"When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there’s nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it. Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight."
Tom Engelhardt
Article dates back to June 24, 2010
America Detached from War
Bush’s Pilotless Dream, Smoking Drones, and Other Strange Tales from the Crypt
Available on Tomdispatch.com
Admittedly, before George W. Bush had his fever dream, the U.S. had already put its first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drone surveillance planes in the skies over Kosovo in the late 1990s. By November 2001, it had armed them with missiles and was flying them over Afghanistan.
In November 2002, a Predator drone would loose a Hellfire missile on a car in Yemen, a country with which we weren’t at war. Six suspected al-Qaeda members, including a suspect in the bombing of the destroyer the USS Cole would be turned into twisted metal and ash -- the first “targeted killings” of the American robotic era.
Just two months earlier, in September 2002, as the Bush administration was “introducing” its campaign to sell an invasion of Iraq to Congress and the American people, CIA Director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney “trooped up to Capitol Hill” to brief four top Senate and House leaders on a hair-raising threat to the country. A “smoking gun” had been uncovered.
According to “new intelligence,” Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had in his possession unmanned aerial vehicles advanced enough to be armed with biological and chemical weaponry. Worse yet, these were capable -- so the CIA director and vice president claimed -- of spraying those weapons of mass destruction over cities on the east coast of the United States. It was just the sort of evil plan you might have expected from a man regularly compared to Adolf Hitler in our media, and the news evidently made an impression in Congress.
Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, said that he voted for the administration's resolution authorizing force in Iraq because "I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard."
In a speech in October 2002, President Bush then offered a version of this apocalyptic nightmare to the American public. Of course, like Saddam’s supposed ability to produce “mushroom clouds” over American cities, the Iraqi autocrat’s advanced UAVs (along with the ships needed to position them off the U.S. coast) were a feverish fantasy of the Bush era and would soon enough be forgotten. Instead, in the years to come, it would be American pilotless drones that would repeatedly attack Iraqi urban areas with Hellfire missiles and bombs.
In those years, our drones would also strike repeatedly in Afghanistan, and especially in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan, where in an escalating “secret” or “covert” war, which has been no secret to anyone, multiple drone attacks often occur weekly. They are now considered so much the norm that, with humdrum headlines slapped on (“U.S. missile strike kills 12 in NW Pakistan”), they barely make it out of summary articles about war developments in the American press.
And yet those robotic planes, with their young “pilots” (as well as the camera operators and intelligence analysts who make up a drone “crew”) sitting in front of consoles 7,000 miles away from where their missiles and bombs are landing, have become another kind of American fever dream. The drone is our latest wonder weapon and a bragging point in a set of wars where there has been little enough to brag about.
CIA director Leon Panetta has, for instance, called the Agency’s drones flying over Pakistan “the only game in town” when it comes to destroying al-Qaeda; a typically anonymous U.S. official in a Washington Post report claims of drone missile attacks, “We’re talking about precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare”; or as Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command told author Peter Singer, speaking of the glories of drones: “They don't get hungry. They are not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”
Seven thousand of them, the vast majority surveillance varieties, are reportedly already being operated by the military, and that’s before swarms of “mini-drones” come on line. Our American world is being redefined accordingly.
In February, Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post caught something of this process when he spent time with Colonel Eric Mathewson, perhaps the most experienced Air Force officer in drone operations and on the verge of retirement. Mathewson, reported Jaffe, was trying to come up with an appropriately new definition of battlefield “valor” -- a necessity for most combat award citations -- to fit our latest corps of pilots at their video consoles. “Valor to me is not risking your life," the colonel told the reporter. "Valor is doing what is right. Valor is about your motivations and the ends that you seek. It is doing what is right for the right reasons. That to me is valor."
Smoking Drones
These days, CIA and administration officials troop up to Capitol Hill to offer briefings to Congress on the miraculous value of pilotless drones: in disrupting al-Qaeda, destroying its leadership or driving it “deeper into hiding,” and taking out key figures in the Taliban. Indeed, what started as a 24/7 assassination campaign against al-Qaeda’s top leadership has already widened considerably. The “target set” has by now reportedly expanded to take in ever lower-level militants in the tribal borderlands. In other words, a drone assassination campaign is morphing into the first full-scale drone war (and, as in all wars from the air, civilians are dying in unknown numbers).
If the temperature is again rising in Washington when it comes to these weapons, this time it’s a fever of enthusiasm for the spectacular future of drones (which the Air Force has plotted out to the year 2047), of a time when single pilots should be able to handle multiple drones in operations in the skies over some embattled land, and of a far more distant moment when those drones should be able to handle themselves, flying, fighting, and making key decisions about just who to take out without a human being having to intervene.
When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there’s nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it. Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight.
Now it's the United States whose UAVs are ever more powerfully weaponized. It's the U.S. which is developing a 22-ton tail-less drone 20 times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. It's the Pentagon which is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700% over the next decade.
Admittedly, there is a modest counter-narrative to all this enthusiasm for our robotic prowess, “precision,” and “valor.” It involves legal types like Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions. He recently issued a 29-page report criticizing Washington’s “ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.” Unless limits are put on such claims, and especially on the CIA’s drone war over Pakistan, he suggests, soon enough a plethora of states will follow in America’s footprints, attacking people in other lands “labeled as terrorists by one group or another.”
