C.I.A. Steps Up Drone Attacks on Taliban in Pakistan
By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: September 27, 2010
WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. has drastically increased its bombing campaign in the mountains of Pakistan in recent weeks, American officials said. The strikes are part of an effort by military and intelligence operatives to try to cripple the Taliban in a stronghold being used to plan attacks against American troops in Afghanistan.
As part of its covert war in the region, the C.I.A. has launched 20 attacks with armed drone aircraft thus far in September, the most ever during a single month, and more than twice the number in a typical month. This expanded air campaign comes as top officials are racing to stem the rise of American casualties before the Obama administration’s comprehensive review of its Afghanistan strategy set for December. American and European officials are also evaluating reports of possible terrorist plots in the West from militants based in Pakistan.
The strikes also reflect mounting frustration both in Afghanistan and the United States that Pakistan’s government has not been aggressive enough in dislodging militants from their bases in the country’s western mountains. In particular, the officials said, the Americans believe the Pakistanis are unlikely to launch military operations inside North Waziristan, a haven for Taliban and Qaeda operatives that has long been used as a base for attacks against troops in Afghanistan.
Beyond the C.I.A. drone strikes, the war in the region is escalating in other ways. In recent days, American military helicopters have launched three airstrikes into Pakistan that military officials estimate killed more than 50 people suspected of being members of the militant group known as the Haqqani network, which is responsible for a spate of deadly attacks against American troops.
Such air raids by the military remain rare, and officials in Kabul said Monday that the helicopters entered Pakistani airspace on only one of the three raids, and acted in self-defense after militants fired rockets at an allied base just across the border in Afghanistan. At the same time, the strikes point to a new willingness by military officials to expand the boundaries of the campaign against the Taliban and Haqqani network — and to an acute concern in military and intelligence circles about the limited time to attack Taliban strongholds while American “surge” forces are in Afghanistan.
Pakistani officials have angrily criticized the helicopter attacks, saying that NATO’s mandate in Afghanistan does not extend across the border in Pakistan.
As evidence of the growing frustration of American officials, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, has recently issued veiled warnings to top Pakistani commanders that the United States could launch unilateral ground operations in the tribal areas should Pakistan refuse to dismantle the militant networks in North Waziristan, according to American officials.
“Petraeus wants to turn up the heat on the safe havens,” said one senior administration official, explaining the sharp increase in drone strikes. “He has pointed out to the Pakistanis that they could do more.”
Special Operations commanders have also been updating plans for cross-border raids, which would require approval from President Obama. For now, officials said, it remains unlikely that the United States would make good on such threats to send American troops over the border, given the potential blowback inside Pakistan, an ally.
But that could change, they said, if Pakistan-based militants were successful in carrying out a terrorist attack on American soil. American and European intelligence officials in recent days have spoken publicly about growing evidence that militants may be planning a large-scale attack in Europe, and have bolstered security at a number of European airports and railway stations.
“We are all seeing increased activity by a more diverse set of groups and a more diverse set of threats,” said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano before a Senate panel last week.
The senior administration official said the strikes were intended not only to attack Taliban and Haqqani fighters, but also to disrupt any plots directed from or supported by extremists in Pakistan’s tribal areas that were aimed at targets in Europe. “The goal is to suppress or disrupt that activity,” the official said.
The 20 C.I.A. drone attacks in September represent the most intense bombardment by the spy agency since January, when the C.I.A. carried out 11 strikes after a suicide bomber killed seven agency operatives at a remote base in eastern Afghanistan.
According to one Pakistani intelligence official, the recent drone attacks have not killed any senior Taliban or Qaeda leaders. Many senior operatives have already fled North Waziristan, he said, to escape the C.I.A. drone campaign.
Over all the spy agency has carried out 74 drone attacks this year, according to the Web site The Long War Journal, which tracks the strikes. A vast majority of the attacks — which usually involve several drones firing multiple missiles or bombs — have taken place in North Waziristan.
The Obama administration has enthusiastically embraced the C.I.A.’s drone program, an ambitious and historically unusual war campaign by American spies. According to The Long War Journal, the spy agency in 2009 and 2010 has launched nearly four times as many attacks as it did during the final year of the Bush administration.
One American official said that the recent strikes had been aimed at several groups, including the Haqqani network, Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. The United States, he said, hopes to “keep the pressure on as long as we can.”
But the C.I.A.’s campaign has also raised concerns that the drone strikes are fueling anger in the Muslim world. The man who attempted to detonate a truck filled with explosives in Times Square told a judge that the C.I.A. drone campaign was one of the factors that led him to attack the United States.
In a meeting with reporters on Monday, General Petraeus indicated that it was new intelligence gathering technology that helped NATO forces locate the militants killed by the helicopter raids against militants in Pakistan.
In particular, he said, the military has expanded its fleet of reconnaissance blimps that can hover over hide-outs thought to belong to the Taliban in eastern and southern Afghanistan.
The intelligence technology, General Petraeus said, has also enabled the expanded campaign of raids by Special Operations commandos against Taliban operatives in those areas.
Rod Nordland and Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.
Showing posts with label Faisal Shahzad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Faisal Shahzad. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Most recent drone attack in June
Missile in Pakistan Kills 16 Militants
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
New York Times piece dated June 19, 2010
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A missile strike in North Waziristan killed at least 16 militants on Saturday as they were making plans to go fight NATO forces in Afghanistan, residents and an intelligence official said.
They said a single missile, believed to have been fired from a drone aircraft, struck a government water-supply plant in the village of Haider Khel, near the town of Mir Ali, where the group was meeting.
Most of the concrete, government-built structures in the area, like schools, hospitals and water plants, have been occupied by militants, who use them to meet and for training.
The residents said that 11 of the dead were foreigners, mostly Arabs and some Uzbeks. An additional 19 people were wounded.
The compound is near the border of Haider Khel and Hassu Khel, two villages that are militant strongholds.
The North Waziristan tribal area borders Afghanistan and is a base of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of an insurgent network blamed by the Americans for recent attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital. North Waziristan is also the place where the American authorities say that Faisal Shahzad, who is accused of trying to bomb Times Square, was trained in explosives.
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
New York Times piece dated June 19, 2010
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A missile strike in North Waziristan killed at least 16 militants on Saturday as they were making plans to go fight NATO forces in Afghanistan, residents and an intelligence official said.
They said a single missile, believed to have been fired from a drone aircraft, struck a government water-supply plant in the village of Haider Khel, near the town of Mir Ali, where the group was meeting.
Most of the concrete, government-built structures in the area, like schools, hospitals and water plants, have been occupied by militants, who use them to meet and for training.
The residents said that 11 of the dead were foreigners, mostly Arabs and some Uzbeks. An additional 19 people were wounded.
The compound is near the border of Haider Khel and Hassu Khel, two villages that are militant strongholds.
The North Waziristan tribal area borders Afghanistan and is a base of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of an insurgent network blamed by the Americans for recent attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital. North Waziristan is also the place where the American authorities say that Faisal Shahzad, who is accused of trying to bomb Times Square, was trained in explosives.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
U.N. Report: U.S. Drones Do More Harm than Good
On a tip from a reader who monitors Newsy.com for multiple reverse angles on the same story appearing in television, print and online news media, this video contributes to opening further the debate on the use of drones in situations listed and described on this site.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
US seeks Pakistan crackdown on Taliban
AP source: US seeks Pakistan crackdown on Taliban
By KIMBERLY DOZIER (AP) May 26, 2010
WASHINGTON — Two top Obama administration officials have told Pakistan that it has only weeks to show real progress in a crackdown against the Pakistani Taliban, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday.
The U.S. has put Pakistan "on a clock" to launch a new intelligence and counterterrorist offensive against the group, which the White House alleges was behind the Times Square bombing attempt, according to the official.
White House national security adviser James Jones and CIA Director Leon Panetta delivered that message to Islamabad last week, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
As first reported by the Los Angeles Times, the high-ranking U.S. delegation presented the Pakistanis with evidence they believe proves that Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad was trained and funded by the Tehrik-e-Taliban, or TTP, as the Pakistani Taliban are known. Shahzad is accused of attempting to ignite what turned out to be a poorly constructed car bomb in Times Square.
The evidence also showed that two TTP members escorted Shahzad to a training base in the lawless tribal area of Waziristan, where he received some instruction in how to build explosives, the U.S. official said.
Pakistani authorities have already detained two suspects thought to be those TTP escorts, the official said. The U.S. now expects to see Pakistan carry out further independent counterterrorist operations and quietly increase other unspecified cooperation with the Americans, the official said.
The visiting delegation reminded Pakistani leaders that President Barack Obama had sent them a letter in November, asking for a tougher crackdown against al-Qaida and its affiliates like the TTP, the official said.
So far, many U.S. officials have rated Pakistan's progress on that front as mixed because Pakistan has maintained a detente with some of the al-Qaida affiliates that operate in its frontier provinces, like the Haqqani network.
The official said those in the delegation to Pakistan were hopeful the Shahzad case may spell the difference because the U.S. is asking Pakistan to crack down on a group that is a sworn enemy of Islamabad.
The TTP have launched a series of bloody bombings against Pakistani government targets and civilians over the past year.
By KIMBERLY DOZIER (AP) May 26, 2010
WASHINGTON — Two top Obama administration officials have told Pakistan that it has only weeks to show real progress in a crackdown against the Pakistani Taliban, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday.
The U.S. has put Pakistan "on a clock" to launch a new intelligence and counterterrorist offensive against the group, which the White House alleges was behind the Times Square bombing attempt, according to the official.
White House national security adviser James Jones and CIA Director Leon Panetta delivered that message to Islamabad last week, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
As first reported by the Los Angeles Times, the high-ranking U.S. delegation presented the Pakistanis with evidence they believe proves that Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad was trained and funded by the Tehrik-e-Taliban, or TTP, as the Pakistani Taliban are known. Shahzad is accused of attempting to ignite what turned out to be a poorly constructed car bomb in Times Square.
