By Conn Hallinan – July 11, 2010
Has the drone war in Pakistan’s rugged frontier finally come
home? Was Faisal Shahzad, the bumbling Times Square bomb maker a blowback from
the Obama Administration’s increased use of killer robots? David Sanger of the New York Times asks the question, and
the New York Post says an “anonymous
law enforcement” source claims Shahzad was driven to his act after witnessing
drone attacks in Pakistan.
In fact, there is little evidence that the bomber ever saw
drone assaults, or even that he received training. While one wing of the
Pakistan Taliban initially claimed credit, they later denied it. If he was
trained it was by Pakistan’s variety of the Gang That Couldn’t Bomb Straight.
But the question is real, and if the U.S. thought that
killing people at a great distance was not likely to end up being a messy
business, then the White House is deeply deluded.
First, the drone war has stirred up considerable
anti-Americanism in Pakistan, to the extent that some of the designers of the
current counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum,
have denounced it as a “technology” fix that has alienated Pakistanis by
chalking up a kill ratio of 50 civilians for every targeted Taliban or al-Qaeda
leader. “Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family,
a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement,” the two
wrote in the New York Times.
The number of civilian deaths caused by the drones is a
sharply debated issue. The Long War Journal blog puts the number at around 30,
Pakistani sources argue the figure is over 1,000, and a recent study by the New
American Foundation concludes that civilian casualties make up about 30 percent
of the fatalities.
But the word “civilian” is a slippery one, because no one
knows exactly what criteria the U.S. uses to distinguish a “militant” from a
civilian. Is someone with a gun a “militant”? Since large numbers of males in
the frontier regions of Pakistan carry guns, that definition would end up
targeting a huge number of people. Is someone who offers hospitality to a
Taliban member a “militant” and, thus, a legitimate target, even if it includes
his whole extended family?
Who is targeted and how those decisions are made are the
subjects of a growing controversy that has sparked at least one lawsuit in the
U.S. and spilled over into international law.
According to the CIA, the drone war is legal, although the
intelligence organization refuses to even admit it is using the killer robots
in Pakistan. “The agency’s counterterrorism operations—lawful,
aggressive, precise, and effective—continue without pause,” says CIA
spokesman Paul Gimigliano.
No one disputes the program is “aggressive,” particularly
under the Obama administration, which has launched more drone attacks in a
little over a year than the Bush Administration did in eight.
Whether the attacks have been “precise” and “effective” is
debatable. A drone did kill Pakistan Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, but only
after 16 tries in which over 300 people were killed, at least half of whom were
civilians. The Agency also took credit for killing Baitullah’s successor,
Hakimullah Mehsud, but reports of his demise turned out to be premature. The Pakistan
Taliban leader surfaced in early May to claim credit for the Times Square
bomber.
But “lawful” is promising to cause the Obama Administration
a major headache.
The CIA strikes are “a clear violation of international
law,” argues Notre Dame Law School professor Mary Ellen O’Connell, who says it
would be like Mexican authorities bombing houses and hotels in the American
Southwest because they may harbor drug lords.
In testifying before the House Subcommittee on National
Security, Kenneth Anderson, a professor at Washington College of Law at
American University warned that “CIA officers or for that matter military
officers or their lawyers” could be called before “international tribunals or
courts in Spain or some place that say you’ve engaged in extra judicial
execution or simple murder and we’re going to investigate and indict.”
Last October, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special
Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, said, “The CIA is running a program
that is killing significant numbers of people, and there is absolutely no
accountability in terms of the relevant international law.” He called on the
U.S. “to reveal more about the ways in which it makes sure that arbitrary
extrajudicial executions aren’t, in fact, being carried out though the use of
these weapons.”
This lack of accountability is the target of a lawsuit,
filed Mar. 16, by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), demanding
“information on when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized,
the number and rate of civilian casualties and other basic information
essential for assessing the wisdom and legality of using armed drones to
conduct targeted killings.”
“The government’s use of drones to conduct targeted killings
raises complicated questions,” said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s
National Security Project. “These questions ought to be discussed and debated
publicly, not resolved secretly behind closed doors.”
However, the CIA has problems with being open that have
nothing to do with national security. The agents and contractors who fly and
direct the drones are civilians, who are prohibited from waging war by the
Geneva Conventions.
“In terms of international armed conflict, those CIA agents
are, unlike their military counterparts, but like the fighters they target,
unlawful combatants,” says Gary Solis, law professor and author of “The Law of
Armed Conflict.” According to Solis, the CIA employees, like their targets,
“are fighters without uniforms or insignia, directly participating in
hostilities, employing armed force contrary to the laws and customs of war.”
This is hardly an arcane legal issue. The Obama
Administration is in the process of vastly increasing the number of lethal
drones for the U.S. military, adding everything from more Predators and Reapers—the
current killers of choice—to unmanned attack aircraft and tanks, and tiny
but deadly “nanobots.”
Many of these will be directed by military
personnel—next year the Air Force will train more drone pilots than
fighter and bomber pilots—but some will end up with the CIA.
For the time being, drones are super weapons, but they
aren’t the first, and it is instructive to consider a few examples from the
past.
At one point in European history the armored knight was
pretty much invincible, until someone figured out that a peasant welding a
crossbow could bring down a very expensive piece of military technology with a
simple bolt.
In Vietnam the U.S. spent many hundreds of thousands of
dollars developing a sniffing device to seek concentrations of urine indicating
enemy campsites, which would then be bombed by B-52s. The Vietnamese finessed
that piece of high tech with buckets of buffalo pee hung in trees.
And NATO thought they had bombed Yugoslavia’s armor back to
the Middle Ages during the Kosovo War, until they found out that most the
“tanks” were wooden dummies with little primus stoves in them to fool infrared
detectors.
“The more the drone campaign works, the more it fails,” says
Naval Post Graduate School analyst John Arquilla. “Increased attacks only make
the Pakistanis angrier at the collateral damage and the sustained violation of
their sovereignty,”
Drones are a high tech solution to a deeply complex
political problem. The longer they stalk the skies over Pakistan, Yemen and
Somalia, the more difficult those political problems become. It is time to stop
bombing and start talking.