Obama cast as architect in US covert wars

Barack Obama was first elected president in part because of his opposition to the Iraq war, which he promptly ended, and has set a deadline for the end of military operations in Afghanistan.

In his second term, he has made it one of his central goals to wind down the "global war on terror", the campaign against al-Qaeda and its affiliates that has consumed American foreign and security policy since the 9/11 attacks.

Yet despite his desire to shift away from the campaigns and tactics of the past decade, Mr Obama finds himself cast in a very different light, as the architect of a new generation of covert wars that inherit - and in some cases extend - the policies introduced by the George W. Bush administration.

In both its use of drone strikes against terror suspects and its extensive electronic surveillance programmes, the Obama administration has harnessed new technologies to expand the battle against jihadi terrorists in ways that have prompted critics to accuse the former constitutional law professor of pushing the constitution beyond its limits.

The extent of US electronic surveillance has been exposed by a series of leaks orchestrated by Edward Snowden, a former contractor at the National Security Agency. The documents provided by Mr Snowden have shown that the US government collects data on telephone calls made by most Americans and hoovers up vast quantities of information from the internet around the world.

While the extent that the US authorities are listening to conversations and reading emails of both Americans and citizens of other countries remains unclear, the overall impression left by Mr Snowden's leaks is of a vast enterprise in collecting electronic information that goes well beyond what most people had imagined the NSA was conducting.

Muddying the waters further, the Snowden revelations have also exposed details of US efforts to spy on other governments - the sort of thing, US officials say, that every country does, but which nonetheless is extremely embarrassing to read about in the newspapers. The embarrassment reached a new high in October, when allegations emerged that the US had monitored German chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile for more than a decade.

Many of the more establishment politicians in the US Congress have rushed to defend the surveillance programmes, arguing that they have served to foil a host of planned terrorist attacks on the US and on other countries.

However, the handful of politicians in the US who had been cautioning for some time about the potentially dangerous expansion in the surveillance capacities of the NSA have stepped up their warnings.

Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator representing Oregon, says: "The combination of increasingly advanced technology with a breakdown in the checks and balances that limit government action could lead us to a surveillance state that cannot be reversed. The government's authority to collect information on law-abiding American citizens is essentially limitless."

Even Mr Obama has admitted that the administration needs to put new limits on the NSA, but momentum is building in Congress to amend the laws on surveillance in ways that go beyond the administration's modest proposals. One possible casualty could be the programme that collects telephone records; it has already only narrowly survived an attempt in the House of Representatives to defund it.

The Obama administration is also coming under increasing criticism for its use of drones to kill alleged terrorists. The Bush administration began the programme of "targeted killings", but it has been expanded substantially under Mr Obama: compared with the 50 strikes ordered in eight years by Mr Bush, the Obama administration conducted about 350 in the first term alone.

Administration officials insist the drone strikes have helped to "decimate" the core of al-Qaeda's leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that civilian casualties are very rare - an assertion that is contradicted by the independent groups who have tried to collect information on drone strikes.

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However, critics say that the extensive use of drones has alienated populations in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen, where al-Qaeda and its affiliates have been able to take advantage of resentment towards the US. "Drone strikes are the face of America to many Yemenis," says Farea al-Muslimi, a young Yemeni activist who was educated in the US and whose village was hit by a drone this year.

More broadly, critics suggest that new technology has reduced the constraints on going to war. Just as advances in computing have allowed the NSA to analyse more of the data it collects, the increasing capacity of drones permits the US to conduct more military operations that would otherwise be impossible without putting at risk substantial numbers of soldiers.

In a high-profile speech in May, Mr Obama recognised some of these points, pledging to place tighter controls on the use of drones. "This war, like all wars, must end," he said of the fight against Islamist terrorists. "That is what history advises. That is what our democracy demands."

Yet that promise has been called into question after the US conducted an intense burst of drone strikes in Yemen in August in response to an intelligence warning about a possible terrorist attack which prompted the state department to shut embassies in 20 countries.

Mr Obama may want to wind down the covert wars against terrorism, but he keeps finding himself sucked back in.

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