President Obama: The drones don't work, they just make it worse

[Zarvan]

Less than two weeks after Senator Rand Paul’s filibuster of CIA Chief John Brennan’s confirmation in the US Senate, it seems that the controversy over the legality and transparency of drone attacks has finally provoked a response from the Obama Administration. On March 19, 2013, reports published in the Daily Beast and the Wall Street Journal indicated that the controversial drone program may be shifted from the CIA to the Department of Defense.

The reports were based on statements by US officials and a yet unreleased draft document indicating that the Obama White House would like the program to be institutionalised and reformed, moving it into the command structure of the US military instead of within its spy agency.

It may be true that moving the drone program to the Department of Defense would address some of the critiques regarding transparency and legality. Drone strikes carried out by the military, as they have been in Afghanistan, would be subject to the rules of engagement that govern the use of military force. They would also have a clearer chain of command that would disclose, at least generally, the parameters used to select targets and order strikes, both contentious points on which the CIA-run drone program has been criticised.

Unlike the CIA, the Department of Defense would not be able to classify all drone operations as “covert” or “clandestine” and would be subject to oversight from other branches of the United States government. Furthermore, while the President did not have to sign off on every strike conducted by the CIA, under a military run program he would have, as Commander-in-chief, clear ultimate authority over the program.

Under the new formulation, operations would move gradually from the CIA to the Department of Defense, with a lengthy period of transition in which the two agencies would work together. The move would allow the CIA to move out of counter-terrorism and focus again on the collection of human intelligence, a facet of its operation that is said to have suffered. On March 20, the Washington Post reported that a panel of White House advisors had expressed grave concerns that the CIA was paying inadequate attention to collecting intelligence on China, the Middle East, and other national security flashpoints, because of its inordinate focus on military operations and drone strikes. A move away from drone strikes, then, would free up the Agency’s resources to do the sort of traditional intelligence gathering with which it is tasked.

On their own side, White House officials are keen to change the impression that the President Obama is a champion of secret assassinations using armed drones on shaky legal grounds. A major counter terrorism speech is expected soon in which the President will define a new direction in counter-terrorism policy and deflect criticism that his Administration has been operating an illegal killing program. While details of timing are unknown, such a speech can be seen as provoked by the questions raised in Senator Paul’s filibuster regarding the possibility of the President ordering drone strikes on US citizens based on unknown determinations. Although Attorney General Eric Holder denied such a possibility in his response to Senator Paul, questions have continued as to the legal authority of CIA targets and the fact that United States citizens cannot demand any sort of accountability for them.

Not really a change

Moving the drone program from the CIA to the Department of Defense is thus being painted as a victory, even a capitulation, to those critics who have criticised the lack of transparency, accountability, and legal basis of the drone program. However, the details of the move do not suggest a reversal or even a rethinking of the strategic imperatives that the Obama Administration and the CIA have used to justify the drone program.

First, the gradual process of the transition without any publicly disclosed details of how and when it will be completed are likely to create a situation in which, at least for a time, it would be difficult if not impossible to tell which agency, the Department of Defense or the CIA, would actually be responsible for a strike. Second, according to a government official who spoke to the Washington Post, the CIA program in Pakistan would be phased out even later “because of the complexities there” and because the program, unlike the ones in Yemen and Somalia, was actually begun by the CIA. Finally, even if the drone program is actually moved to the Department of Defense, it will be incorporated into its most secret portion, the Joint Special Operations Command, whose top-secret operations are also covert and never released to the public.

When these factors are considered, the effort to provide more transparency and an institutional framework for the drone program seem chimerical at best and deceptive at worst. All of them point to a continuation of a national security mindset, within the Obama Administration and the State Department, both believing that drones, cheaply bought and unmanned, are a perfect way to bombard other countries with minimal cost the United States. With the risk of dead American soldiers reduced to nothing, military officials are also gobbling up the idea of waging remote-control wars all over the world, wherever a possible or even supposed threat can be identified.

