Wednesday, May 2, 2012

I Will Drone You

... reportedly used as a threat by young men in the tribal areas of Pakistan who frequently hear the buzz of U.S. hunter killer drones overhead.

About a decade ago there was a great deal of talk about a revolution in military affairs, the emergence of the electronic battlefield, the transformation of G.I. Joe into Buck Rogers, and a wide range of gee-whiz innovations, constrained only by the writer’s imagination.  While we’re still waiting for much of what was promised (along with the flying cars, robot housekeepers and free electricity that the fearless forecasters of the 60s assured us would be here long before now), some aspects of modern warfare has been transformed by technology.

A particularly notable example is the mushrooming use of drones.  The consensus estimate is the U.S. has about 7,500 drones -- unmanned aircraft -- deployed today.  They range from the relatively small like the 18 inch Wasp III with a 3 mile radius, to the forty-four and half foot Global Hawk that can fly as high as 65,000 feet and say in the air as long as 36 hours.  The large majority carry cameras and radars of varying types for data gathering and mapping.  Some, like the Predator and Reaper, are used for killing. 

Drones are not cheap; you can fly the little WASP III off the lot for $49,000 but a Predator will set you back over $13 million and the Global Hawk goes for around $15 million.  (All drones include GPS systems and electronics far more advanced than your car; but your car does have a better sound system and more cupholders.)

Most drones are purchased and controlled by the military; some are loaned to other branches of government, from the CIA to the Border Patrol to NASA.  The CIA’s use of drones to attack and kill suspected Taliban in Pakistan and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen has raised some of the most serious questions surrounding their use.

Under the Obama administration the use of drones for all purposes has mushroomed including the use of Reaper or Predator drones for attacks.  Hard data is elusive but it has been estimated that there have been around 300 drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia over the past decade, with at least 118 confirmed strikes in Pakistan in 2010 alone. 

Responsibility for using drones is divided between the Department of Defense and the CIA.  The military operates the drones in Afghanistan and until the first of this year, in Iraq.  (At least there have no public reports of U.S. drone attacks in Iraq since the ostensible withdrawal of U.S. forces.)  Operations in Pakistan are under the CIA and operations in Yemen are divided, with the military making some drone attacks and the CIA others. 

This division of responsibility matters because it affects who gets targeted for drone attacks and who oversees the operations.  There are, according to some sources, three separate “kill lists” -- the National Security Council compiles one, the CIA another, and the miliary’s Joint Special Operations Command a third.  Who decides, using what criteria, to put someone’s name on a list is not clear.  Nor do we know who decides that there is enough intelligence to launch a specific mission targeting an individual.  In addition, the CIA uses “signature” strikes.  Instead of confirming that a particular individual whose name is on a kill list is in fact in the sights of the drone operator, there is a set of behavioral indicators that support the conclusion that the people being observed are engaged in harmful or threatening activities and should be targets of a missile. 

Civilian, specifically Congressional, oversight of both the military and the CIA is central to our conception of American government.  The military use of drones in Afghanistan is overseen by the House and Senate Armed Services committees, while the House and Senate Intelligence committees oversee the CIA operations.  It is not surprising then that the rules of engagement are apparently different for military as opposed to CIA drone attacks. 

I think the use of hunter killer drones like Predator and Reaper raise several issues that you and I as American citizens ought to be thinking about. 

●    who is monitoring the broad policy implications of drone attacks outside formal combat zones, particularly the attacks in Pakistan

●    are targeted assassinations comparable to, or different from, shooting enemy solders during a fire fight

●    who, using what criteria, puts someone’s name on a kill list

●    can the government of the United States execute an American citizen without a trial?

The question of broader policy implications is raised directly by the CIA operations in Pakistan.  CIA drone strikes in northwest Pakistan have complicated an already difficult relationship.  From an American perspective the key issues are internal stability, deep concern about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the use of Pakistani territory by Taliban fighters from Afghanistan, and the potential for a violent confrontation with India. 

The drone strikes seriously complicate U.S. efforts to slow down the growth of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and to support political development because they:

Are wildly unpopular with Pakistan public opinion.  It may well be true that they have gotten far more discriminating and the number of innocent bystanders killed has been drastically reduced, as proponents of the strikes contend.  But they are widely perceived in Pakistan as an arrogant assault on Pakistan’s territory and sovereignty that have killed hundreds of innocent bystanders.  This makes it harder for the government to appear to cooperate with the U.S.   

