with the Obama administration, the constant conflicts and wars held in the Middle-East would end. However, the focus changed towards Afghanistan instead of Iraq, and also Pakistan with the use of drones to target potential Al Qaeda allies, with the collateral damage of innocent civilians being dead. 

In Obama’s speech on Drone Policy made on May 23, 2013, he justifies the attacks as a defensive strategy, using the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) as their main source to defend the policies (Stimson, 2015: 12). Making this war continue and using similar arguments as the former administrations used, such as: «We are at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first». Also, he states that their main goal is not to hurt civilians.

However, the causalities and the constant attacks, which multiplied after 2008, increased the number of deaths of civilians, especially when instead of focusing on a list of targets, the drones started to attack people because personality strikes, «coding the behavior and geography of individuals; targeting their lifeworld» (Shaw, 2014: 546). And this pattern didn’t come out from nowhere: the arrests and situations Muslim-Americans lived immediately after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, their constant surveillance, it is extrapolated to these rural regions in Pakistan. Making the United States a Predator Empire that targets patterns of life.

That idea of targeting people is racialized, and makes this new approach during the Obama administration deepen in Foucault’s ideas of the “state control of the biological”.

And also, with the drone policy, one of the biggest criticisms both the Stimson and Amnesty International reports was of the number of civilians killed and how dehumanized their deaths get. For that reason, documentaries such as the Wounds of Waziristan try to humanize their lives and situations again. Show how their daily lives change because of the constant surveillance and targeting they suffer. However, this documentary also follows racial and gender stereotypes, because the main victims presented are women and children, still stuck in that idea (strongly influenced by Orientalism) of what a terrorist should be.

All in all, I think the approach is inappropriate, because, even if the intentions to end terrorism are good (Obama says that this war is a war of ideas), the only way to kill an idea, is by stopping people believe in that, and the use of violence would not end it, only make it worse. Prove of that is that new terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State, are getting new allies and becoming stronger. And until we do not change the approach, is going to keep being problematic.