- FEBRUARY 9, 2010
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Obama’s drone-strike counterterrorism policy
Posted By Stuart Gottlieb
Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - 11:29 PM
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U.S. drones have executed dozens of alleged al Qaeda members along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But is silence on this counterterrorism tactic the best strategy?
By Stuart Gottlieb
If you were under the impression that U.S. President Barack Obama's promise to craft new counterterrorism policies "in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals" could be accomplished without exposing dangerous contradictions, consider this:
Since Obama's swearing-in, the United States has executed dozens of suspected al Qaeda leaders and operatives without court hearings, the presentation of evidence, or the involvement of defense lawyers. These executions, typically carried out by missile strikes from unmanned CIA drone aircraft, have taken place in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Scores of civilians, including many women and children, have reportedly been killed or maimed in the strikes.
Calls for granting habeas corpus rights to Guantánamo detainees and outrage over the Bush administration's harsh treatment of enemy combatants have dominated the headlines. Yet this side of the U.S. war against al Qaeda and its affiliates is little discussed and even less deliberated.
But with tensions rising in Pakistan and around the Muslim world over the brutality and high civilian death toll from these targeted assassination attacks, the United States' day of reckoning regarding this policy may soon arrive as well. As we learned from the Bush administration, there are tremendous costs to aggressive counterterrorism policies, especially when their purposes are not clearly understood. Unless Obama candidly explains how targeted killings fit within his overall counterterrorism approach, he faces similar difficulties and the possible exhaustion of goodwill toward his new administration.
Indeed, although targeted killings can be justified on national security grounds -- to weaken the capability of Taliban and al Qaeda forces to carry out attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere -- they run counter to Obama's espoused counterterrorism ethos. Assuring the world in one breath that "America does not torture" suspected terrorists, while in another ordering Hellfire missile strikes that can burn victims alive, is unsustainable from both policy and diplomatic perspectives. How does the U.S. president explain why one suspected terrorist leader held in Guantánamo gets a team of lawyers fighting for his day in court, while another is killed in his car along with his family?
To justify these targeted killings, the Obama team needs to acknowledge two things. First, that the threat from al Qaeda and its affiliates remains so dire that the United States needs to engage in practices that in some contexts would be war crimes. Second, that some of the former Bush administration's most aggressive and controversial policies remain necessary in the conflict against al Qaeda, including targeted killings (admittedly a preferable alternative to a ground operation, which could leave scores of U.S. troops and Pakistani and Afghan civilians dead as well).
Obama has taken great care to level with the American people about the current financial crisis. He has made clear that there are no silver-bullet solutions and that returning to sustained economic growth will require difficult trade-offs.
This same candor is needed in the fight against global terrorism, whether on the frontiers of Pakistan or elsewhere. Although this might not mesh well with Obama's overall message on the terrorist threat and his administration's response, in the case of targeted killings, actions are already speaking more loudly than words.
Stuart Gottlieb, a former Senate foreign policy adviser, directs the Policy Studies Program at Yale University's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.
Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
EXPLORE:CENTRAL ASIA, AFGHANISTAN, BUSH'S LEGACY, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, MILITARY, PAKISTAN, SECURITY, TERRORISM 
I appreciate this post because it brings to our attention the dichotomy between reporting in the Muslim world, and in the US. While the former includes a great deal of negative publicity about precision targeting, the latter virtually ignores it.
Is it the pro-Obama media giving him a pass? Or is it patriotism?
In any case, as a nation unwilling to sacrifice too much for someone else's freedom - the inverse of the puritan if someone is sinning you can't be happy in your house (now turned on its head to read if someone is not free somewhere, that's ok, we're cool with that)- we naturally are inclined to get hands-off and try to blast our way with robots and guided missiles.
The danger of turning war into one vast video game is precisely that we become insular to its human dimensions, and this is then exploited by our enemy. The insularity by the way, increases with the reliance on remote-methods. Because entrenching them costs money, and in the end a mentality sets in, which wont allow you to cast too much doubt on these system's reliability.
It is definitely time for a debate
It is amazing that every twenty years we must enculturate another generation of diplomats, journalists and their associates in how to wage war. But here we go.