Are Drones effective?

Starkly absent from the debate are any meaningful critiques of the actual effectiveness of drone strikes. Figures obtained from the South Asia Terrorism Portal indicate, for example, that the drastic escalation in drone strikes in Pakistan during the Obama Administration has caused no decrease in the capacity of drone-targeted groups to carry out terrorist attacks in the region. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, President Obama ordered 53 drones strikes in Pakistan in 2009. These strikes were reported to have killed, among others, Tehreek-e-Taliban Commander Baitullah Mehsud and Maulvi Gul Nazeer. In turn, there were approximately 500 bomb blasts in Pakistan that year, most of which were concentrated in the northwestern tribal areas of Pakistan.

In 2010, President Obama ordered 128 drone strikes which were again reported to have killed various prominent Taliban figures and various Al-Qaeda commanders. The number of bomb blasts carried out by terrorist groups in Pakistan that year was 473, with most of them again concentrated in the tribal areas and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. In 2011, President Obama ordered 75 drone strikes which killed, among others, Al-Qaeda Chief financial officer Abu Zaid Al Iraqi and Taliban spokesperson Shakirullah Shakir. However, despite this being the third year of drone strikes, terror groups within Pakistan were still able to carry out 673 bomb blasts. They also expanded the geographic area of the blast operations to include not only the remote and sparsely populated tribal areas, but also the urban centers of Karachi in the south and Quetta in the southwest of Pakistan. Finally, in 2012, President Obama ordered 48 drone strikes which were alleged to have killed between 242 and 400 people. Among the dead was Taliban commander Hakimullah Mehsud, whose death was said to be a big blow to the operative capacities of the organization.

However, even despite this being the fourth year of drone strikes in Pakistan, with so many Al-Qaeda and Tehreek-e-Taliban leaders allegedly killed in strikes in past years, terrorists were nevertheless able to still carry out 652 attacks killing 1,007 people and injuring 2,687. Not only were they able to kill more, they were also able to expand their ambit of operations into other parts of Pakistan, with terrorist attacks in Karachi and Quetta now almost equivalent in damage to the ones that occurred in the northwest, where the war against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban had once been isolated.

The move of Tehreek-e-Taliban activity from the tribal areas of Pakistan, where drones operate more effectively, to urban areas like Karachi has also been documented in a recent report issued by the United States Institute for Peace, which stated that Karachi is now the “preferred hideout of the TTP, Afghan Taliban, other extremist, and sectarian outfits" and that Karachi’s urban density and sprawl offer “the best militant hideout,” since U.S drone strikes cannot be enacted in Karachi, which unlike Federally Administered Tribal Area is the country’s economic and financial capital. The report further goes on to say that militants “are relocating to Karachi and are able to plan local and international operations in the city.”

That those allegedly being targeted by drones do not seem at all weakened by them seems largely absent from the discussion on drones and the preoccupations of whether the program will be snuck from the secret corners of one US agency to another. The problem of an increase in terrorist attacks in Pakistan, even after their leaders have been hammered for years by drones, can be ignored by American officials whose interest is ostensibly limited only to protecting Americans. However, if it is concerns of transparency and legality that are provoking the responses from the Obama Administration and the purported move to reassign the drone program to the Department of Defense, perhaps the issue of actual effectiveness can also be added to the mix.

Rafia Zakaria is on the board of directors of Amnesty International. She is a lawyer and a Political Science PhD candidate at Indiana University.

You can follow Rafia on Twitter @rafiazakaria

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
President Obama: The drones don't work, they just make it worse - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

 

[forcetrip]

@Zarvan, could you edit the text and highlight the important information like where obama has said whats written in the title. I did a quick glance and did not find it.

 

[Bang Galore]

@Zarvan, could you edit the text and highlight the important information like where obama has said whats written in the title. I did a quick glance and did not find it.

