Just five months after President Biden’s high profile troop withdrawal from Afghanistan the country is in crisis. According to the United Nations World Food Program, 23 million Afghans are living in conditions of “severe food insecurity,” and conditions are expected to get worse throughout the winter. This crisis comes not from President Biden’s so-called end of the war on Afghanistan, but rather through his continuation of the war through economic means.

Immediately after the U.S. troop withdrawal, the United States, along with the United Nations Security Council, launched heavy sanctions on Afghanistan. This resulted in a withdrawal of international funding equivalent to 40% of the country’s entire GDP. Thiswas immediately devastating to the country given that 75% of its public spending was funded by foreign aid grants.

While it took a while for the economic crisis to gain attention from the international community, the situation in Afghanistan has gotten so bad that major news outlets are finally covering the issue. Not only are they covering it; they are publishing direct criticism of Biden’s policy of economic warfare. The New York Times editorial board published an op-ed requesting that Biden “let innocent Afghans have their money,” and on the one year anniversary of Biden’s inauguration, MSNBC columnist Zeeshan Aleem wrote an opinion piece arguing that Biden never ended the war and that his economic sanctions are a form of collective punishment on the Afghan people.

With major news outlets publishing such direct critiques of Biden’s economic warfare on Afghanistan, it is safe to assume that even news consumers who do not pay close attention to foreign policy are learning more about sanctions than they usually would. However what is unfortunately not being made clear to a mainstream audience is that Afghanistan is just a particularly egregious example of a larger way that the United States wages war throughout the world.

For more than half a century – decades before the United States began militarily occupying Afghanistan – the United States began perfecting its tactics of economic warfare on the people of Cuba. The trade embargo the United States placed on Cuba beginning in 1960 now forbids most U.S. companies from doing business with Cuba and even includes laws that punish foreign companies from trading with Cuba. Though Cuba has managed to maintain high standards of healthcare and education in spite of the embargo, the United Nations estimates that over six decades the embargo has cost the Cuban economy $130 billion dollars, resulting in regular food, fuel, and medicine shortages.

Tensions began to ease for a short time with President Obama opening up relations with Cuba towards the end of his presidency. Sadly this opening was short-lived. The Trump administration went back on all progress made under the Obama administration and placed even more severe sanctions on the country, including a limit on remittances that Cuban Americans can send to their relatives in Cuba. This was especially cruel since remittances were long one of the few sources of income that the Cuban people could rely on. Trump’s economic warfare on Cuba also meant that when the Covid-19 pandemic came, Cuba was deprived of millions of syringes it needed to vaccinate its population.

The Trump administration had a special love of sanctions and Cuba was not the only victim of such economic warfare. In 2017 the Trump administration put sanctions on Venezuela, severely limiting the country’s ability to import food. A report published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research in 2019 found that these sanctions resulted in the death of tens of thousands of Venezuelans. In 2018 the administration launched “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran which deprived the country of medical resources. The sanctions cut especially into Iranian hospitals’ ability to treat cancer patients. The sanctions also resulted in the Covid-19 pandemic hitting Iranians especially hard. Amid a surge in Covid deaths in Iran, Trump actually increased sanctions on the country.

The Biden administration has maintained the cruel economic warfare that Trump was such a fan of. Biden has carried over Trump’s sanctions on countries like Venezuela and Iran and added his own sanctions on various countries including Nicaragua and Ethiopia. Whatever justifications he may provide, the cost of sanctions is always placed primarily on the average civilian. Even when sanctions are only placed on individuals within a country’s government, businesses tend to completely steer clear of countries where U.S. sanctions are in place, resulting in the entire populations of sanctioned countries being economically cut off from the international community.

As the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan is demonstrating to many people, economic warfare can be just as deadly as traditional warfare, especially when it's being done by the United States. Sanctions are often used by imperialist leaders because they can be sold to the public as a more peaceful way for the United States to inflict its will. But economic warfare is still warfare. People should be outraged at how the United States is inflicting starvation and deprivation on the Afghan people, and that outrage must expand. Humanity has an obligation to fight for an end to the economic siege of Afghans as part of a larger fight against economic siege on Cubans, Iranians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Ethiopians, and any other people that find themselves on the receiving end of U.S. economic warfare.