The evidence also showed that two TTP members escorted Shahzad to a training base in the lawless tribal area of Waziristan, where he received some instruction in how to build explosives, the U.S. official said.
Pakistani authorities have already detained two suspects thought to be those TTP escorts, the official said. The U.S. now expects to see Pakistan carry out further independent counterterrorist operations and quietly increase other unspecified cooperation with the Americans, the official said.
The visiting delegation reminded Pakistani leaders that President Barack Obama had sent them a letter in November, asking for a tougher crackdown against al-Qaida and its affiliates like the TTP, the official said.
So far, many U.S. officials have rated Pakistan's progress on that front as mixed because Pakistan has maintained a detente with some of the al-Qaida affiliates that operate in its frontier provinces, like the Haqqani network.
The official said those in the delegation to Pakistan were hopeful the Shahzad case may spell the difference because the U.S. is asking Pakistan to crack down on a group that is a sworn enemy of Islamabad.
The TTP have launched a series of bloody bombings against Pakistani government targets and civilians over the past year.
Flashback to May 12: No Taliban link found
Looking at comments in the press today regarding Faisal Shahzad, Attorney General Eric Holder's investigation and Miranda rights for terrorism suspects in the balance, you'd never know the link between Shahzad and the Pakistani Taliban (nevermind the link between Tehrik-e-Taliban and Al Qaeda) was unsubstantiated. In fact, in the pages of the New York Times this substantiation is being forgone. From the Philadelphia Inquirer May 12. Retaliatory drone strikes in the last two paragraphs ...
Pakistan: No Taliban link found in N.Y. plot
By Saeed Shah
McClatchy Newspapers
KARACHI, Pakistan - Pakistani investigators have been unable to find evidence linking Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bombing suspect, with the Pakistani Taliban or other extremist groups, Pakistani security officials said Tuesday. Investigators also have been unable to substantiate Shahzad's reported confession that he received bomb-making training in the country's wild Waziristan region.
The lack of evidence found by investigators stands in contrast to forceful statements by top Obama administration officials linking Shahzad to extremist Pakistani groups.
The prime Pakistani suspect, Muhammad Rehan, was detained last week outside a radical mosque in Karachi after Shahzad was arrested in New York. A member of the banned group Jaish-e-Mohammad, Rehan was the only concrete link found so far between Shahzad, 30, and the extremist underworld in Pakistan.
However, the interrogation of Rehan did not provide any solid link to the Pakistani Taliban or another extremist group, officials said. "We have not found any involvement of Rehan [in the New York attempted bombing]. He didn't introduce Faisal Shahzad to the Pakistani Taliban," said a security official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue with journalists. "No Taliban link has come to the fore."
'Intimately involved'
An FBI team that flew into Pakistan after Shahzad was arrested was allowed to question Rehan on Sunday. The investigation continues, and new leads yet could emerge.
In Washington, a U.S. official said there was "information that links Shahzad to the TTP [Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan], and not all of it is coming from him." The official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, cautioned that it still wasn't clear how close a relationship Shahzad had to the Pakistani Taliban.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on a Sunday talk show that the Pakistani Taliban was "intimately involved" in the attempted blast, and he reiterated his stand Tuesday. Also Tuesday, five senators called for adding Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan to the U.S. terror list.
Still, the government in Islamabad is perplexed and angry at Washington's statements and threats about Shahzad links with the Pakistani Taliban. Officials say they believe the Obama administration is exploiting the issue to apply pressure for a new military offensive in Pakistan's tribal border area with Afghanistan, in the North Waziristan region, where Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, as well as al-Qaeda, are holed up.
Taliban denial
"There are no roots to the case, so how can we trace something back?" the security official asked.
Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen of Pakistani origin, reportedly has told U.S. interrogators that he trained in Waziristan before the May 1 attack in Times Square, according to the U.S. charges against him. The Pakistani Taliban released a video in which its chief trainer of suicide bombers, Qari Hussain, seemed to claim responsibility for the U.S. bombing attempt.
The video said nothing specifically about New York or Shahzad. The Pakistani Taliban's official spokesman, Azam Tariq, has denied that his group was involved with Shahzad. The inept construction of the failed bomb has also raised doubts over whether the Taliban could have trained Shahzad.
The U.S. focus on Pakistan's tribal area continued Tuesday with another missile strike from an American drone aircraft, the third such attack since the failed Times Square bombing. The strike, in North Waziristan, reportedly killed at least 14 suspected extremists.
The Obama administration has unleashed an intensive campaign of drone attacks in the region targeting extremist hideouts in the tribal area.
Pakistan: No Taliban link found in N.Y. plot
By Saeed Shah
McClatchy Newspapers
KARACHI, Pakistan - Pakistani investigators have been unable to find evidence linking Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bombing suspect, with the Pakistani Taliban or other extremist groups, Pakistani security officials said Tuesday. Investigators also have been unable to substantiate Shahzad's reported confession that he received bomb-making training in the country's wild Waziristan region.
The lack of evidence found by investigators stands in contrast to forceful statements by top Obama administration officials linking Shahzad to extremist Pakistani groups.
The prime Pakistani suspect, Muhammad Rehan, was detained last week outside a radical mosque in Karachi after Shahzad was arrested in New York. A member of the banned group Jaish-e-Mohammad, Rehan was the only concrete link found so far between Shahzad, 30, and the extremist underworld in Pakistan.
However, the interrogation of Rehan did not provide any solid link to the Pakistani Taliban or another extremist group, officials said. "We have not found any involvement of Rehan [in the New York attempted bombing]. He didn't introduce Faisal Shahzad to the Pakistani Taliban," said a security official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue with journalists. "No Taliban link has come to the fore."
'Intimately involved'
An FBI team that flew into Pakistan after Shahzad was arrested was allowed to question Rehan on Sunday. The investigation continues, and new leads yet could emerge.
In Washington, a U.S. official said there was "information that links Shahzad to the TTP [Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan], and not all of it is coming from him." The official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, cautioned that it still wasn't clear how close a relationship Shahzad had to the Pakistani Taliban.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on a Sunday talk show that the Pakistani Taliban was "intimately involved" in the attempted blast, and he reiterated his stand Tuesday. Also Tuesday, five senators called for adding Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan to the U.S. terror list.
Still, the government in Islamabad is perplexed and angry at Washington's statements and threats about Shahzad links with the Pakistani Taliban. Officials say they believe the Obama administration is exploiting the issue to apply pressure for a new military offensive in Pakistan's tribal border area with Afghanistan, in the North Waziristan region, where Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, as well as al-Qaeda, are holed up.
Taliban denial
"There are no roots to the case, so how can we trace something back?" the security official asked.
Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen of Pakistani origin, reportedly has told U.S. interrogators that he trained in Waziristan before the May 1 attack in Times Square, according to the U.S. charges against him. The Pakistani Taliban released a video in which its chief trainer of suicide bombers, Qari Hussain, seemed to claim responsibility for the U.S. bombing attempt.
The video said nothing specifically about New York or Shahzad. The Pakistani Taliban's official spokesman, Azam Tariq, has denied that his group was involved with Shahzad. The inept construction of the failed bomb has also raised doubts over whether the Taliban could have trained Shahzad.
The U.S. focus on Pakistan's tribal area continued Tuesday with another missile strike from an American drone aircraft, the third such attack since the failed Times Square bombing. The strike, in North Waziristan, reportedly killed at least 14 suspected extremists.
The Obama administration has unleashed an intensive campaign of drone attacks in the region targeting extremist hideouts in the tribal area.
Friday, May 21, 2010
US warns of terror link to Pakistan catering firm
AP story by KATHY GANNON and ASIF SHAHZAD May 21
ISLAMABAD – The U.S. Embassy warned Friday that terrorist groups may have "established links" to an upscale catering company in Pakistan that security officials said was owned by a suspect arrested over the failed car bombing in Times Square.
The suspect who owned Hanif Rajput Catering Service was among a group of six that have been detained in Pakistan since the May 1 botched attack in New York, said a senior Pakistani intelligence officer who gave details on the identities of those arrested on condition his own name not be used.
The group appeared to be wealthy and educated members of Pakistan's small urban elite.
They included the owner of a large computer shop in Islamabad who allegedly called the prime suspect detained in the United States, Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, urging him to flee the country; a man who worked for a cell phone company who had an MBA from the United States; and a retired army major and his brother, who was a computer engineer.
An army spokesman earlier this week denied a media report that the former major had been arrested in the case.
In an unusual statement on its website that was e-mailed to Americans in Pakistan, the embassy said U.S. government personnel had been instructed to avoid using Rajput, a well-known firm that has been used by the American embassy and other foreign missions in the capital.
The message said Rajput was owned by Rana Ashraf Khan and his son Salman Ashraf Khan.
Earlier this week, a senior security official had named a suspect arrested in Pakistan over links to Shahzad as Salman Ashraf, whom the intelligence officer confirmed was the owner of Rajput.
The security official said another arrested suspect was a cousin of Salman Ashraf. He said both men were suspected of having financial links with Shahzad. The official also spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.
A man who answered the phone at Rajput declined to comment on the allegations made by the U.S. Embassy.
A biography on the Rajput website said Salman Ashraf Khan studied in Houston, Texas, before returning home to help run the family business. It said Rana Ashraf Khan worked for Pakistan International Airlines for 20 years and then started the catering firm.
Rajput cooks for large parties, providing food, cutlery and grand tents at embassy compounds and the homes of the well-to-do in Islamabad and other cities.
Shahzad is accused of leaving an SUV rigged with a homemade car bomb in Times Square on May 1. The bomb failed to explode. He was arrested May 3 at John F. Kennedy International Airport while heading to Dubai.
U.S. authorities suspect he had contact with members of the Pakistani Taliban in their hideouts in the northwest of the Pakistan close to the Afghan border. Pakistan says it is cooperating with the probe, but has released little information about what it is finding.