I think it is addressed to Obama not said by him.

 

[forcetrip]

I see.. i guess it was one of those misleading titles, or badly put together sentences.

 

[fatman17]

April 09, 2013

Akbar Ahmed’s "The Thistle and the Drone"

Droning Into a War on Tribal Islam


by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY


Bina Shah has written an excellent review of Akbar Ahmed’s important new book, The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam (Brookings, March 2013). I urge you to read it carefully, because I think it accurately sums up much of Ahmed’s tour de force, at least in so far as I understand it.

Shah’s review appeared in the 7 April 2013 issue of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn It stands in sharp contrast to Michael O’Hanlon’s petulant review that appeared in the Brookings own blog, which I also urge you to read carefully.



O’Hanlon, a typical inside-the-beltway, thinky-tanky self-proclaimed defense scholar, a defender of the Afghan surge and the drone war, cherry-picks a few quotes (out of 369 pages!) in a pique of critique. In so doing he sounds more like a Pentagon PR drone defending the farm than a serious reviewer making a dispassionate effort to understand and dissect Ahmed’s thesis. In contrast, Bina Shah, a novelist, has produced a far more nuanced review that, I think, accurately addresses the core of Ahmed’s thesis, albeit from what is clearly a sympathetic viewpoint.

So what is their difference of opinion about?

The Thistle and Drone documents the results of about 40 case studies in the world wide crises of tribal-central government (periphery-center) relations in Islamic societies. Ahmed argues how the effects of globalization, especially the war on terror, doubly especially the drone war, is destabilizing the already existing crises in these center-periphery relations and is morphing into a catastrophic anti-tribal religious war. This is a subject about which most Americans, including O’Hanlon, as well as myself, know almost nothing.

But at least I am learning, thanks to this book.

I found Ahmed’s work to be a fascinating dissection of the tensions among the moral
systems of traditional tribal cultures, Islam, and the modern states in which they exist. It is both scholarly and highly informative — and it is elegantly written and easy to understand.

Ahmed is a PhD anthropologist by training (Cambridge) and now holds the appropriately named Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington DC. But he also has a wealth of practical real world experience: He served a the Political Agent of the Pakistani central government in the South
Waziristan, a place now called the most dangerous place on earth (see this video of his speech to an interfaith conference at the Chautaugua Institute), and as the Pakistan’s ambassador to the UK.

Too often American foreign policy is shaped by a naive projection of our own values onto other people about which we know very little, conditioned always by heavy doses arrogance and ignorance. Ahmed’s book is a dose of corrective medicine in this regard. Of course, given its incredibly broad sweep, just about any reader will find passages he or she disagrees with or subjects that are perhaps not addressed sufficiently to one’s satisfaction.

While Professor Ahmed admirably dissects Pakistani President Musharraf’s dysfunctional role in the so-called War on Terror, I, for example, wish he had devoted more time to analyzing the legacy of General Zia ul-Haq’s rule of Pakistan (1977-88) and how that regime shaped contemporary Pakistani politics and its evolving relationship with the United States. I say this because Zia’s rule coincided with the buildup to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, including the Carter Administration’s efforts in 1979 to use religious fervor to provoke the Soviets into invading Afghanistan, the resulting flood of Afghan refugees into the tribal areas of Pakistan, the emergence of the Saudi-influenced Madrassa culture in the tribal areas, and the evolution of the US-Saudi-Pakistani support of the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan in the 1980s during the Reagan Administration.

On the other hand, these omissions merely represent my own biases and interests, and they in no way detract from the larger cogency of Ahmed’s thesis. In the words of Dr. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, “This is a book of genuinely global importance; by offering a fresh and entirely persuasive analysis of what the West habitually and superficially treats as ‘religiously motivated’ violence and terror, it demands an urgent rethinking of the disastrous strategies that have been used in the last decade to combat the threat of terrorist activity.”