Such mechanized, long-distance warfare, he also suggests, will breach what respect remains for the laws of war. “Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield,” he wrote, “and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a 'PlayStation' mentality to killing.”
Similarly, the ACLU has filed a freedom of information lawsuit against the U.S. government, demanding that it “disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas, as well as the ground rules regarding when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and the number of civilian casualties they have caused.”
But pay no mind to all this. The arguments may be legally compelling, but not in Washington, which has mounted a half-hearted claim of legitimate “self-defense,” but senses that it’s already well past the point where legalities matter. The die is cast, the money committed. The momentum for drone war and yet more drone war is overwhelming.
It’s a done deal. Drone war is, and will be, us.
A Pilotless Military
If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars, and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well. The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment.
It’s a moment that could, of course, be presented as an apocalyptic nightmare in the style of the Terminator movies (with the U.S. as the soul-crushing Skynet), or as a remarkable tale of how “networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare” (as Christopher Drew recently put it in the New York Times). It could be described as the arrival of a dystopian fantasy world of one-way slaughter verging on entertainment, or as the coming of a generation of homegrown video warriors who work “in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk... and coffee and Red Bull help[ing] them get through the 12-hour shifts.” It could be presented as the ultimate in cowardice -- the killing of people in a world you know nothing about from thousands of miles away -- or (as Col. Mathewson would prefer) a new form of valor.
The drones -- their use expanding exponentially, with ever newer generations on the drawing boards, and the planes even heading for “the homeland” -- could certainly be considered a demon spawn of modern warfare, or (as is generally the case in the U.S.) a remarkable example of American technological ingenuity, a problem-solver of the first order at a time when few American problems seem capable of solution. Thanks to our technological prowess, it’s claimed that we can now kill them, wherever they may be lurking, at absolutely no cost to ourselves, other than the odd malfunctioning drone. Not that even all CIA operatives involved in the drone wars agree with that one. Some of them understand perfectly well that there’s a price to be paid.
As it happens, the enthusiasm for drones is as much a fever dream as the one President Bush and his associates offered back in 2002, but it’s also distinctly us. In fact, drone warfare fits the America of 2010 tighter than a glove. With its consoles, chat rooms, and “single shooter” death machines, it certainly fits the skills of a generation raised on the computer, Facebook, and video games. That our valorous warriors, their day of battle done, can increasingly leave war behind and head home to the barbecue (or, given American life, the foreclosure) also fits an American mood of the moment.
The Air Force “detachments” that “manage” the drone war from places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada are “detached” from war in a way that even an artillery unit significantly behind the battle lines or an American pilot in an F-16 over Afghanistan (who could, at least, experience engine failure) isn’t. If the drone presents the most extreme version thus far of the detachment of human beings from the battlefield (on only one side, of course) and so launches a basic redefinition of what war is all about, it also catches something important about the American way of war.
After all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this. If anything, since Vietnam when an increasingly rebellious citizens’ army proved disastrous for Washington’s global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.
As a start, with no draft and so no citizen’s army, war and the toll it takes is now the professional business of a tiny percentage of Americans (and their families). It occurs thousands of miles away and, in the Bush years, also became a heavily privatized, for-profit activity. As Pratap Chatterjee reported recently, “[E]very US soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq is matched by at least one civilian working for a private company. All told, about 239,451 contractors work for the Pentagon in battle zones around the world.” And a majority of those contractors aren’t even U.S. citizens.
If drones have entered our world as media celebrities, they have done so largely without debate among that detached populace. In a sense, our wars abroad could be thought of as the equivalent of so many drones. We send our troops off and then go home for dinner and put them out of mind. The question is: Have we redefined our detachment as a new version of citizenly valor (and covered it over by a constant drumbeat of “support for our troops”)?
Under these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that a “pilotless” force should, in turn, develop the sort of contempt for civilians that can be seen in the recent flap over the derogatory comments of Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal and his aides about Obama administration officials.
The Globalization of Death
Maybe what we need is the return of George W. Bush’s fever dream from the American oblivion in which it’s now interred. He was beyond wrong, of course, when it came to Saddam Hussein and Iraqi drones, but he wasn’t completely wrong about the dystopian Drone World to come. There are now reportedly more than 40 countries developing versions of those pilot-less planes. Earlier this year, the Iranians announced that they were starting up production lines for both armed and unarmed drones. Hezbollah used them against Israel in the 2006 summer war, years after Israel began pioneering their use in targeted killings of Palestinians.
Right now, in what still remains largely a post-Cold War arms race of one, the U.S. is racing to produce ever more advanced drones to fight our wars, with few competitors in sight. In the process, we’re also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances. In the process, we may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike.
We are also creating the (il)legal framework for future war on a frontier where we won’t long be flying solo. And when the first Iranian, or Russian, or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of "terrorists," we won’t like it one bit. When the first “suicide drones” appear, we’ll like it even less. And if drones with the ability to spray chemical or biological weapons finally do make the scene, we’ll be truly unnerved.
In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of “globalization” which was widely hailed as good news. Now, the U.S. and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone, and establishes planetary free-fire zones. It’s a nasty combination, this globalization of death.
Showing posts with label Leon Panetta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leon Panetta. Show all posts
Thursday, September 16, 2010
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.
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”).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)