Shahzad was born in Pakistan but moved to the United States when he was 18. He is the son of former air force vice marshal and led a privileged life. He has family roots in the major northwestern city of Peshawar, but he grew up in at least one other city, Karachi, relatives and officials have said.
ISLAMABAD – The U.S. Embassy warned Friday that terrorist groups may have "established links" to an upscale catering company in Pakistan that security officials said was owned by a suspect arrested over the failed car bombing in Times Square.
The suspect who owned Hanif Rajput Catering Service was among a group of six that have been detained in Pakistan since the May 1 botched attack in New York, said a senior Pakistani intelligence officer who gave details on the identities of those arrested on condition his own name not be used.
The group appeared to be wealthy and educated members of Pakistan's small urban elite.
They included the owner of a large computer shop in Islamabad who allegedly called the prime suspect detained in the United States, Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, urging him to flee the country; a man who worked for a cell phone company who had an MBA from the United States; and a retired army major and his brother, who was a computer engineer.
An army spokesman earlier this week denied a media report that the former major had been arrested in the case.
In an unusual statement on its website that was e-mailed to Americans in Pakistan, the embassy said U.S. government personnel had been instructed to avoid using Rajput, a well-known firm that has been used by the American embassy and other foreign missions in the capital.
The message said Rajput was owned by Rana Ashraf Khan and his son Salman Ashraf Khan.
Earlier this week, a senior security official had named a suspect arrested in Pakistan over links to Shahzad as Salman Ashraf, whom the intelligence officer confirmed was the owner of Rajput.
The security official said another arrested suspect was a cousin of Salman Ashraf. He said both men were suspected of having financial links with Shahzad. The official also spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.
A man who answered the phone at Rajput declined to comment on the allegations made by the U.S. Embassy.
A biography on the Rajput website said Salman Ashraf Khan studied in Houston, Texas, before returning home to help run the family business. It said Rana Ashraf Khan worked for Pakistan International Airlines for 20 years and then started the catering firm.
Rajput cooks for large parties, providing food, cutlery and grand tents at embassy compounds and the homes of the well-to-do in Islamabad and other cities.
Shahzad is accused of leaving an SUV rigged with a homemade car bomb in Times Square on May 1. The bomb failed to explode. He was arrested May 3 at John F. Kennedy International Airport while heading to Dubai.
U.S. authorities suspect he had contact with members of the Pakistani Taliban in their hideouts in the northwest of the Pakistan close to the Afghan border. Pakistan says it is cooperating with the probe, but has released little information about what it is finding.
Shahzad was born in Pakistan but moved to the United States when he was 18. He is the son of former air force vice marshal and led a privileged life. He has family roots in the major northwestern city of Peshawar, but he grew up in at least one other city, Karachi, relatives and officials have said.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Backyard Predator Drones
"Each Predator and Reaper costs American taxpayers $4 million to $12 million and each Hellfire missile some $70,000, and the drones are causing anti-American sentiment to spread, especially in the Muslim world."
by Chen Weihua
China Daily 05/18/2010
chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn
I never realized I was so close to the war zone in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border until I went to Syracuse in upstate New York a week ago.
The Hancock Field there has been turned into a base for drones that fly over Pakistan and Afghanistan for bombing missions. This means that someone sitting in the control room is playing a computer game that is killing real people thousands of miles away.
The strikes may have achieved the goals of assassinating some Taliban leaders and militants; yet, high collateral damage has been reported by both Pakistani and US sources. Pakistani authorities reported that in 2009 alone, some 700 civilians died during the drone attacks.
The high casualties - of innocent people - should be a grave concern for "anti-war" President Barack Obama, who authorized more drone strikes in his first year as president than his predecessor George W. Bush did in his last four years in office.
Civilian deaths are clearly a problem. A CNN report last week quoted Tadd Scholtis, spokesman for General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, as saying US and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan could someday win medals for restraint that prevents civilian casualties in combat.
This proposal under consideration simply means that too many innocents are being killed, and that the army has not exercised enough restraint.
Unfortunately, many Americans are unaware of the nature of the drone attacks launched from an air force base near their home, despite numerous protests across the country against the drones.
Just a few days before my trip to Syracuse, peace activists from upstate New York gathered outside the Hancock Air Force base to oppose the unmanned aircraft attacks.
On May 18-19, protesters from across California and some from Nevada will hold a rally in San Diego outside the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which builds the Predator and Reaper drones.
Cindy Sheehan, who held a prolonged anti-war protest in 2005 outside George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, led a rally near the CIA headquarters in Virginia early this year, calling the CIA-operated drone bombing "immoral" and "terrorism with a big budget."
Demonstrations were also witnessed last year outside the Creech Air Force Base, only 35 miles from Las Vegas, resulting in the arrests of a number of peace activists.
In contrast to the anti-war activists, mainstream US media and scholars have been relatively quiet on the issue. Most have been talking endlessly about Times Square bomb suspect Faisal Shahzad's ties to the Taliban and whether his legal rights and citizenship should be deprived.
They have largely ignored the rising anger among Pakistanis about the drone Hellfire missile attacks. Shahzad also reportedly claimed that his intention was to retaliate for the drones, which he saw in Waziristan, in northwest Pakistan.
A Gallup poll last August showed that only 9 percent of Pakistanis support the drone attacks, while 67 percent oppose them. The majority saw the US as a bigger threat than the Taliban.
A recent Newsweek report quotes local villagers as saying that every family there has one male member in the Taliban force.
In the war on terror, many Americans seem to be worried that criticizing the US government and military would make them look unpatriotic or un-American.
Each Predator and Reaper costs American taxpayers $4 million to $12 million and each Hellfire missile some $70,000, and the drones are causing anti-American sentiment to spread, especially in the Muslim world.
If that money is used to build schools there to reflect the US' soft power, it will win more hearts and minds and make Americans safer.
Stopping the drones launched from American citizens' backyards is no less urgent than finding the true connection of Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad.
by Chen Weihua
China Daily 05/18/2010
chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn
I never realized I was so close to the war zone in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border until I went to Syracuse in upstate New York a week ago.
The Hancock Field there has been turned into a base for drones that fly over Pakistan and Afghanistan for bombing missions. This means that someone sitting in the control room is playing a computer game that is killing real people thousands of miles away.
The strikes may have achieved the goals of assassinating some Taliban leaders and militants; yet, high collateral damage has been reported by both Pakistani and US sources. Pakistani authorities reported that in 2009 alone, some 700 civilians died during the drone attacks.
The high casualties - of innocent people - should be a grave concern for "anti-war" President Barack Obama, who authorized more drone strikes in his first year as president than his predecessor George W. Bush did in his last four years in office.
Civilian deaths are clearly a problem. A CNN report last week quoted Tadd Scholtis, spokesman for General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, as saying US and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan could someday win medals for restraint that prevents civilian casualties in combat.
This proposal under consideration simply means that too many innocents are being killed, and that the army has not exercised enough restraint.
Unfortunately, many Americans are unaware of the nature of the drone attacks launched from an air force base near their home, despite numerous protests across the country against the drones.
Just a few days before my trip to Syracuse, peace activists from upstate New York gathered outside the Hancock Air Force base to oppose the unmanned aircraft attacks.
On May 18-19, protesters from across California and some from Nevada will hold a rally in San Diego outside the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which builds the Predator and Reaper drones.
Cindy Sheehan, who held a prolonged anti-war protest in 2005 outside George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, led a rally near the CIA headquarters in Virginia early this year, calling the CIA-operated drone bombing "immoral" and "terrorism with a big budget."
Demonstrations were also witnessed last year outside the Creech Air Force Base, only 35 miles from Las Vegas, resulting in the arrests of a number of peace activists.
In contrast to the anti-war activists, mainstream US media and scholars have been relatively quiet on the issue. Most have been talking endlessly about Times Square bomb suspect Faisal Shahzad's ties to the Taliban and whether his legal rights and citizenship should be deprived.
They have largely ignored the rising anger among Pakistanis about the drone Hellfire missile attacks. Shahzad also reportedly claimed that his intention was to retaliate for the drones, which he saw in Waziristan, in northwest Pakistan.
A Gallup poll last August showed that only 9 percent of Pakistanis support the drone attacks, while 67 percent oppose them. The majority saw the US as a bigger threat than the Taliban.
A recent Newsweek report quotes local villagers as saying that every family there has one male member in the Taliban force.
In the war on terror, many Americans seem to be worried that criticizing the US government and military would make them look unpatriotic or un-American.
Each Predator and Reaper costs American taxpayers $4 million to $12 million and each Hellfire missile some $70,000, and the drones are causing anti-American sentiment to spread, especially in the Muslim world.
If that money is used to build schools there to reflect the US' soft power, it will win more hearts and minds and make Americans safer.
Stopping the drones launched from American citizens' backyards is no less urgent than finding the true connection of Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
CIA director, national security adviser to meet with officials in Pakistan
Washington Post story by Karen DeYoung
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Excerpt - Officials say the administration has been pleased so far with Pakistani cooperation in the investigation, which has focused on any role insurgent groups there might have played in helping to train and otherwise assist bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad.
But officials said that Jones and Panetta intend to reiterate to the Pakistanis the importance that the administration places on more aggressive military action against groups allied with al-Qaeda in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. Shahzad, a Pakistani American, has said he traveled to the region to train with elements of the Pakistani Taliban, officials say.
The bombing attempt has already given rise to questions from Congress about Pakistan's zeal in confronting radical groups; a successful attack in the United States would severely undermine a bilateral relationship that is a crucial part of the administration's Afghanistan war strategy.
"It's important they hear our latest thinking on the danger to all of us from the tribal areas. That's very, very real," said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the ongoing investigation and the intelligence relationship with Pakistan.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Excerpt - Officials say the administration has been pleased so far with Pakistani cooperation in the investigation, which has focused on any role insurgent groups there might have played in helping to train and otherwise assist bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad.