Caveat Emptor: Akbar Ahmed is a new found friend, whom I both like and admire as a person and as a scholar.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. He be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

 

[fatman17]

May 23, 2013

The Militaristic Trajectory

Drones = Assassinations = War Crimes


by NORMAN POLLACK


Journalist Scott Shane, with an assist from Mark Mazzetti, reports in the New York Times (May 22) on the decline in armed drone strikes. Perhaps, for all the wrong reasons, drone warfare is now under review–i.e., in the words of one national-security expert, these strikes are not worth the “long-term strategic costs.” Giving up this principal tool, Obama’s signature weapon of choice, is not on the table, only its selective use, so as not to invite charges that the US is horrifically guilty under international law for the vaporization of fellow human beings, and then, from “pilots” sitting in Nevada or New Mexico, 8000 miles away, the victims of presidential authorization at nomination parties Terror Tuesdays at the White House.

Who, in Summer ’08, would believe they were electing a moral monster, so cold-blooded as to revamp military operations through expanding the mission of CIA, assigning critical tasks to JSOC, and globalizing their paramilitary functions into both a doctrine of permanent war (the gist of counterterrorism) and avenue to maintaining political-ideological hegemony (the gist of counterrevolution) in a world that no longer corresponds to US claims of leadership in structuring the international system on lines acceptable to American capitalist expansion and, its twin, US military supremacy.

Obama is expected to reveal the justification for wholesale acts of political murder (now including that of four Americans—but who’s counting?) and the extreme terrorization of whole populations, through never knowing when the sustained buzzing overhead will strike without warning, this last a trick that the Nazis learned about psychological warfare during the London bombings, especially the unmanned aerial vehicles. If the US is skating on the thin edge of fascism in its creation of an hierarchical social order based on monopolization, the unrestrained growth of the military, and, through the political culture of militarism ensuring mass passivity and acquiescence (hardly a peep from organized labor, civil rights and civil liberties organizations, religious groups, students—all of whom played an important part in the civil rights struggle—on assassination as official US policy from the top), the use of armed drones is taking America over the edge.

Now partly disguised through liberal rhetoric and the stubborn loyalty to Obama of the Democratic party, the black community (an expression of racial solidarity Paul Robeson and Dr. King would have had no trouble seeing through), and assorted liberal groups, beginning with labor and environmentalists.

“Fascism” stick in the craw? Too bad, because given the preponderance of military spending, planning, and execution, coupled with the uncontested fact of wider disparities of wealth and power in America as never before, and the formation looks suspiciously one-sided, a business polity occupying a moral void, presided over by a POTUS responsive to ruling groups, at the direct expense of the poor, yes, black and white alike.

Obama’s fascination, joined by Brennan, and a national-security apparatus claiming drone assassination is moral because it obviates the need for more boots on the ground (Pentagon jargon), with antiseptic killing—down of course to leaving the victim a blood spat, disappeared, not one to worry about in terms of imprisonment—speaks volumes about the psychological authoritarianism callous to human suffering, not to say obliteration. The Oval Office has done its share in legitimating bestiality.

My Comment on The Times’s article follows:

Along with Savage, Shane and Mazzetti are among my favorite national-security reporters. Yet in this article I could not find the key word describing the armed drone strikes: ASSASSINATION. No wonder America’s ugly reputation in the world. Obama the assassination president, Obama enshrouding the program in secrecy (lest its illegality be exposed), Obama the killer of more children through so-called “collateral damage” than are killed through gun violence in America.

Oh those Terror Tuesday sessions off the Situation Room, selecting targets as though in a shooting gallery at a county fair. POTUS the Mars of War (while God is busy ministering to the victims). Almost as shameful as Obama’s personal authorization for targeted killings–these include zapping the funerals of the victims and first responders seeking to help the victims–are the reasons given for slowing down the number of strikes. Everything about the drones speaks to cynicism, cold-bloodedness, amorality, together adding up to an indictment for WAR CRIMES.

Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University.