Like the North Vietnamese, who blew up women and children indiscrimnately in their guerrilla war; The Base does so also. They then have their front men raise a big stink about how we're killing men and women as if we're neanderthal murderers. Collateral damage incurred during drone strikes results from The Base domiciling among the people they are fighting for. They move with and live among their families hence when we attack, we inevitably kill their wives, children and parents. But these persons completely support them; in this type of war they are combatants.
The Base and their Pakistani and Afghani adherents fight a total war that stretches through generations and includes all generations. From age 10 to 90. They are fighting a war not for political or economic ends but for ideological ends. They wish to eliminate America because we are not their brand of Muslim. They wish to eliminate any Shia, Sufi or Sunni also because they are not their kind of Muslim. This isn't just right wing propaganda but the result of listening to Al Qaeda and its allies promote and recruit their combatants; as you should if you purport to give foreign policy advise.
Sincerely,
China Nolan chinanolan98@yahoo.com
Taken to an extreme, the idea of arresting and trying those who are killing Americans (not to mention the much greater numbers of non-Americans) would have soldiers locking up and bringing to some court terrorists caught on a battlefield with still-hot AK 47s or IEDs in their hands. Where does it end? These are not people committng crimes. By their own admission, they are at war with non-believers. You don't need proof beyond a reasonable doubt to kill an enemy in war. All you need is the opportunity. Granted, you need to be reasonably sure the people you are killing are the enemy but there is no need to prove it in court first. Like China Nolan says, if you hide among your family it is your fault they are at risk.
It seems there's a serious misunderstanding of what WAR actually is. Everything that President Obama has done (that's been made public, anyway) falls within the Laws of Armed Combat. If we were to follow Mr. Gottlieb's logic, every time US forces engage in a firefight with an enemy we're in the wrong if we don't do everything in our power to arrest and extradite the enemy back to US soil where they can be prosecuted. That is impractical as well as ridiculous. War isn't pretty but that doesn't make it illegal or unethical.
First, execution is when an unarmed, subdued prisoner is killed (normally quickly to imply civilization of some sort). The United States' use of unmanned warcraft to strike designated targets has become part of our strategic response to guerrilla warfare. Just or not, these strikes include less risk to our troops. But all civilians and troops may be the targets of attempted reprisals.
Second, these unmanned strikes and other conventional military offensives will not be the only, or even the primary, strategies aimed at stabilizing, improving and bringing peace to Afghanistan and its border regions. Diplomacy, politics and economics are the only hope in developing stable cooperation among the many diverse leaders and stake-holder factions who must accept and respect each other in order to create the consensus necessary to reduce radical groups to a controllable and maybe even manageable minority.
What is an acceptable offensive action in the course of waging a war? "Collateral damage" is one of them no matter how sophisticated the weaponry whether via drone "assassination-by-air" capabilities or another disingenuous term "smart bomb." Now you added another term "targeted killings." These disambiguities succeeds in further muddying the debate over war, its strategies and objectives. The very nature of war is the polemic here. But you've expanded the debate to include ethics, fairplay and morality - the real battlefield.
Our "targeted killings," given the circumstances of this war, are both consequential and inconsequential. The former because innocents inevitable die (and will continue to die); the latter because "scores" are a mere drop in the bucket when tallying casualties in our ongoing objective to wear down the terrorists. What would be some pragmatic, more conscionable alternatives? Ending the war is one of them!
Oh, for crying out loud!
Did the author of this article get kicked in the head by a horse, or was he just BORN stupid?
In war, people die . . . including civilians. It is inevitable. In World War II, we bombed German munitions factories . . . even though we knew there were civilians working in them.
Why? Because it was NECESSARY to destroy the Nazis' ability to continue fighting. This is not rocket science. Why doesn't the author of this article devote equal time to revealing all the countless civilians who have been DELIBERATELY targeted by the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Does he think that the U.S. alone is responsible for civilian deaths? Islamic fanatics unquestionably fire from civilian houses and use civilians as human shields . . . sometimes with the support of those same brainwashed civilians. Our experience in Iraq has given many examples of dead insurgents being stripped of their weapons and portrayed as "innocent civilians" to a gullible media. That is also a common tactic of the fanatics in Pakistan, just as it was in Somalia, years ago. Why aren't "moderate" Muslims just as furious about DELIBERATE Taliban and al-Qaeda attacks on innocents as they are about civilians who die as a result of being near Islamic fanatics who are targeted by us?