But officials said that Jones and Panetta intend to reiterate to the Pakistanis the importance that the administration places on more aggressive military action against groups allied with al-Qaeda in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. Shahzad, a Pakistani American, has said he traveled to the region to train with elements of the Pakistani Taliban, officials say.
The bombing attempt has already given rise to questions from Congress about Pakistan's zeal in confronting radical groups; a successful attack in the United States would severely undermine a bilateral relationship that is a crucial part of the administration's Afghanistan war strategy.
"It's important they hear our latest thinking on the danger to all of us from the tribal areas. That's very, very real," said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the ongoing investigation and the intelligence relationship with Pakistan.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Drones and the Ethics of War
This essay, posted Friday, attempts to briefly address the emerging arguments in what appears to be a debate shaping together over the ethics of using armed unmanned aerial vehicles.
President Obama is quoted as saying in a speech, "We have an interest in reducing civilian casualties because I don’t want civilians killed." This sentiment has manifested itself in the contrary strident legal posturing of State Department legal adviser Harold Koh with no signs of halting, reducing or altering the methods of drone attacks, which have increased following the Times Square bombing attempt.
What's missing here is any human rights argument that human beings--combatants, non-combatants in proximity to or whose lives are entwined with those of combatants--have some kind of right to expect not to be hunted by robots with electric eyes being piloted by indoctrinated nationalists who believe what they are doing--no matter what it is--to be benevolent.
Further complicating this aspect of the issue is the tendency of comments to news outlets following various articles on drone attacks to maintain drones have the ability to "kill the bastards" while service men and women risk no physical danger. This line evades the key issue that children, villagers, farmers, unarmed inhabitants in an agrarian culture are not "the bastards," and the warfare of extermination is, on paper, a part of our past and not our future.
Until these discrepancies are addressed no productive debate on the ethics of UAVs and their use to murder civilians in relentless pursuit of "high-value targets" is going to take place. Rhetorically, we are left with the pre-World War II mentality of "might makes right," and nothing more sophisticated or justified.
From the website Pakistan Defense (defence.pk)
May 14th, 2010
Drones and the Ethics of War
by David E. Anderson
According to news reports, Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American charged with trying to use a weapon of mass destruction in the failed Times Square bombing, has told investigators he carried out the attempted bombing to avenge US drone attacks in the North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan.
Shahzad’s assertion adds more fuel to the simmering controversy over the ethics and effects of increasing reliance by both the CIA and the US military on unmanned drones to launch missile strikes against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, asked (“US pressure helps militants overseas focus efforts,” May 7) : “Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan—notable the Predator drone strikes—actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on American than they prevent? It is a hard question.”
The Times Square drone connection also follows on last year’s deadly attack on the CIA, when a suicide bomber, a Jordanian doctor linked to al-Qaeda, detonated his explosives at an American base in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, killing himself and seven CIA officers and contractors who were operating at the heart of the covert program overseeing US drone strikes in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal regions.
CIA director Leon Panetta has called lethal drone technology “the only game in town” for going after al-Qaeda, and Obama administration officials have strenuously defended both the legality of the strikes in Pakistan as well as their effectiveness in killing suspected militants. They also deny the drones are responsible for an unacceptable level of civilian deaths.
“In this ongoing armed conflict, the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning an attack,’’ Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, told an audience of international legal scholars on March 25, according to the Wall Street Journal (“US defends legality of killing with drones”).
Since President Obama took office, the CIA has used drones to kill some 400 to 500 suspected militants, according to intelligence officials, the Journal reported. The officials say only some 20 civilians have been killed—a figure critics sharply challenge. In 2009, Pakistani officials said the strikes had killed some 700 civilians and only 14 terrorist leaders, or 50 civilians for every militant. A New America Foundation analysis of reported US drone strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 to 2010 says the strikes killed between 830 and 1210 individuals, of whom 550 to 850 were militants, or about two-thirds of the total on average.
More recently, an April 26 story in the Washington Post reported that the CIA has refined its techniques and made technological improvements that are reducing civilian deaths, and this week, in his joint news conference with President Karzai of Afghanistan, President Obama said, “I am ultimately accountable…for somebody who is not on the battlefield who got killed…and so we do not take that lightly. We have an interest in reducing civilian casualties not because it’s a problem for President Karzai; we have an interest in reducing civilian casualties because I don’t want civilians killed.”
Earlier this month, in a May 6 interview on National Public Radio, David Rohde, the New York Times reporter who was held captive for months by the Taliban in northern Pakistan, spoke about the US drone strikes and said, “I saw firsthand in north and south Waziristan that the drone strikes do have a major impact. They generally are accurate. The strikes that went on killed foreign militants or Afghan or Pakistani Taliban that went on around us. There were some civilians killed but generally the Taliban would greatly exaggerate the number of civilians killed. They inhibited their operations. Taliban leaders were very nervous about being tracked by drones. So they are effective in the short-term I would say…I don’t think the answer is, you know, endless drone strikes. The answer is definitely not sending American troops into Pakistan, into the tribal areas. That would just create a tremendous nationalist backlash. It has to be the Pakistanis doing it.”
Ethicists and religious leaders are beginning to challenge the morality of the drone program, arguing it violates international law as well as key precepts of just war theory. The Christian Century, for example, editorialized in mid-May (“Remote-control warfare,” May 18) that while the drone attacks have no doubt killed terrorists and leaders of al-Qaeda, “they raise troubling questions to those committed to the just war principle that civilians should never be targeted.”
Taking aim at one of the aspects of drone warfare that make it so popular with the military and with politicians—that it is a risk-free option for the US military because it avoids American casualties—the Century editors said: “According to the just war principles, it is better to risk the lives of one’s own combatants than the lives of enemy noncombatants.”
The “risk-free” idea is also being challenged. In a recent piece in the Jesuit magazine America (“A troubling disconnection,” March 15), Maryann Cusimano Love, an international relations professor at Catholic University, wrote that military (as opposed to CIA) drone operators suffer post-traumatic stress disorder at higher rates than soldiers in combat zones. “Operators see in detail the destruction and grisly human toll from their work,” she observed, and she quoted an air force commander who said, “There’s no detachment. Those employing the system are very involved at a personal level in combat. You hear the AK-47 going off, the intensity of the voice on the radio calling for help. You’re looking at him, 18 inches away from him, trying everything in your capability to get that person out of trouble.”
The Christian Century editors also noted that drone attacks on civilians have given militants a recruitment tool, citing an opinion piece by counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen and former army officer Andrew McDonald Exum published last year in the New York Times (May 17, 2009). “Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as the drone strikes have increased,” they wrote.
An even more emphatic critic of the use of drones is Mary Ellen O’Connell, an international law professor at the University of Notre Dame. “Neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration has been persuasive about its legal right to launch attacks in Pakistan,” she wrote in “Flying Blind,” an article also published in America magazine. “Even with the legal right to use military force, drone attacks must also conform to the traditional principles governing the rules of warfare, including those of distinction, necessity, proportion and humanity.’’
O’Connell argues that under the United Nations Charter, resort to military force on the territory of another state, in this case Pakistan, is permitted only when the attacking state is acting in self-defense, acting with U.N. Security Council authorization, or is invited to aid another state in the lawful use of force. “Pakistan did not attack the United States and is not responsible for those who did,” O’Connell wrote. “The United States has no basis, therefore, for attacking in self-defense on Pakistani territory.’’
In addition, she contends that while al-Qaeda is a violent terrorist group, “it should be treated as a criminal organization to which law enforcement rules apply. To do otherwise is violate fundamental human rights principles. Outside of war, the full body of human rights applies, including the prohibition on killing without warning.”
The only basis for the United States to lawfully use force in Pakistan would be if it had the consent of the country’s political leaders. It is not clear whether the US has such a valid invitation, according to O’Connell.
“Pakistan’s president has told US leaders not to attack certain groups that have cooperated with Islamabad,” O’Connell wrote. “The United States has done so anyway, insisting that Pakistan use more military force and threatening to carry out attacks itself if the government refuses. None of this can be squared with international law.”
As recently as May 12, the head of an influential religious party which is a junior partner in Pakistan’s ruling coalition denounced the most recent drone attacks as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty. “The recurring attacks on targets in tribal areas are blatant aggression against Pakistan and the military should shoot down intruding drones,” Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of the Jamiat Ulema Islam party told reporters, as reported in the Gulf News.
The case of western Pakistan presents particular challenges, according to O’Connell: “There suspected militant leaders wear civilian clothes, and even the sophisticated cameras of a drone cannot reveal with certainty that a suspect is a militant. In such a situation international humanitarian law gives a presumption to civilian status.”
In an interview, O’Connell suggests that there is confusion about international law versus domestic national security law and that the scarcity of developed ethical analysis and discussion of drone warfare might have to do with the fact that the drone itself is “just a delivery vehicle.” The real ethical issue, she said, is “the greater propensity to kill” made possible by the “video game-like” quality of drone combat.
Gary Simpson, a theology professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota and the author of “War, Peace, and God: Rethinking the Just War Tradition” (Augsburg Fortress Press, 2007), acknowledges that although he hasn’t yet thought about ethics and drone warfare, “the ongoing evolution of weaponry always poses new questions. It changes the questions about proportionality”—referring to the just war principle that the benefits of war must be proportionate to the expected harm— “and the protection of one’s own forces over against the vulnerability of civilian populations.”
The House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs held hearings in March and April on the rise of the drones, the legality of unmanned targeting systems, and the future of war, and US Naval Academy ethics professor Edward Barrett testified that while unmanned weapons systems “are consistent with a society’s duty to avoid unnecessary risks to its combatants,” and they can “enhance restraint” on the part of the soldiers engaged in virtual warfare, they also “could encourage unjust wars” and “could facilitate the circumvention of legitimate authority and pursuit of unjust causes.”