The New York Times recently came through with a display of reporting that should be commended. On December 18, the paper announced its release of hundreds of the Pentagon’s confidential reports of civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East. This follows its high-profile investigations into the U.S. drone murder of the Ahmadi family during the Afghanistan withdrawal and an American strike cell in Syria that killed dozens of civilians with airstrikes.

Many journalists will, rightfully, praise the New York Times for its reporting on U.S. airstrikes and the civilian cost. Far fewer will point out how the inhumanity of U.S. airstrikes were first revealed in 2013 by whistleblower Daniel Hale.

Hale used his first-hand experience identifying targets for the drone program to highlight how it relies on faulty criteria, and as a result, kills civilians. Later, Hale worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, where he had access to documents on how the drone program operates. Hale provided those documents to the Intercept which published them as The Drone Papers in 2015. While Hale’s documents were not as comprehensive as the trove recently published by the New York Times, they did provide much of the same core revelations, particularly the faulty nature of how intelligence is gathered and the high civilian toll of air campaigns. Most notably, Hale’s documents revealed that 90% of the drone program’s victims were not the intended targets. Up until the recent reporting by the New York Times, Hale’s revelations were the most comprehensive proof of how U.S. air warfare functions.

To be fair, the Times’ reporting on the brutal nature and high civilian cost of U.S. airstrikes is not insignificant. Americans could have easily ignored the Pentagon’s violence now that the “boots on the ground” approach to intervention has largely ended with Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal. In fact, the use of airstrikes was championed by Obama so as to avoid anti-war sentiments from Americans. The Times actually highlights this, writing:

The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away.

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Still, as much as the Times’ reporting already seems to be provoking conversation around U.S. air warfare, it is concerning that this conversation comes with the risk of Hale’s own heroic actions being disregarded. The Times makes no mention of Hale’s actions, even as they receive accolades for supposedly breaking to the world the violence of U.S. airstrikes. More damning is how little the Times has commented on the fact that Hale was sentenced to nearly four years in prison earlier this year for exposing the drone program. Aside from a standard article about his sentencing published in July, Daniel Hale is absent from the New York Times’ pages. Azmat Khan, the reporter behind the “Civilian Casualty Files” has not mentioned Daniel Hale once on Twitter.

It’s not like there have not been updates in Hale’s story since he was sentenced. After his sentencing, Hale was kept languishing in a jail for over two months even though he was supposed to be transferred in a matter of weeks. Once finally transferred, Hale’s situation was made worse. He was supposed to be sent to a prison that would provide care for his post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis, but instead he is now being held in a communication management unit (CMU). CMU’s are designed for terrorists and “high-risk inmates” and detainees have highly restricted contact with the outside world. The American Civil Liberties Union has called on the U.S. government to end its use of CMUs, arguing that these “secretive housing units inside federal prisons in which prisoners are condemned to live in stark isolation from the outside world are unconstitutional, violate the religious rights of prisoners and are at odds with U.S. treaty obligations.”

Daniel Hale deserves freedom for revealing proof of the very crimes the New York Times is now being praised for exposing. His support team and anti-war activists have been working hard to grow concern and action for his cause, but that is a daunting task considering Hale is a person who the U.S. government, and U.S. military in particular, want silenced. But as the Times has shown with its own reporting of U.S. airstrikes, they have a platform that can cut through Pentagon-imposed silence. A single editorial calling for Hale’s release would do wonders for his cause.

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As the mainstream press spent this past weekend once again ensuring that Americans never forget the fear and anger of 9/11 which prompted 20 years of war, 10 of the latest victims of 9/11 were being wiped from historical memory. Just two weeks before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a US drone killed the Ahmadi family, including seven children. In the US-centric writing of history, they have already been forgotten.