Divide the Pakistani military.  The popular democratic movement that replaced the military dictatorship with a civilian government did not change the fundamentals of Pakistani politics: the military is the single most important factor.  The military is deeply ambivalent about the Taliban operating in northwest Pakistan’s tribal areas. For some military leaders, especially the Intelligence agency (ISI), the Taliban is a tool they created in the 1980s to help expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan and to prevent India from gaining a foothold in the area.  [for a brief overview of the Taliban and its relation to the ISI, see Who are Those Guys?] In 2012 India is the major threat and replacing the weak and corrupt Karzai government with a reliably anti-Indian, pro-Pakistan regime would be a good thing.  Drone strikes kill good guys and are very bad thing. For other military leaders, the Taliban has become a threat to internal stability and urban middle and upper middle classes.  Drone strikes kill bad guys and are a good thing, even if the government must make periodic public protests for the sake of public opinion.

The weightiest issue, I think, is not the drone strikes themselves but who decides that the positive impact of the strikes on the war in Afghanistan outweighs the negative impacts on other aspects of U.S. foreign policy.  It is not clear that anyone is seriously evaluating the larger strategic consequences of the tactical use of drones.

The use of drones to target particular individuals who have been identified as Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders raises a serious issue.  U.S. law prohibits assassination attempts on foreign heads of state.  International law and norms try to maintain a distinction between combat on a battlefield and other kinds of killing.  Drones are used in Pakistan and Yemen (and perhaps elsewhere) to kill specific individual who are believed to be plotting against the United States.  I don’t think this can be justified in the same way that one can justify killing someone in an enemy uniform or someone who is shooting at you.  I can make an argument that it can be justified and I can make the counter argument.  The point is, I think, is that no one has been challenged to make the argument, there has been no demand that the CIA or the Defense Department justify the use of drones as weapons in this fashion. 

Closely related to the question of targeted killings by drones the existence of “kill lists.”  Perhaps because it is so easy to see the targets of the drone attacks as “bad guys who need to be killed” very few people seem to be concerned about the criteria used and the decision process that puts a person’s name on the list.  The arguments for and against capital punishment are well known and the debate has raged for decades and the conditions under which the State can take a person’s life are tightly circumscribed by law.  But a person can be executed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Reaper drone under secret guidelines with no trial.  This seems to be a serious enough action that we ought to be thinking about it.

Signature attacks seem even more problematic.  The criteria are secret  -- some people find it troubling that you can be killed far from a battlefield for doing something that someone sitting in a darkened room at Creech Air Force base outside Las Vegas or another installation in the U.S. finds suspicious.  There is no way for you or I to know how useful the behavioral criteria are at clearly distinguishing hostile behavior or how often they yield a false positive by misinterpreting behavior.  There are unconfirmed allegations, for example, that people running to help victims of a drone attack have in their turn been attacked.

For many people, the fact that  American citizens have been executed in targeted drone attacks is particularly troubling.  Anwar al-Awlaki was killed last September in Yemen.  His 16 year old son was killed in another drone strike two weeks later. When word leaked that President Obama had approved adding al-Awlaki to a kill list in the fall of 2010 there was a flurry of protests by civil liberties groups but legal challenges failed and the alleged crimes of al-Awlaki were so serious and he was so public in his hopes to do harm to Americans that most of us paid little attention.  And we paid equally little attention a couple months ago when Attorney General Holder offered a long awaited justification of killing al-Awlaki by citing a secret Justice Department memo.  But some people do remain troubled by the argument that the President has the authority to execute an American citizen without a trial or any judicial process but you and I cannot see the legal rationale.

In some ways the issues raised by drone strikes are some of the familiar issues raised by the “war on terror” which in many ways continues just as it began under the Bush administration, even if the term itself has been stricken from the official vocabulary.  In other ways these issues flow from the use of a new technology whose implications are only now beginning to emerge but that promises to become more and more prominent in our every day lives as well as on battlefields far removed.

Who Are Those Guys: Quick Overview of the Taliban

Hunter killer drone strikes in Pakistan are directly linked to the war in Afghanistan but I suspect that most Americans have little understanding of who is fighting there and why.  Many of us could identify “The Taliban” as the enemy (especially if it was a multiple choice question) but would find it very hard to explain who they are and why our government has felt it necessary to fight them for the past 10 years.

