Joe Biden Might Continue Drone Strikes Despite Pledge To Stop ‘Endless Wars,’ Journalist Says

In a Sunday piece for The Intercept, journalist Elise Swain suggested that President-elect Joe Biden might continue Barack Obama’s legacy of escalating the use of targeted drone strikes.

Despite Biden’s campaign pledge to put a stop to “endless wars,” Swain noted that his campaign and transition websites are curiously devoid of any mention of drone strikes. She also spoke to Kate Kizer, policy director for Win Without War, who claimed that the term “endless war” is not clearly defined.

“There’s a pretty clear divide on our understanding of what it means to end endless war, and between what the Left actually wants to do and what they are likely to do,” she said.

According to Kizer, Biden’s team must decide whether counterterrorism measures like drone strikes are effective and consider other options to battle terrorism.

Retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey argued that Obama and George W. Bush’s approaches to the Middle East were ineffective, and Trump has effectively brought the region into a stalemate. According to Jeffrey, Biden should follow the president’s Middle East foreign policy. Even still, The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Trump had escalated the drone wars relative to the Obama administration.

According to Alka Pradhan, human rights counsel at the Guantanamo Bay Military Commissions, Americans are comfortable with drone strikes, which have placed less focus on ground wars.

“You don’t have to see who you’re killing. You don’t usually see their faces plastered across the newspapers because the government has a companion policy of not acknowledging civilian deaths for the most part.”

Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, argued that the CIA’s use of drone strikes requires scrutiny and should be included in discussions on the United States’ use of military violence as a whole.

“In what scenarios and under what authorities does the government of the United States, acting in the name of the American people, use violence to advance the security of the American people?”

While some officials push for continued drone strikes while bringing home American troops, Pradhan argued that this is not a credible way of ending conflicts.

As reported by BBC, Amnesty International recently deemed CIA drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen to be unlawful and suggested that some could amount to war crimes.

The human rights group Reprieve found in 2014 that 96.5 percent of drone assassinations in the Middle East killed civilians instead of their terrorist targets. In particular, the group claimed that of the 1,147 people that were killed by U.S. airstrikes, just 41 were terrorists.