Pulling the U.S. drone war out of the shadows

[Solomon2]

The Post’s View
Pulling the U.S. drone war out of the shadows

By Editorial Board, Published: November 1

IT’S BEEN 10 years since the first strike by an armed U.S. drone killed an al-Qaeda leader and five associates in Yemen. Since then, according to unofficial counts, there have been more than 400 “targeted killing” drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — countries where the United States is not fighting a conventional war. About 3,000 people have been killed, including scores — maybe hundreds — of civilians. And though the United States is winding down its military mission in Afghanistan, the Obama administration, as The Post’s Greg Miller reported last week, “expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.”

All of this causes increasing unease among Americans of both political parties — not to mention many U.S. allies. They are disturbed by the antiseptic nature of U.S. personnel launching strikes that they watch on screens hundreds or thousands of miles from the action. They question whether drone attacks are legal. They ask why the process of choosing names for the kill list as well as the strikes themselves are secret and whether such clandestine warfare does more harm than good to long-term U.S. interests.

Some of these anxieties seem to us misplaced. But the means and objectives of drone attacks — and the Obama administration’s steps toward institutionalizing the system — deserve much more debate than they have attracted during the presidential campaign.

Start with the misconceptions: Many critics second Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO under President George W. Bush, who wrote on the opposite page Sunday that drone strikes allow U.S. adversaries to portray the United States as “a distant, high-tech, amoral purveyor of death.” While drones may indeed prompt such propaganda, they are really a more effective and — yes — humane way to conduct one of the age-old tactics for combating an irregular enemy: identifying and eliminating its leaders. That drones do not put the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk and cause fewer collateral deaths are virtues, not evils.

Similarly, Mr. Volker asks “what we would say if others used drones to take out their opponents” — such as Russia in Chechnya or China in Tibet. The answer is twofold: Other nations will inevitably acquire and use armed drones, just as they have adopted all previous advances in military technology, from the bayonet to the cruise missile. But the legal and moral standards of warfare will not change. It’s hard to imagine that Russian drones would cause more devastation in Grozny than did Russian tanks and artillery, but if used there they would surely attract international censure.

That brings us to the question of whether the United States deserves such censure for the way it is using drones in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — the three places they have been employed outside a conventional war zone. As we have written previously, the strikes meet tests for domestic and international legality. War against al-Qaeda and those who harbor it was authorized in 2001 by Congress, and the United States has the right under international law to defend against attacks on its homeland, which al-Qaeda forces in Pakistan and Yemen have launched. Moreover, the governments of Yemen, Somalia and, up to a point, Pakistan have consented to the strikes.

The Obama administration’s heavy and increasing dependence on drones is nevertheless troubling. As Mitt Romney said in endorsing the drone strikes during the last presidential debate, “we can’t kill our way out of this.” Terrorism can be defeated only by a comprehensive effort to encourage stable and representative governments and economic development in countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan — a mission the administration, with its harping about “nation-building here at home,” appears increasingly disinclined to take on. Moreover, drone strikes do stoke popular hostility and therefore make U.S. political and diplomatic goals more difficult to achieve.

Perhaps most troubling, the relative ease of using drones, combined with the Obama administration’s reluctance to detain foreign militants, which would be politically difficult at home, has produced a stark record: Thousands of al-Qaeda suspects killed by drones have been balanced by only one significant capture — a Somali who was held on a U.S. warship for two months before being turned over to the U.S. civilian justice system.

In recent months drone strikes in Pakistan have decreased, partly in response to these negative effects. But The Post’s reporting suggests that the administration is working to institutionalize the system of creating “kill or capture” lists and is contemplating the use of drones in more countries where jihadist forces are active, including Libya and Mali. This raises new legal and political quandaries. The further — in geography, time and organizational connection — that the drone war advances from the original al-Qaeda target in Afghanistan, the less validity it has under the 2001 congressional authorization. While the United States has legal cause to retaliate against the terrorists who attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, most of the world is unlikely to accept an argument that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks justify drone strikes more than a decade later in Northern Africa.

In our view, the continuing fight against al-Qaeda and other Islamic jihadists targeting the United States must be considered a war and conducted as such. Nevertheless, when that war ranges far from conventional battlefields, U.S. interests will be better served by greater disclosure, more political accountability, more checks and balances and more collaboration with allies. Drone strikes should be carried out by military forces rather than by the CIA; as with other military activities, they should be publicly disclosed and subject to congressional review. The process and criteria for adding names to kill lists in non-battlefield zones should be disclosed and authorized by Congress — just like the rules for military detention and interrogation. Before operations begin in a country, the administration should, as with other military operations, consult with Congress and, if possible, seek a vote of authorization. It should seek open agreements with host countries and other allies.

There may be cases where the president must act immediately against an imminent threat to the country, perhaps from an unexpected place. But to institutionalize a secret process of conducting covert drone strikes against militants across the world is contrary to U.S. interests and ultimately unsustainable.