The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is a excellent example of a colonial border that is little more than a line drawn on a map arbitrarily dividing members of an existing society.  The border does exist, there are check points along the roads and soldiers who will question you if you want to go visit friends and family and who have to be avoided or bribed if your business is taking untaxed or illegal merchandise from one side to the other, but it is more of  an inconvenient fiction than a true division.  People think of themselves as members of their extended families, their village societies, and the broader clans and groups that make up the community of Pashtu speaking traditional people and not as citizens of Pakistan or Afghanistan.  The idea that I am Pakistani and my mother’s brother’s son who lives in the next valley over is a citizen of Afghanistan and therefore a foreigner is nonsensical.

Much of the Pakistani army is stationed in this northeastern section of the country to maintain order.  But the central government in Islamabad is far away and leaves everyday governance and economic life to traditional leaders in the villages. On the Afghan side the central government is even further away and even more irrelevant.

The outside world intruded heavily in Pashtun life in the 1980s when the Soviet Union sent its military into Afghanistan to prop up a friendly regime.  Resistance to foreign forces was fierce across Afghanistan and refugees flooded into northeast Pakistan.

The United States framed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as part of the Cold War and sought proxies to fight the Red Army.  Anti-communist, anti-Russian Arab states, most notably Saudi Arabia, framed the invasion as atheists assaulting Islam.  Pakistan framed the invasion as India’s ally, the USSR, threatening Pakistan’s security.  The result was the emergence of the Taliban as the largest and most well supported opposition force.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency became the primary conduit for money and weapons from the U.S. and Persian Gulf states to anti-Soviet fighters.  The ISI is a highly secretive, quite autonomous branch of the military that combines many of the functions of the CIA, special operations forces, and the FBI.  The ISI recruited young men from refugee camps, from villages along the border with Afghanistan and incorporated a wave of volunteers from the Middle East  to create a very effective guerrilla force that could launch operations in Afghanistan from safe havens in Pakistan.  Saudi Arabia also supplied a number of religious leaders who set up schools in refugee camps and worked with potential fighters to promulgate a particularly austere and conservative version of Islam.

When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan,
  • the foreign fighters left, some to become Al Qaeda;
  • the Taliban triumphed in the chaotic melee among different ethnic groups contending for power in Afghanistan and the dominant faction, influenced by the Saudi version of Islam,  instituted a government mirroring life in the most rural and reactionary villages;
  • the Taliban regime provided a refuge for its erstwhile allies in Al Qaeda who had been chased out of their camps in Sudan;
  • the ISI retained its close ties to its proteges
Very few people outside the ISI shed any tears when the United States attacked the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after 9/11 to remove Al Qaeda’s major ally.  The regime was notorious for oppression, mindless assaults on its own cultural heritage, and defiance of the international community and was beset by a powerful insurgency which was motivated largely by traditional rivalries and resentment of Pashtun dominance.  The U.S. and NATO forces tipped the balance and presided over the installation of a new Afghan regime which had to struggle from the beginning for both legitimacy and effective control. 

It is a question for another day, a classic “woulda coulda shoulda” question, to decide how different Afghanistan would have been if the U.S. had not almost immediately launched the war in Iraq, if there had been a strong and consistent focus on the civilian side of national development and building effective governance institutions, if we could have avoided becoming perceived as yet another band of foreigners trying to impose a corrupt and intrusive regime.  The fact is that is how the situation came to be defined. 

It is convenient to lump all the groups fighting against us under the rubric “Taliban” and to perceive all of Afghanistan as a single combat zone.  American strategy is more complicated than that and we do, at least at times, recognize that there are divisions and factions within the coalition that is opposing us.  The most important groups are Pashtun, motivated as much by xenophobe as religious or social values and their ability to rest and regroup in Pakistan’s tribal areas is critical.  And the most important groups have some kind of relationship with Pakistan’s ISI.

There are two optimistic scenarios for the end of American direct combat in Afghanistan.  One is that the investment in training the Afghan army and national police pays off and the Karzai government can survive.  The other is that the U.S. and the Karzai regime can split their opponents and negotiate a power sharing agreement with enough factions within the Taliban to block the most extreme leaders and the groups most under the sway of the ISI from returning to power.  The drone attacks are seen by the Obama administration as supporting either of those happy outcomes.