BJP accuses Obama of ‘hypocrisy’: Which countries were bombed under his govt?

Obama’s remarks came on during Modi’s first State visit to the US, where he inked a host of deals with the nation and gave his second address to a joint session of the American Congress. In an interview on June 22, Obama told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour: “If President (Joe Biden) meets with Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi, the protection of Muslim minority in a majority Hindu India is something worth mentioning”.

Did Obama drop ‘26,000 bombs’ on ‘six Muslim-dominated countries’?

According to the analysis of Micah Zenko, an American political scientist, which was published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, under Obama’s leadership in 2016 alone, 26,172 bombs were dropped across seven countries, including Syria (12,192), Iraq (12,095), Afghanistan (1,337), Libya (496), Yemen (35), Somalia (14) and Pakistan (3).

Moreover, Zenko claimed that the estimate was “undoubtedly low, considering reliable data is only available for airstrikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, and a single “strike,” according to the Pentagon’s definition, can involve multiple bombs or munitions.”

It wasn’t as if 2016 was an anomaly during Obama’s tenure as President. In 2015, America dropped 23,144 bombs in all the above-mentioned countries except Libya. In fact, the former president’s eight years in office were replete with a staggering number of drone strikes too. Experts suggest that Obama as president “dramatically expanded the air wars and the use of special operations forces around the globe”, The Guardian reported in 2017.

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit news organisation based in London, Obama in his two terms authorised 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeting Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. “Between 384 and 807 civilians were killed in those countries” due to the strikes, the Bureau said.

To put these numbers in context, there were ten times more air strikes by the USA “in the covert war on terror” during Obama’s presidency than under his predecessor, George W Bush, the news outlet further added. The Democratic president authorised more strikes in his first year in office than Bush ordered during his entire presidency.

Obama entered office on the back of the promise to end America’s war on terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan — both began under the Bush administration after the September 11, 2001, attacks. He also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, months after winning the presidential elections, for his “vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons”. But US military forces continued to be at war for all eight years of Obama’s tenure and he became the first two-term President with that distinction.

In a 2017 report, the Los Angeles Times noted that although the President slashed the number of troops, as he had vowed to do, in war zones from 150,000 to 14,000 and contained the deaths of American soldiers, he expanded the deployment of elite commando units and the use of new technology, including armed drones and cyber weapons.

Jon Alterman, Middle East specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, told the newspaper: Obama “got the country out of ‘war,’ at least as we used to see it… We’re now wrapped up in all these different conflicts, at a low level and with no end in sight.”