It will be interesting to see whether Congress and the White House continue to involve ethicists and religious thinkers in future deliberations on these issues. Last December, just before President Obama gave his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on themes of just war, the White House gathered religious leaders at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for what was described as a briefing and discussion of the morality of war, according to the Washington Post. White House staff members took notes for the president.
For now, the Obama administration insists the use of drones in Pakistan is imperative in the fight against terrorism, and Amitai Etzioni, an international relations professor at George Washington University, writing recently in the Joint Force Quarterly (“Unmanned Aircraft Systems: The Moral and Legal Case”), has enumerated many of the reasons and offered multiple lines of supporting argument: “The United States and its allies can make a strong case that the main source of the problem is those who abuse their civilian status to attack truly innocent civilians and to prevent our military and other security forces from discharging their duties,” he says, and “we must make it much clearer that those who abuse their civilian status are a main reason for the use of UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] and targeted killing against them.”
But others, such as Kilcullen and Exum, argue drone combat exacerbates the problem of terrorism and contributes to the instability of Pakistan. “Having Osama bin Laden in one’s sights is one thing,” write Kilcullen and Exum. “Devoting precious resources to his capture or death, rather than focusing on protecting the Afghan and Pakistani populations, is another. The goal should be to isolate extremists from the communities in which they live.”
Missile strikes launched from the comfort of Langley, Virginia, a half a world away from Waziristan, are unlikely to do that and thus, to critics, remain morally problematic.
David E. Anderson, senior editor for Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Afghanistan (“The Right War Gone Wrong”) and nuclear disarmament (“Trimming the Nuclear Arsenals”).
President Obama is quoted as saying in a speech, "We have an interest in reducing civilian casualties because I don’t want civilians killed." This sentiment has manifested itself in the contrary strident legal posturing of State Department legal adviser Harold Koh with no signs of halting, reducing or altering the methods of drone attacks, which have increased following the Times Square bombing attempt.
What's missing here is any human rights argument that human beings--combatants, non-combatants in proximity to or whose lives are entwined with those of combatants--have some kind of right to expect not to be hunted by robots with electric eyes being piloted by indoctrinated nationalists who believe what they are doing--no matter what it is--to be benevolent.
Further complicating this aspect of the issue is the tendency of comments to news outlets following various articles on drone attacks to maintain drones have the ability to "kill the bastards" while service men and women risk no physical danger. This line evades the key issue that children, villagers, farmers, unarmed inhabitants in an agrarian culture are not "the bastards," and the warfare of extermination is, on paper, a part of our past and not our future.
Until these discrepancies are addressed no productive debate on the ethics of UAVs and their use to murder civilians in relentless pursuit of "high-value targets" is going to take place. Rhetorically, we are left with the pre-World War II mentality of "might makes right," and nothing more sophisticated or justified.
From the website Pakistan Defense (defence.pk)
May 14th, 2010
Drones and the Ethics of War
by David E. Anderson
According to news reports, Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American charged with trying to use a weapon of mass destruction in the failed Times Square bombing, has told investigators he carried out the attempted bombing to avenge US drone attacks in the North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan.
Shahzad’s assertion adds more fuel to the simmering controversy over the ethics and effects of increasing reliance by both the CIA and the US military on unmanned drones to launch missile strikes against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, asked (“US pressure helps militants overseas focus efforts,” May 7) : “Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan—notable the Predator drone strikes—actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on American than they prevent? It is a hard question.”
The Times Square drone connection also follows on last year’s deadly attack on the CIA, when a suicide bomber, a Jordanian doctor linked to al-Qaeda, detonated his explosives at an American base in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, killing himself and seven CIA officers and contractors who were operating at the heart of the covert program overseeing US drone strikes in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal regions.
CIA director Leon Panetta has called lethal drone technology “the only game in town” for going after al-Qaeda, and Obama administration officials have strenuously defended both the legality of the strikes in Pakistan as well as their effectiveness in killing suspected militants. They also deny the drones are responsible for an unacceptable level of civilian deaths.
“In this ongoing armed conflict, the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning an attack,’’ Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, told an audience of international legal scholars on March 25, according to the Wall Street Journal (“US defends legality of killing with drones”).
Since President Obama took office, the CIA has used drones to kill some 400 to 500 suspected militants, according to intelligence officials, the Journal reported. The officials say only some 20 civilians have been killed—a figure critics sharply challenge. In 2009, Pakistani officials said the strikes had killed some 700 civilians and only 14 terrorist leaders, or 50 civilians for every militant. A New America Foundation analysis of reported US drone strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 to 2010 says the strikes killed between 830 and 1210 individuals, of whom 550 to 850 were militants, or about two-thirds of the total on average.
More recently, an April 26 story in the Washington Post reported that the CIA has refined its techniques and made technological improvements that are reducing civilian deaths, and this week, in his joint news conference with President Karzai of Afghanistan, President Obama said, “I am ultimately accountable…for somebody who is not on the battlefield who got killed…and so we do not take that lightly. We have an interest in reducing civilian casualties not because it’s a problem for President Karzai; we have an interest in reducing civilian casualties because I don’t want civilians killed.”
Earlier this month, in a May 6 interview on National Public Radio, David Rohde, the New York Times reporter who was held captive for months by the Taliban in northern Pakistan, spoke about the US drone strikes and said, “I saw firsthand in north and south Waziristan that the drone strikes do have a major impact. They generally are accurate. The strikes that went on killed foreign militants or Afghan or Pakistani Taliban that went on around us. There were some civilians killed but generally the Taliban would greatly exaggerate the number of civilians killed. They inhibited their operations. Taliban leaders were very nervous about being tracked by drones. So they are effective in the short-term I would say…I don’t think the answer is, you know, endless drone strikes. The answer is definitely not sending American troops into Pakistan, into the tribal areas. That would just create a tremendous nationalist backlash. It has to be the Pakistanis doing it.”
Ethicists and religious leaders are beginning to challenge the morality of the drone program, arguing it violates international law as well as key precepts of just war theory. The Christian Century, for example, editorialized in mid-May (“Remote-control warfare,” May 18) that while the drone attacks have no doubt killed terrorists and leaders of al-Qaeda, “they raise troubling questions to those committed to the just war principle that civilians should never be targeted.”
Taking aim at one of the aspects of drone warfare that make it so popular with the military and with politicians—that it is a risk-free option for the US military because it avoids American casualties—the Century editors said: “According to the just war principles, it is better to risk the lives of one’s own combatants than the lives of enemy noncombatants.”
The “risk-free” idea is also being challenged. In a recent piece in the Jesuit magazine America (“A troubling disconnection,” March 15), Maryann Cusimano Love, an international relations professor at Catholic University, wrote that military (as opposed to CIA) drone operators suffer post-traumatic stress disorder at higher rates than soldiers in combat zones. “Operators see in detail the destruction and grisly human toll from their work,” she observed, and she quoted an air force commander who said, “There’s no detachment. Those employing the system are very involved at a personal level in combat. You hear the AK-47 going off, the intensity of the voice on the radio calling for help. You’re looking at him, 18 inches away from him, trying everything in your capability to get that person out of trouble.”
The Christian Century editors also noted that drone attacks on civilians have given militants a recruitment tool, citing an opinion piece by counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen and former army officer Andrew McDonald Exum published last year in the New York Times (May 17, 2009). “Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as the drone strikes have increased,” they wrote.
An even more emphatic critic of the use of drones is Mary Ellen O’Connell, an international law professor at the University of Notre Dame. “Neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration has been persuasive about its legal right to launch attacks in Pakistan,” she wrote in “Flying Blind,” an article also published in America magazine. “Even with the legal right to use military force, drone attacks must also conform to the traditional principles governing the rules of warfare, including those of distinction, necessity, proportion and humanity.’’
O’Connell argues that under the United Nations Charter, resort to military force on the territory of another state, in this case Pakistan, is permitted only when the attacking state is acting in self-defense, acting with U.N. Security Council authorization, or is invited to aid another state in the lawful use of force. “Pakistan did not attack the United States and is not responsible for those who did,” O’Connell wrote. “The United States has no basis, therefore, for attacking in self-defense on Pakistani territory.’’
In addition, she contends that while al-Qaeda is a violent terrorist group, “it should be treated as a criminal organization to which law enforcement rules apply. To do otherwise is violate fundamental human rights principles. Outside of war, the full body of human rights applies, including the prohibition on killing without warning.”
The only basis for the United States to lawfully use force in Pakistan would be if it had the consent of the country’s political leaders. It is not clear whether the US has such a valid invitation, according to O’Connell.
“Pakistan’s president has told US leaders not to attack certain groups that have cooperated with Islamabad,” O’Connell wrote. “The United States has done so anyway, insisting that Pakistan use more military force and threatening to carry out attacks itself if the government refuses. None of this can be squared with international law.”
As recently as May 12, the head of an influential religious party which is a junior partner in Pakistan’s ruling coalition denounced the most recent drone attacks as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty. “The recurring attacks on targets in tribal areas are blatant aggression against Pakistan and the military should shoot down intruding drones,” Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of the Jamiat Ulema Islam party told reporters, as reported in the Gulf News.
The case of western Pakistan presents particular challenges, according to O’Connell: “There suspected militant leaders wear civilian clothes, and even the sophisticated cameras of a drone cannot reveal with certainty that a suspect is a militant. In such a situation international humanitarian law gives a presumption to civilian status.”
In an interview, O’Connell suggests that there is confusion about international law versus domestic national security law and that the scarcity of developed ethical analysis and discussion of drone warfare might have to do with the fact that the drone itself is “just a delivery vehicle.” The real ethical issue, she said, is “the greater propensity to kill” made possible by the “video game-like” quality of drone combat.
Gary Simpson, a theology professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota and the author of “War, Peace, and God: Rethinking the Just War Tradition” (Augsburg Fortress Press, 2007), acknowledges that although he hasn’t yet thought about ethics and drone warfare, “the ongoing evolution of weaponry always poses new questions. It changes the questions about proportionality”—referring to the just war principle that the benefits of war must be proportionate to the expected harm— “and the protection of one’s own forces over against the vulnerability of civilian populations.”
