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Making More Enemies than We Kill? Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages Dropped on Laos and Cambodia, and Weighing Their Implications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Taylor Owen  and
Ben Kiernan
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Debate over the nature and impact of civilian casualties from U.S. aerial attacks continues. “Are we creating more terrorists than we're killing?,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once asked of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq and of its offshoot ISIS, suggests the answer there. Reflecting in 2012 on U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, the former director of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Robert Greiner, wrote: “One wonders how many Yemenis may be moved in future to violent extremism in reaction to carelessly targeted missile strikes, and how many Yemeni militants with strictly local agendas will become dedicated enemies of the West in response to US military actions against them.” That same month a Yemeni lawyer warned: “DEAR OBAMA, when a U.S. drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 13 , Issue 17 , April 2015 , e3
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2015

References

Notes

1 Albert R. Hunt, “Killing Terrorists, Creating More,” New York Times, April 16, 2013(accessed April 25, 2015).

2 The New York Times reports that by 2007, Al Qaeda “had taken control of several major cities and provinces” in Iraq. Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo, “Petraeus Reaches Plea Deal…,” March 4, 2015, p. A15.

3 Robert Greiner, “Yemen and the US: Down a Familiar Path,” Al-Jazeera, May 10, 2012, (accessed April 25, 2015)

4 Ibrahim Monthana, “How Drones Help Al Qaeda,” New York Times, June 13, 2012, (accessed April 25, 2015)

5 David Rohde, “Obama's Overdue Step on Drones,” Reuters, May 24, 2013, (accessed April 25, 2015)

6 Hassan Abbas, Atlantic, August 23, 2013, (accessed April 25, 2015)

7 Bruce Cumings, The Korean War, New York, Modern Library, 2010.

8 James P. Harrison, “History's Heaviest Bombing,” in The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives, ed. Jayne S. Werner and Luu Doan Huynh, Armonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe, 1993, 131-32.

9 William Yardley, “Fred Branfman, Who Exposed Bombing of Laos, Dies at 72,” New York Times, Oct. 6, 2014:(accessed April 25, 2015)

10 Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2013, xiii.

11 Holly High, “Violent Landscape: Global Explosions and Lao Life-Worlds,” Global Environment 1:1, 2008, 56-79, at 67, www.whp-journals.co.uk/GE/high.pdf. High cites her source in note 35: “John Dingley, Senior Technical Advisor at UXO Lao, personal communication. This figure is based on US Air Force data provided to UXO Lao. Unfortunately, the data has many errors, and exact figures are still unclear.”

12 Holly High, James R. Curran and Gareth Robinson, “Electronic Records of the Air War Over Southeast Asia: A Database Analysis,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 8:4 (Fall 2013), pp. 86-124, at 104, 110. This article first appeared in 2014 here: note 26 cites a URL “accessed November 2013.”

13 Ben Kiernan, “The US Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969-1973,” Vietnam Generation, 1:1, Winter 1989, pp. 4-41, Table 1, p. 6:

14 Phnom Penh Post, April 14, 2000.

15 Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, “Bombs over Cambodia,” Walrus magazine, October 2006, 62-69,

16 Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia,”Asia-Pacific Journal, May 12, 2007:

17 Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, “Roots of U.S. Troubles in Afghanistan: Civilian Bombing Casualties and the Cambodian Precedent,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 26-4-10, June 28, 2010, box inset, and note 38:

18 Kiernan and Owen, “Roots of U.S. Troubles in Afghanistan: Civilian Bombing Casualties and the Cambodian Precedent,” Asia-Pacific Journal, June 28, 2010, note 38.

19 High et al., “Electronic Records of the Air War,” note 26.

20 High et al., “Electronic Records of the Air War,” 92.

21 The CGP geographic data may be downloaded here.

22 Kiernan, “US Bombardment,” 32, 36.

23 Owen and Kiernan, “Bombs over Cambodia,” 62-3.

24 Kiernan and Owen, “Roots of U.S. Troubles in Afghanistan,”

25 Kiernan, “US Bombardment of Kampuchea,” 6.

26 Hunt, “Killing Terrorists, Creating More.”

27 “Jimmy Carter: Drones Create More Terrorists,” Huffington Post, March 25, 2014, (accessed April 25, 2015).