In World War II, we bombed German munitions factories . . . even though we knew there were civilians working in them.
Why? Because it was NECESSARY to destroy the Nazis' ability to continue fighting.
But for a good while switzerland and sweden made essential war materials for the nazis, and we didn't bomb their factories. They wanted to be neutral, and by voluntarily selling ball bearings etc to the germans they avoided german occupation. Later when the war was going badly enough for the germans that this wasn't an issue these "neutral" nations stopped the supply.
Suppose we had bombed swedish factories and killed swedish civilians. Would they have gotten upset enough with us to help the germans more? Maybe. Maybe likely. That might have been part of why we didn't do it.
Now we are fighting an enemy that is thinly dispersed among neutrals. We don't necessarily win much by killing them if it turns more neutrals against us than we kill enemies. This is not a moral issue. (OK, it might be a moral issue too, but that isn't my point.) This is a tactical issue. We are using tactics that probably do more harm than good.
In a short war we could hope to kill their trained people faster than they can replace them. But that can't work in this case. When they get plenty of recruits they can get them trained. We can't hope to kill them as fast as they train.
In a war that lasted for days or maybe weeks we could win by disrupting their communications. While they are disorganised we move in and win. But that can't work in this case either. They don't need that much communication with each other. If they survive as an ideology and if they carry out occasional acts of terrorism then we will think we are losing. And their communications can be slow for that. If a message is delayed for weeks it will usually be no big deal.
So, in the bombing campaign, who learns the fastest? We get data about where the terrorists will be and we bomb them. Ideally we would then send in a team to search the rubble and get DNA samples from it, to compare to the particular terrorists we were aiming for to see whether we got them. You know that usually doesn't happen.
They send cellphone messages etc, and they get to see what we bomb. There's no doubt at all what we bomb versus what we don't bomb.
Doesn't it make perfect sense that they'd steer us to bomb orphanages and holy men and whatever would get people the maddest at us? They're despicable to do that, but we already knew they were that way....
Sure, in war you have to do evil things to win. But I'm concerned that we're doing evil things that lose.
If we could be nice guys and win, that would be ideal. If we have to do bad stuff to win, that's sad but when we don't know a better way then we're stuck with it. But when we wind up being bad guys and it hurts us, it kind of takes away the point of it all.
Some comments seem unwarranted here--I don't take the author to mean that he is necessarily against these targeted killings, but rather pointing out the logical inconsistency in Obama's rhetoric and actions.
On the one hand, the 'overseas contingency operations' is not serious enough to keep those we capture on the battlefield in places like Gitmo; instead they are to be allowed access to our court systems and potentially let free into this country. On the other hand, it is serious enough that we can fly drones into a sovereign allied country and kill people we only suspect are planning 'man-made disasters', regardless of the collateral damage.
And this schism, magnified by the fact that in the US these are reported as targeted killings with little focus on the collateral damage, while in the Muslim world the focus is on the dead innocents, may end up surprising us with the blowback it causes for us. If we think the 'overseas contingency operations' is no big deal, so that we can close the prisons, etc., and the Muslim world sees us as engaging in brutality, this difference in perception is going to decrease any outreach attempts at understanding.
I mean, we're not even calling it a war anymore, so if it's not a war, what are we doing executing these people without trial with bombs from the air in a sovereign allied country, and killing anyone who might be in their immediate vicinity?
Why do we fight? Examine this question from within the reality of Pakistan's tribal areas and national perspective.
The Pashtun have never in their history accepted the dictat of any power, they have never accepted the Durand line and never will. They are quite adept at playing and using the contending regional and "great powers" to maintain their independence and way of life. They can outlast anyone on their home ground.Technology will make no difference here regardless of the statistical reports made to the pentagon.
We(the USA)will have to negotiate with the Pashtun and deliver both protection from Bin Ladin and ISA and the resources they have been asking the Pakistan goverment for since the creation of the state. This is a task better handled by SOCOM and State than Drones.
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