The House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs held hearings in March and April on the rise of the drones, the legality of unmanned targeting systems, and the future of war, and US Naval Academy ethics professor Edward Barrett testified that while unmanned weapons systems “are consistent with a society’s duty to avoid unnecessary risks to its combatants,” and they can “enhance restraint” on the part of the soldiers engaged in virtual warfare, they also “could encourage unjust wars” and “could facilitate the circumvention of legitimate authority and pursuit of unjust causes.”
It will be interesting to see whether Congress and the White House continue to involve ethicists and religious thinkers in future deliberations on these issues. Last December, just before President Obama gave his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on themes of just war, the White House gathered religious leaders at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for what was described as a briefing and discussion of the morality of war, according to the Washington Post. White House staff members took notes for the president.
For now, the Obama administration insists the use of drones in Pakistan is imperative in the fight against terrorism, and Amitai Etzioni, an international relations professor at George Washington University, writing recently in the Joint Force Quarterly (“Unmanned Aircraft Systems: The Moral and Legal Case”), has enumerated many of the reasons and offered multiple lines of supporting argument: “The United States and its allies can make a strong case that the main source of the problem is those who abuse their civilian status to attack truly innocent civilians and to prevent our military and other security forces from discharging their duties,” he says, and “we must make it much clearer that those who abuse their civilian status are a main reason for the use of UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] and targeted killing against them.”
But others, such as Kilcullen and Exum, argue drone combat exacerbates the problem of terrorism and contributes to the instability of Pakistan. “Having Osama bin Laden in one’s sights is one thing,” write Kilcullen and Exum. “Devoting precious resources to his capture or death, rather than focusing on protecting the Afghan and Pakistani populations, is another. The goal should be to isolate extremists from the communities in which they live.”
Missile strikes launched from the comfort of Langley, Virginia, a half a world away from Waziristan, are unlikely to do that and thus, to critics, remain morally problematic.
David E. Anderson, senior editor for Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Afghanistan (“The Right War Gone Wrong”) and nuclear disarmament (“Trimming the Nuclear Arsenals”).
Friday, May 14, 2010
Faisal Shahzad introduces us to "Guardrail": a "Minority Report"-style surveillance technology
Excerpt from Jeremy Scahill's May 4 Nation magazine online story ...
A US Special Operations Force source told me that the planes were likely RC-12s equipped with a Guardrail Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) system that, as the plane flies overland "sucks up" digital and electronic communications. "Think of them as manned drones. They're drones, but they have men sitting in them piloting them and they can be networked together," said the source. "You have many of them--four, five, six of them--and they all act as a node and they scrape up everything, anything that's electronic and feed it back." The source added: "It sucks up everything. We've got these things in Jalalabad [Afghanistan]. We routinely fly these things over Khandahar. When I say everything, I mean BlueTooth would be effected, even the wave length that PlayStation controllers are on. They suck up everything. That's the point."
Guardrail has been used for years by the US military. In recent years, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has also used the "Constant Hawk" and "Highlighter" aerial sensor platforms. All of these programs have recently undergone a series of upgrades.
So were US special forces involved with Shahzad's arrest?
"My conjecture at the moment is that immediately after this went down and they knew that he was on the loose, parts of the domestic counter-terrorism operations that they had set up during the Bush administration were reactivated," says the Special Forces source. "They're compartmentalized. So they kicked into high gear and were supporting law enforcement. In some cases, law enforcement may not have even known that some of the signals intelligence was coming from covert military units."
A US Special Operations Force source told me that the planes were likely RC-12s equipped with a Guardrail Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) system that, as the plane flies overland "sucks up" digital and electronic communications. "Think of them as manned drones. They're drones, but they have men sitting in them piloting them and they can be networked together," said the source. "You have many of them--four, five, six of them--and they all act as a node and they scrape up everything, anything that's electronic and feed it back." The source added: "It sucks up everything. We've got these things in Jalalabad [Afghanistan]. We routinely fly these things over Khandahar. When I say everything, I mean BlueTooth would be effected, even the wave length that PlayStation controllers are on. They suck up everything. That's the point."
Guardrail has been used for years by the US military. In recent years, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has also used the "Constant Hawk" and "Highlighter" aerial sensor platforms. All of these programs have recently undergone a series of upgrades.
So were US special forces involved with Shahzad's arrest?
"My conjecture at the moment is that immediately after this went down and they knew that he was on the loose, parts of the domestic counter-terrorism operations that they had set up during the Bush administration were reactivated," says the Special Forces source. "They're compartmentalized. So they kicked into high gear and were supporting law enforcement. In some cases, law enforcement may not have even known that some of the signals intelligence was coming from covert military units."
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Pakistan denies Taliban link to Times Square bomb suspect
Investigators dismiss US claims that Faisal Shahzad was working under direction of Pakistani Taliban
From the London Guardian Tuesday 11 May 2010 18.57 BST
by Saeed Shah in Karachi
see also Huffington Post: "Pakistan: No Evidence Pakistani Taliban Linked To Shahzad"
Pakistani investigators have found no evidence to support American claims that the failed Times Square bomber was working under the direction of the Pakistani Taliban, the Guardian has learned.
Senior officials in Washington – including the attorney general, Eric Holder, and John Brennan, the White House's special adviser on counterterrorism – have said that the suspected bomber, Faisal Shahzad, conspired with militants in Pakistan, but a Pakistani security official with knowledge of the investigation said: "No Taliban link has come to the fore."
The interrogation of Muhammad Rehan, a friend of Shahzad who was arrested last week outside a radical mosque in Karachi, has not yielded a link to the Pakistani Taliban or any other militant group. Rehan, a member of the banned Jaish-e-Mohammad extremist group, remains the only suspected link found between 30-year-old Shahzad and the militant underworld in Pakistan.
Officials in Islamabad are perplexed and angry at statements from Washington about Shahzad's links with the Pakistani Taliban, believing that the US is exploiting the issue to apply pressure for new military offensives in Pakistan's tribal border area with Afghanistan, in the north Waziristan region.
"We have not found any involvement of Rehan [in the New York attempted bombing]. He didn't introduce Faisal Shahzad to the Pakistani Taliban," said the security official.
"There are no roots to this case, so how can we trace something back?"
An FBI team which flew into Pakistan after the arrest of Shahzad was allowed to question Rehan on Sunday. More than a dozen other suspects taken into custody in Karachi have been released, but the investigation is continuing, so new leads could yet emerge.
Rehan's arrest as he left prayers at the Karachi mosque was seized on by the international press as evidence of Shahzad's involvement with Pakistani militant groups. It emerged that Rehan and Shahzad had last year taken a 1,000-mile road trip from Karachi to Peshawar, on the edge of Pakistan's tribal area, raising further suspicions.
However, Pakistani investigators have found that Rehan was not a very active member of JEM, a violent group primarily against India and with no history of global activities. He knew Shahzad because he is related to Shahzad's wife.
Shahzad, a naturalised American citizen of Pakistani origin, told US interrogators that he had been trained in Waziristan, part of Pakistan's tribal area, according to the court charges laid against him.
After the failed attack, the Pakistani Taliban released a video in which its chief trainer of suicide bombers, Qari Hussain, appeared to claim responsibility. But that video said nothing specifically about New York, Shahzad, or a car bomb.
Since then, the Pakistani Taliban's official spokesman, Azam Tariq, has twice denied that his group was involved with Shahzad. The ineptness of Shahzad's bomb, which did not go off, also raised doubts over whether the Pakistani Taliban could have trained him.
Holder said at the weekend that the Pakistani Taliban were "intimately involved" in Shahzad's attempted bombing. Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, also warned Islamabad of "dire consequences" if a plot originating in Pakistan succeeded in the US.
But David Petraeus, the American general in charge of the Middle East and central Asia, had previously said that Shahzad was a "lone wolf" who was "inspired by militants in Pakistan but didn't have direct contact with them".
A senior Pakistani government official said: "There is a disconnect between the Pentagon and the [Obama] administration. The Pentagon gets it that more open pressure on Pakistan is not helpful."
The US focus on Pakistan's tribal area, thought to be a power base for the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida, as well as Pakistani Taliban, continued today with another missile strike from an unmanned American drone aircraft, the third such attack since the failed Times Square bombing. The strike, in north Waziristan, reportedly killed at least 14 militants. The Obama administration has unleashed an intensive campaign of drone attacks inside Pakistani territory, targeting extremist hideouts in the tribal area.
From the London Guardian Tuesday 11 May 2010 18.57 BST
by Saeed Shah in Karachi
see also Huffington Post: "Pakistan: No Evidence Pakistani Taliban Linked To Shahzad"
Pakistani investigators have found no evidence to support American claims that the failed Times Square bomber was working under the direction of the Pakistani Taliban, the Guardian has learned.
Senior officials in Washington – including the attorney general, Eric Holder, and John Brennan, the White House's special adviser on counterterrorism – have said that the suspected bomber, Faisal Shahzad, conspired with militants in Pakistan, but a Pakistani security official with knowledge of the investigation said: "No Taliban link has come to the fore."
The interrogation of Muhammad Rehan, a friend of Shahzad who was arrested last week outside a radical mosque in Karachi, has not yielded a link to the Pakistani Taliban or any other militant group. Rehan, a member of the banned Jaish-e-Mohammad extremist group, remains the only suspected link found between 30-year-old Shahzad and the militant underworld in Pakistan.
Officials in Islamabad are perplexed and angry at statements from Washington about Shahzad's links with the Pakistani Taliban, believing that the US is exploiting the issue to apply pressure for new military offensives in Pakistan's tribal border area with Afghanistan, in the north Waziristan region.
"We have not found any involvement of Rehan [in the New York attempted bombing]. He didn't introduce Faisal Shahzad to the Pakistani Taliban," said the security official.