Read more on this issue:

Charles Krauthammer: Barack Obama, drone warrior

David Ignatius: An embassy asks, drones or diplomacy?

The Post’s View: Additional review for drone killings

 

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from: Unmanned aerial vehicles: Death from afar | The Economist

Unmanned aerial vehicles
Death from afar
America uses drones a lot, in secret and largely unencumbered by declared rules. Worries about that abound, not least in the administration
Nov 3rd 2012 | from the print edition

Drones are hardly synonymous with harmony. But in the last election debate neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney disagreed over what is now America’s main tactic in fighting the long war on terrorism: ever-greater use of armed drones for targeted killings in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the badlands of Yemen and Somalia, and, no doubt before long, north Mali, where an al-Qaeda affiliate has recently taken root. Just a few days before the debate, the CIA’s director, David Petraeus, reportedly asked the White House for a big expansion in the agency’s fleet of missile-carrying drones. It is part of the agency’s decade-long evolution from an intelligence organisation to a paramilitary one.

In Djibouti, an impoverished mini-state on the Gulf of Aden, America has turned a former French Foreign Legion outpost, Camp Lemonnier, into the most important base for drone operations outside the war zone of Afghanistan. According to an investigation by the Washington Post, Predator drones take off round the clock on missions over nearby Somalia and Yemen. Their pilots are in Creech, an air force hub 8,000 miles away in Nevada. The Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) runs Camp Lemonnier; the CIA is believed to have a more secret site elsewhere in the Arabian Peninsula. Aircraft from both bases often work together, as in the attack last year that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who became an al-Qaeda planner and propagandist.

After Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans do not want to spend blood and treasure in fighting big insurgencies on the ground. So drone strikes seem certain to stay the centrepiece of counter-terrorism efforts for many years to come and may well increase in reach and scale. America will invest $1.4 billion on new construction at Camp Lemonnier alone. Hugely enlarging the scope of drone operations (see chart) has been politically useful for Mr Obama. The ruthlessness of the campaign, plus the killing of Osama bin Laden, blunted Republican charges that he is soft on national security.

Because drones can loiter over potential targets for hours before firing their missiles, they are more discriminating than either fast jets or helicopter-borne special forces. Nor are their pilots put in harm’s way. Yet it is disturbingly unclear how many people the attacks have killed (some estimates suggest more than 3,000). The vast majority appear to have been militants, but some have been unlucky civilians. The distinction may also be blurring. New looser rules allow so-called “signature” attacks on unnamed fighters; that can easily mean any male of fighting age in an insurgent-held area.

It would be surprising if some aspects of the drone programme did not jar the president’s sensibilities. The former law professor has decried “bending the rules” in the fight against terrorism, or thinking that the ends justify the means. He worries about a “slippery slope into a place where we’re not being true to who we are”. The attorney-general, Eric Holder, argued in March that the administration’s counter-terrorism efforts, including the use of “technologically advanced weapons” were rooted in adherence to the law. The Pentagon and the CIA have deployed their general counsels to explain how their drones are always operated legally.

Staying true to America’s principles is one worry. Providing a template for other countries is another. China and Russia have similar technologies but their own ideas about what constitutes terrorism. In April the White House’s counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, a former senior CIA officer who opposed both the Iraq war and interrogation techniques such as water-boarding, gave a long and thoughtful speech on Mr Obama’s strategy. Mr Brennan said that the president was always urging his national security team to be as open as possible and went into some detail about the “extraordinary care” that was taken to ensure that attacks were both legal in terms of American and international law, as well as ethical in the wider sense.

In September Mr Obama himself went on television to give an account of his approach. He set out five rules. The target must be “authorised by our laws” and represent a threat that is “serious and not speculative”. The need for attack must be urgent. Planners must be “very careful” about avoiding civilian casualties. And despite the legal justification for stopping American citizens in al-Qaeda’s ranks from carrying out plots, “they are subject to the protections of the constitution and due process”. He did not mention another principle that some lawyers regard as indispensable: the consent of the country where the attack is to take place.

Should Mr Romney win, he will inherit a counter-terrorism “playbook” from Mr Obama—a set of rules that, in effect, institutionalises the use of armed drones—and the prototype of a “disposition matrix”—a database of terrorist suspects and a menu providing options for dealing with them. Mr Brennan is said to want the rules to be better codified and more transparent. The JSOC, which has a clear chain of command and legal accountability, could take the lead on drone attacks from the CIA.

But Kurt Volker, a former American official close to Senator John McCain, sees a bigger problem: drones have made killing too easy. In a recent article he asked: “What do we want to be as a nation? A country with a permanent kill list? A country where people go to the office, launch a few kill shots and get home in time for dinner? A country that instructs workers in high-tech operations centres to kill human beings on the far side of the planet because some government agency determined that those individuals are terrorists?” The debate over drones is only just starting.

from the print edition | International