There has been another Predator strike, killing four (or so we assume) in South Waziristan. The new Gates-Obama budget calls for an approximate doubling of the Predator force, indicating the beginnings of a major shift toward unmanned drones taking the lead in the nation’s wars.
This could not be more disastrous. In Afghanistan, the U.S. and NATO have recognized the extreme danger of relying on air strikes to make up the gap for a tiny or ineffective ground presence: in 2008, the number of air strikes in Afghanistan actually decreased about 33% from their high in 2007 (following up on a much-maligned 2007 observation by then-Senator Obama). This may be misleading: the authors are only measuring tonnage; Jaap de Hoof Scheffer, NATO’s Secretary-General, declared an intention in 2007 to switch from large 1,000 and 2,000 pound bombs to smaller, 500 pound munitions. Decreased tonnage does not necessarily indicate a decreased number of air strikes.
In Afghanistan, then, military leaders may be recognizing the folly of using air strikes to win an insurgency (finally). Why not in Pakistan? Indeed, aside from David Kilcullen, the number of people advocating the practical reasons why the drone war in Pakistan is so counterproductive is surprisingly small. Even then, they don’t seem to get it. Take this provocative essay in Foreign Policy by Stuart Gottleib, the director of the Policy Studies Program at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.
Indeed, although targeted killings can be justified on national security grounds — to weaken the capability of Taliban and al Qaeda forces to carry out attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere — they run counter to Obama’s espoused counterterrorism ethos. Assuring the world in one breath that “America does not torture” suspected terrorists, while in another ordering Hellfire missile strikes that can burn victims alive, is unsustainable from both policy and diplomatic perspectives. How does the U.S. president explain why one suspected terrorist leader held in Guantánamo gets a team of lawyers fighting for his day in court, while another is killed in his car along with his family?
This is incoherent reasoning. Gottleib is asserting that the rights of foreign militants who have declared their own war on the world and the U.S. specifically are identical to the rights of captured militants held in U.S. custody. It’s never worked like that, and as much as I disagree with President Obama’s escalation of the drone war against Pakistan, there is nothing morally inconsistent with decrying the Bush Administration torture policies while pursuing the extremists in Pakistan. There are many justifications, from right of pursuit to the tacit approval of U.S. strikes by the Pakistani government, that make Gottleib’s argument more than a bit silly.
Gottleib later refers to these strikes as war crimes, which is a similarly ridiculous claim: they are not targeted collective punishment, nor are they preemptive strikes, nor are they anything else that could conceivably be called war crimes for the very simple reason that the Pakistani government at least kind of sort of approves of them (their primary objection seems to be operational control, not the operations themselves).
The real reason the drone strikes are such a horrible idea is that, even if President Zadari’s administration accepts and approves of them (even if only in private), those strikes actively undermine the legitimacy of his government amongst the very people he must govern in order to win: the citizens of the FATA and, increasingly, the NWFP. Lobbing missiles from flying robots does nothing to change the fundamental ground conditions for why there are militants in the area, nor do they help to protect the few opposing tribal leaders that haven’t been beheaded, nor do they prop up the Pakistani government’s rule of law. In almost every way imaginable, they are the definition of a short-sighted agenda in pursuit of an overly narrow goal. Why they continue to be lauded as a grand success—even as violence, instability, and cross-border attacks into Afghanistan increase in number and ferocity—eludes me. But that is the point President Obama’s advisers must begin to take into account if they are to make any progress against the creeping stain of extremism.
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Joshua, usually your judgment is a lot better than this! Of course allegedly ‘targeted’ killings– also known as extra-judicial executions– are against the laws of war. In a situation of actual hostilities it is permissible under international humanitarian law–IHL, aka the laws of war– to kill your enemy. But if the opponent is not actually engaged in combat, it’s illegal. (Think: US or Israeli reservists, in their time off, going to a beach in Greece or whatever.) That is one consideration– even if it’s often glossed over with claims of “oh, we were in hot pursuit…
That is why they’re called ‘extra-judicial’ executions.
But in these allegedly ‘targeted’ executions there are other serious legal/ethical problems. When and how is the ‘evidence’ against the targeted individuals ever actually considered in anything resembling an open forum? How about the many possibilities for malicious or inadvertent mis-identification of targets? Who sorts those out; who makes the decision to ‘kill’, and how?
Again, the whole process is extra-judicial and should be roundly condemned by anyone claiming to uphold the rule of any kind of law. Gottlieb is quite right.
And yes, in addition, they are counter-productive. But from a rule of law perspective that’s an additional, and secondary, consideration. (In a deep sense it is linked, of course. People in the communities targeted find these kind of remote-control killings quite despicable and their hatred of the governments and institutions launching them only grows. Those feelings are often linked to a strong sort of natural justice.)
Helena, I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but I also don’t think it’s quite as black and white. US or Israeli reservists on vacation in Greece is not an analogous situation to a group of militants basing their anti-U.S. operations over the border of a neighboring country that has requested assistance in destroying them.
The point about review is a sound one—I’ve raised objections to that in this space repeatedly, but the drone strikes are not obviously a war crime, and simply calling it such strikes me as needlessly inflammatory.
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