"There are no roots to this case, so how can we trace something back?"
An FBI team which flew into Pakistan after the arrest of Shahzad was allowed to question Rehan on Sunday. More than a dozen other suspects taken into custody in Karachi have been released, but the investigation is continuing, so new leads could yet emerge.
Rehan's arrest as he left prayers at the Karachi mosque was seized on by the international press as evidence of Shahzad's involvement with Pakistani militant groups. It emerged that Rehan and Shahzad had last year taken a 1,000-mile road trip from Karachi to Peshawar, on the edge of Pakistan's tribal area, raising further suspicions.
However, Pakistani investigators have found that Rehan was not a very active member of JEM, a violent group primarily against India and with no history of global activities. He knew Shahzad because he is related to Shahzad's wife.
Shahzad, a naturalised American citizen of Pakistani origin, told US interrogators that he had been trained in Waziristan, part of Pakistan's tribal area, according to the court charges laid against him.
After the failed attack, the Pakistani Taliban released a video in which its chief trainer of suicide bombers, Qari Hussain, appeared to claim responsibility. But that video said nothing specifically about New York, Shahzad, or a car bomb.
Since then, the Pakistani Taliban's official spokesman, Azam Tariq, has twice denied that his group was involved with Shahzad. The ineptness of Shahzad's bomb, which did not go off, also raised doubts over whether the Pakistani Taliban could have trained him.
Holder said at the weekend that the Pakistani Taliban were "intimately involved" in Shahzad's attempted bombing. Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, also warned Islamabad of "dire consequences" if a plot originating in Pakistan succeeded in the US.
But David Petraeus, the American general in charge of the Middle East and central Asia, had previously said that Shahzad was a "lone wolf" who was "inspired by militants in Pakistan but didn't have direct contact with them".
A senior Pakistani government official said: "There is a disconnect between the Pentagon and the [Obama] administration. The Pentagon gets it that more open pressure on Pakistan is not helpful."
The US focus on Pakistan's tribal area, thought to be a power base for the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida, as well as Pakistani Taliban, continued today with another missile strike from an unmanned American drone aircraft, the third such attack since the failed Times Square bombing. The strike, in north Waziristan, reportedly killed at least 14 militants. The Obama administration has unleashed an intensive campaign of drone attacks inside Pakistani territory, targeting extremist hideouts in the tribal area.
Drones attack Taliban targets in Pakistan
Financial Times story by Farhan Bokhari in Islamabad
Published: May 12 2010 03:10
CIA-flown pilot-less drone aircraft on Tuesday fired more than 15 missiles at a suspected Taliban stronghold in Pakistan’s lawless north Waziristan region killing at least 24 suspected militants.
The attack was the biggest of its kind since the failed attempt by Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-born US national, to blow up New York’s Times Square on May 1.
Tuesday’s attack, said by a Pakistani intelligence official to be “Washington’s payback”, follows claims by US officials that Mr Shahzad is connected to Taliban militants. Mr Shahzad was arrested last week.
The Pakistani intelligence official said the missiles hit two targets – a vehicle driving three militants through a village and a nearby compound used for the training of recruits.
The attack took place in an area known to be controlled by Gul Bahadur, a Taliban commander.
In the past few months, US officials have increasingly acknowledged Pakistan’s growing importance as an ally in Washington’s efforts to secure the Afghanistan-Pakistan region where al-Qaeda and Taliban militants continue to pose a major resistance.
Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan’s foreign minister, on Tuesday said relations between the US and Pakistan continued to improve, brushing aside concerns over tensions after the failed New York bombing attempt. “There is nothing to worry about, our relationship is smooth and it is moving towards a partnership,” he said.
But a foreign ministry official in Islamabad warned that further US attacks on Pakistani soil of the kind seen on Tuesday will “inevitably bring in frictions of the kind that no one wants to see. You can’t bomb a country increasingly and expect cordial relations at the same time.”
Published: May 12 2010 03:10
CIA-flown pilot-less drone aircraft on Tuesday fired more than 15 missiles at a suspected Taliban stronghold in Pakistan’s lawless north Waziristan region killing at least 24 suspected militants.
The attack was the biggest of its kind since the failed attempt by Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-born US national, to blow up New York’s Times Square on May 1.
Tuesday’s attack, said by a Pakistani intelligence official to be “Washington’s payback”, follows claims by US officials that Mr Shahzad is connected to Taliban militants. Mr Shahzad was arrested last week.
The Pakistani intelligence official said the missiles hit two targets – a vehicle driving three militants through a village and a nearby compound used for the training of recruits.
The attack took place in an area known to be controlled by Gul Bahadur, a Taliban commander.
In the past few months, US officials have increasingly acknowledged Pakistan’s growing importance as an ally in Washington’s efforts to secure the Afghanistan-Pakistan region where al-Qaeda and Taliban militants continue to pose a major resistance.
Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan’s foreign minister, on Tuesday said relations between the US and Pakistan continued to improve, brushing aside concerns over tensions after the failed New York bombing attempt. “There is nothing to worry about, our relationship is smooth and it is moving towards a partnership,” he said.
But a foreign ministry official in Islamabad warned that further US attacks on Pakistani soil of the kind seen on Tuesday will “inevitably bring in frictions of the kind that no one wants to see. You can’t bomb a country increasingly and expect cordial relations at the same time.”
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
US mulls putting Pakistan Taliban on terrorism list
This item, should the U.S. decide to follow through, runs distictly counter to the prescription in a previous post here, New York Review of Books piece by Ahmed Rashid Feb. 25, A Deal with the Taliban?, which specifically pores over the history of the Pakistani Taliban.
Maybe it's too late.
US mulls putting Pakistan Taliban on terrorism list
Tue May 11, 2010 4:40pm EDT* Pakistani Taliban tied to failed May 1 Times Square bomb
(EXCERPT)
* 'Terrorist' designation would lead to punitive measures
* Five Democratic senators urge Clinton to make the move (Adds more from State Department spokesman)
By Sue Pleming
WASHINGTON, May 11 (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it was looking into putting the Pakistani Taliban, the group tied to the failed car bombing in New York's Times Square, on the U.S. list of "foreign terrorist" groups.
Adding the Pakistani Taliban to the list would trigger punitive measures such as freezing assets tied to the group, barring foreign nationals with links to it from entering the United States and making it a crime to give any material help.
"It is something we are considering in light of what happened, and obviously the investigation will yield information that might give us greater clarity," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters.
Crowley said there was a lengthy legal process before a group could be designated a "foreign terrorist organization" and he did not know when a decision would be made.
"We have been focused on this group for some time and, without being specific, we have been working with our Pakistani counterparts and we have taken appropriate action to diminish the capabilities of this group and others in the region," Crowley said, referring to military action to target Pakistani Taliban leaders.
Faisal Shahzad, 30, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, was arrested two days after authorities say he parked a sport utility vehicle packed with a bomb in New York's busy Times Square on May 1.
Maybe it's too late.
US mulls putting Pakistan Taliban on terrorism list
Tue May 11, 2010 4:40pm EDT* Pakistani Taliban tied to failed May 1 Times Square bomb
(EXCERPT)
* 'Terrorist' designation would lead to punitive measures
* Five Democratic senators urge Clinton to make the move (Adds more from State Department spokesman)
By Sue Pleming
WASHINGTON, May 11 (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it was looking into putting the Pakistani Taliban, the group tied to the failed car bombing in New York's Times Square, on the U.S. list of "foreign terrorist" groups.
Adding the Pakistani Taliban to the list would trigger punitive measures such as freezing assets tied to the group, barring foreign nationals with links to it from entering the United States and making it a crime to give any material help.
"It is something we are considering in light of what happened, and obviously the investigation will yield information that might give us greater clarity," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters.
Crowley said there was a lengthy legal process before a group could be designated a "foreign terrorist organization" and he did not know when a decision would be made.
"We have been focused on this group for some time and, without being specific, we have been working with our Pakistani counterparts and we have taken appropriate action to diminish the capabilities of this group and others in the region," Crowley said, referring to military action to target Pakistani Taliban leaders.
Faisal Shahzad, 30, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, was arrested two days after authorities say he parked a sport utility vehicle packed with a bomb in New York's busy Times Square on May 1.
In repetitive report on Shahzad, a claim of Adm. Mullen on the phone with Pakistan's army chief
By Elise Labott, CNN
May 10, 2010
This report is repetitive and irrelevant, warranted to appear in a hard news outlet maybe Friday or Saturday. However, it contains a rather spurious claim at the end that Admiral Mullen spoke with Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani on the phone with assurances.
If this is not a fabrication, it addresses a claim I made in a post yesterday that vague pressure upon Pakistan from a global powerhouse like Secretary Clinton is sure to fetch murderous, wholesale results in a place where the army charges out into the tribal areas hunting for retribution for mud on the face of some suits in Islamabad because government affairs aren't going according to plan.
The last paragraph of Elise Labott's story quotes an unidentified source speaking about a top brass phone conversation. Were this bit of information a deliberate leak, we must ask why the U.S. military would want CNN to whisper in the ears of its audience Pakistan isn't being tossed into the cold without dinner to hunt terrorists.
"CNN has learned that Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, chief of the Pakistani Army, to discuss the matter. But Mullen called to 'reassure Kayani we are not trying to pressure him as a result of this case,' said a senior U.S. military official. 'Mullen didn't call to say, 'You gotta do more because this Pakistani-American was trained on your territory.'"
May 10, 2010
This report is repetitive and irrelevant, warranted to appear in a hard news outlet maybe Friday or Saturday. However, it contains a rather spurious claim at the end that Admiral Mullen spoke with Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani on the phone with assurances.
If this is not a fabrication, it addresses a claim I made in a post yesterday that vague pressure upon Pakistan from a global powerhouse like Secretary Clinton is sure to fetch murderous, wholesale results in a place where the army charges out into the tribal areas hunting for retribution for mud on the face of some suits in Islamabad because government affairs aren't going according to plan.