The US military surveilled 43-year-old Zemari Ahmadi throughout his final day. He went about his normal routine as a Kabul-based employee of the aid group Nutrition and Education International. Ahmadi dropped off his co-workers at various locations throughout Kabul, filled water cartons at his office, and drove home to a residential compound where he lived with his family and his brother's family. As his own children and his brother's children ran to greet him, a US air force Reaper drone launched a missile at his car, incinerating him and the nine loved ones gathered around him.

This is the story that The New York Times uncovered through extensive interviews with Ahmadi's neighbors, colleagues, and medical experts. The Washington Post did its own extensive reporting and reached the same conclusion of the events. The story that US joint chiefs of staff chair, Gen. Mark Milley, gave to the public to justify the strike is very different.

Milley claimed that the attack was a "righteous strike" against ISIS-K members. Our military fed the lie to reporters that there was a second blast following the drone strike, proving that Ahmadi had explosives in his car which he was planning on using to launch a second terrorist attack on Kabul Airport. Those "explosives" were, in fact, the water cartons Ahmadi was bringing to his family. The New York Times and Washington Post both found that there was no second blast, just the one directed by the US military that incinerated seven kids.

Responding to The New York Times' reporting on Twitter, Matthew Hoh, a disabled combat veteran and anti-war activist put it best: "This very well sums up the last 20 years: fear, barbarism, ineptitude and lying."

This drone strike follows the same logic that 20 years ago turned 9/11 from a day of tragedy and violence into two decades of tragedy and violence.

20 years ago, Americans were correctly terrified and grief-stricken over 2,996 lives being snuffed out. What was never correct was the idea -- pushed by politicians in the highest positions of power and media outlets with the largest platforms -- that in exchange for these 2,996 lives, hundreds of thousands more needed to be taken. It was incorrect, but it was possible because the US lives taken on 9/11 were made out to be more valuable than the lives of Afghans or Iraqis.

20 years later, as US troops were finally leaving Afghanistan for good, an attack on Kabul Airport killed 13 US troops. 170 Afghans were also killed by the attack as well as shooting by US forces in the immediate aftermath. However, much like on 9/11, it's the smaller number of American lives lost that are significant to the corporate press and politicians.

It is because the lives of these 13 American troops matter more to certain sections of the American public that Biden vowed "revenge." In exchange for the lives of these 13 troops, 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children, were easy targets for retribution. Then our government lied about these victims, claiming they were terrorists. US troops may no longer be occupying Afghanistan, but if the devaluing of Afghan lives, the violence of the US war machine, and the lies from our leaders continue, it could only be a matter of time before we're dragged back into war again. Biden has already made clear his commitment to keep bombing Afghanistan.

For those who have been paying attention, it is not surprising that Biden's drone strike killed a family and it will not be surprising if additional bombing of Afghanistan kills more civilians. This is the very nature of the drone program which became a norm of US policy under the Obama administration. From January 2012 to February 2013, the US terrorized Afghanistan with Operation Haymaker, a military campaign of drone warfare in which 90% of victims were not the intended targets.

No one from the Obama administration has faced any consequences for the terror of the drone program. Nor have any members of the Trump administration faced consequences for waiving rules of engagement for airstrikes in Afghanistan, resulting in a spike in civilian casualties.

Daniel Hale, however, was sentenced to four years in prison for having the courage to provide the public with information about the drone program and its disregard for civilians. If voices like his were not silenced behind bars, maybe there would be more public outrage, or at least public acknowledgement of the civilian toll of US bombs and drones.

The war on Afghanistan is not over until the drone program has been shut down, the Afghan people have been paid reparations with money taken directly out of the Pentagon's budget, and prison cells have swapped out whistleblowers for war criminals. Along with this full ending of the war, the United States will need a reckoning with the militaristic culture which made war on Afghanistan at first a popular demand and later a background noise that most Americans could ignore. That militaristic culture is still packed into American entertainment and news commentary, simmering until the next reason for war allows it to boil into another frenzy of xenophobic vengeance.

Sam Carliner is a journalist based in New Jersey. His writing focuses on US imperialism and the climate crisis. He is also the Weekend Social Media Manager at CODEPINK.