The last paragraph of Elise Labott's story quotes an unidentified source speaking about a top brass phone conversation. Were this bit of information a deliberate leak, we must ask why the U.S. military would want CNN to whisper in the ears of its audience Pakistan isn't being tossed into the cold without dinner to hunt terrorists.
"CNN has learned that Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, chief of the Pakistani Army, to discuss the matter. But Mullen called to 'reassure Kayani we are not trying to pressure him as a result of this case,' said a senior U.S. military official. 'Mullen didn't call to say, 'You gotta do more because this Pakistani-American was trained on your territory.'"
Sunday, May 9, 2010
The demonization of a viewpoint: drones are inappropriate for legitimate warfare
Quoted in a May 6 Sify News (India) article describing Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad's conversations with Connecticut neighbors.
But last year, Shahzad's fixation on U.S. policy in the Middle East was evident at a house party in leafy Shelton, Conn.
Neighbor Dennis Flanner said a brooding Shahzad was staring at the TV news in a room packed with drunken partygoers.
"They were talking about those drones blowing things up in Afghanistan," Flanner, 18,said. "He was the only one watching it. Everybody else was just having a good time."
At one point, Flanner said, a reveler told Shahzad to loosen up and have some fun. Shahzad wasn't having it.
"They shouldn't be shooting people from the sky," Shahzad replied, according to Flanner. "You know, they should come down and fight."
Note: so what we're seeing here is if you believe the UAV drones are somehow unfit to the rules of engagement or otherwise a cowardly or inhumane way to engage people who may or may not be enemy combatants; if you disagree in any way with the facts these machines are operated from a distant location by CIA agents and independent service providers on a corporate-government contract, then you agree with all terrorists and all terrorism. If you are of Middle Eastern decent or related to people of Islamic faith (racial, religious and ethnic discrimination), you are certainly not doing enough to distinguish yourself from terrorists.
Do such arguments sound fair to any degree? If you were attempting to defend yourself under the given circumstances against these arguments, do you think you would be able to prove your position outside of wrongdoing or malicious intent?
For now, I'm glad this is appearing in the Indian press and not on Yahoo News or USA Today.
But last year, Shahzad's fixation on U.S. policy in the Middle East was evident at a house party in leafy Shelton, Conn.
Neighbor Dennis Flanner said a brooding Shahzad was staring at the TV news in a room packed with drunken partygoers.
"They were talking about those drones blowing things up in Afghanistan," Flanner, 18,said. "He was the only one watching it. Everybody else was just having a good time."
At one point, Flanner said, a reveler told Shahzad to loosen up and have some fun. Shahzad wasn't having it.
"They shouldn't be shooting people from the sky," Shahzad replied, according to Flanner. "You know, they should come down and fight."
Note: so what we're seeing here is if you believe the UAV drones are somehow unfit to the rules of engagement or otherwise a cowardly or inhumane way to engage people who may or may not be enemy combatants; if you disagree in any way with the facts these machines are operated from a distant location by CIA agents and independent service providers on a corporate-government contract, then you agree with all terrorists and all terrorism. If you are of Middle Eastern decent or related to people of Islamic faith (racial, religious and ethnic discrimination), you are certainly not doing enough to distinguish yourself from terrorists.
Do such arguments sound fair to any degree? If you were attempting to defend yourself under the given circumstances against these arguments, do you think you would be able to prove your position outside of wrongdoing or malicious intent?
For now, I'm glad this is appearing in the Indian press and not on Yahoo News or USA Today.
Friday, May 7, 2010
US to expand Pakistan drone strikes
The US has reportedly carried out more than 100 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2008
Al Jazeera story May 6, 2010 13:07 GMT
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been granted approval by the US government to expand drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal regions in a move to step up military operations against Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, officials have said.
Federal lawyers backed the measures on grounds of self-defence to counter threats the fighters pose to US troops in neighbouring Afghanistan and the United States as a whole, according to authorities.
The US announced on Wednesday that targets will now include low-level combatants, even if their identities are not known.
Barack Obama, the US president, had previously said drone strikes were necessary to "take out high-level terrorist targets".
Conflicting figures
"Targets are chosen with extreme care, factoring in concepts like necessity, proportionality, and an absolute obligation to minimise loss of innocent life and property damage," a US counterterrorism official said.
But the numbers show that more than 90 per cent of the 500 people killed by drones since mid-2008 are lower-level fighters, raising questions about how much the CIA knows about the targets, experts said.
Only 14 of those killed are considered by experts to have been high ranking members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban or other groups.
"Just because they are not big names it does not mean they do not kill. They do," the counterterrorism official said.
The US tally of combatant and non-combatant casualties is sharply lower than some Pakistani press accounts, which have estimated civilian deaths alone at more than 600.
Analysts have said that accurately estimating the number of civilian deaths was difficult, if not impossible.
"It is unclear how you define who is a militant and who is a militant leader," Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism expert at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, said.
Jonathan Manes, a legal fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, said: "It is impossible to assess the accuracy of government figures, unattributed to a named official, without information about what kind of information they are based on, how the government defines 'militants' and how it distinguishes them from civilians."
US message
Former intelligence officials acknowledged that in many, if not most cases, the CIA had little information about those killed in the strikes.
Jeffrey Addicott, director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St Mary's University, said the CIA's goal in targeting was to "demoralise the rank and file".
"The message is: 'If you go to these camps, you're going to be killed,'" he added.
Critics say the expanded US strikes raise legal as well as security concerns amid signs that Faisal Shahzad, the suspect behind the attempted car bombing in New York's Times Square on Saturday, had ties to the Pakistani Taliban movement, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.
CIA-operated drones have frequently targeted the group over the past year in Pakistan, and its members have vowed to avenge strikes that have killed several of their leaders and commanders.
Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan's foreign minister, told CBS television channel that the US should not be surprised if anti-government fighters try to carry out more attacks.
"They're not going to sort of sit and welcome you [to] sort of eliminate them. They're going to fight back," Qureshi said.
Al Jazeera story May 6, 2010 13:07 GMT
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been granted approval by the US government to expand drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal regions in a move to step up military operations against Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, officials have said.
Federal lawyers backed the measures on grounds of self-defence to counter threats the fighters pose to US troops in neighbouring Afghanistan and the United States as a whole, according to authorities.
The US announced on Wednesday that targets will now include low-level combatants, even if their identities are not known.
Barack Obama, the US president, had previously said drone strikes were necessary to "take out high-level terrorist targets".
Conflicting figures
"Targets are chosen with extreme care, factoring in concepts like necessity, proportionality, and an absolute obligation to minimise loss of innocent life and property damage," a US counterterrorism official said.
But the numbers show that more than 90 per cent of the 500 people killed by drones since mid-2008 are lower-level fighters, raising questions about how much the CIA knows about the targets, experts said.
Only 14 of those killed are considered by experts to have been high ranking members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban or other groups.
"Just because they are not big names it does not mean they do not kill. They do," the counterterrorism official said.
The US tally of combatant and non-combatant casualties is sharply lower than some Pakistani press accounts, which have estimated civilian deaths alone at more than 600.
Analysts have said that accurately estimating the number of civilian deaths was difficult, if not impossible.
"It is unclear how you define who is a militant and who is a militant leader," Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism expert at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, said.
Jonathan Manes, a legal fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, said: "It is impossible to assess the accuracy of government figures, unattributed to a named official, without information about what kind of information they are based on, how the government defines 'militants' and how it distinguishes them from civilians."
US message
Former intelligence officials acknowledged that in many, if not most cases, the CIA had little information about those killed in the strikes.
Jeffrey Addicott, director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St Mary's University, said the CIA's goal in targeting was to "demoralise the rank and file".
"The message is: 'If you go to these camps, you're going to be killed,'" he added.
Critics say the expanded US strikes raise legal as well as security concerns amid signs that Faisal Shahzad, the suspect behind the attempted car bombing in New York's Times Square on Saturday, had ties to the Pakistani Taliban movement, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.
CIA-operated drones have frequently targeted the group over the past year in Pakistan, and its members have vowed to avenge strikes that have killed several of their leaders and commanders.
Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan's foreign minister, told CBS television channel that the US should not be surprised if anti-government fighters try to carry out more attacks.
"They're not going to sort of sit and welcome you [to] sort of eliminate them. They're going to fight back," Qureshi said.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Who is Faisal Shahzad?
NY bomb suspect probed for links abroad
Reuters
(Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta in New York; Jeremy Pelofsky, Jeff Mason, JoAnne Allen and Jim Vicini in Washington; and William Maclean in London; Editing by Chris Wilson)
Investigators questioned the suspected Times Square bomber hoping to uncover links he might have had to foreign militant groups and U.S. media said he could appear in a New York court on Wednesday.
Just one thing to note here: this comment defies conventional wisdom—
Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Shahzad's family "are on our radar."
"He is not from a radical or illiterate family. He is from an educated family. We are looking into how he got radicalized," he told Reuters.
... Osama Bin Laden's family is among the wealthiest and most influential in Saudi Arabia. He attended King Abdulaziz University. His father Muhammed Awad bin Laden was a wealthy businessman with close ties to the Saudi royal family.
Reuters
(Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta in New York; Jeremy Pelofsky, Jeff Mason, JoAnne Allen and Jim Vicini in Washington; and William Maclean in London; Editing by Chris Wilson)
Investigators questioned the suspected Times Square bomber hoping to uncover links he might have had to foreign militant groups and U.S. media said he could appear in a New York court on Wednesday.
Just one thing to note here: this comment defies conventional wisdom—
Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Shahzad's family "are on our radar."
"He is not from a radical or illiterate family. He is from an educated family. We are looking into how he got radicalized," he told Reuters.
... Osama Bin Laden's family is among the wealthiest and most influential in Saudi Arabia. He attended King Abdulaziz University. His father Muhammed Awad bin Laden was a wealthy businessman with close ties to the Saudi royal family.
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