Dronestrike-led foreign policy - bad timing?

[Fist and Faith]

wayfriend, would you not have a problem with Nation X if they droned somebody in the US, and took out your loved ones in the process? Don't you think that would cause you, and a lot of other Americans, to have some seriously bad feelings against X? I don't see how it wouldn't. I know I'd be extremely angry about it, even if I didn't know the people killed. You kidding me? And if some of us think we deserve to be vilified over having done this, I think we can be reasonably sure some of the wedding party's survivors do. And that some AQ operatives are fanning the flames as best they can.

So what if we stop? What if we use the intelligence we gather to stop them from coming here, sending bad things here, etc? If we know who they are, and can pinpoint their location sufficiently to kill them with drones, maybe we can stop them in ways that don't kill innocents.

[Cail]

Two websites no one's ever heard of said that Pakistanis don't mind drone strikes, so clearly you're lying Fist.

[SerScot]

Cail,

No, they say that someone, who remains unidentified, invited us to use drones in Pakistan therefore all the explicit public denunciations of drone strikes by the Pakistani Government are irrelevant.

[Cail]

My mistake....

[Fist and Faith]

Doesn't make any difference who at what level of the govt said what. If Obama said Nation X could use drones to kill an enemy over here, and my family died in the strike, I'd be royally pissed at X and Obama. Probably even moreso at Obama, because he should've had our own forces go get the guy so that such an accident didn't happen.

(In fact, if I hear that Obama gives X such permission, I'll be royally pissed even if a strike is never made. I don't care if we don't want to turn X's enemy over to X, there's certainly better solutions than giving X permission to attack us in any way.)

[TheFallen]

What people forget...

Drones kill fewer civilians, as a percentage of total fatalities, than any other military weapon. [link]

But for extremists who are indeed plotting violence against innocents, he said, “all the evidence we have so far suggests that drones do better at both identifying the terrorist and avoiding collateral damage than anything else we have.” [link]

This information is pretty much bound to be disingenuous. Of course it's the tritest of truisms to state that sending a drone in against a single target in a group of twenty for example is going to give you a "better" percentage in this macabre game of collateral damage than say, carpet bombing a city. Plus of course, given that the deliberately spun headline refers to "any other military weapon", I'd say that a sniper's rifle would be bound to perform far FAR better (albeit with far greater personal risk to the sniper as compared to the pointy-headed CIA poindexter joystick-jockeying the drone onto a selected target from a thousand miles away).

What really gets me about this article - and the supportive comment from Bradley J. Strawser, a former Air Force officer and an assistant professor of philosophy at the Naval Postgraduate School as featured in the NY Times article that WF's post also quoted (gee, I wonder which side of the hawk/dove fence Strawser comes down on? ) - is the complete avoidance of the issue of the validity of those targeted. Never mind the civilians that drones kill in error, because the poindexters have got it wrong. Yet again, let's not forget that the US admin decides as often as not to launch drone strikes against unidentified - read my lips, UNIDENTIFIED - targets who it merely suspects of indulging in suspicious behaviour and/or who it merely predicts might be involved in terrorist attacks in the future. When it successfully blows such "targets" to pieces, it'll report such killings as successful or justified terrorist deaths. These will then be counted "to the good", even if such killings simply have to be seen by any right-thinking person as executing the innocent. Talk about rigging the stats...

And yes, RR, you're right. Drones aren't just Obama. That slack-jawed buffoon Dubya also was happy enough to use them - although it's interesting to note that Obama, despite his pre-election oft publically stated opposition to Bush's stance towards the Middle East, has by now sanctioned about ten times more drone strikes than Bush ever did. Thus it looks as if drone strikes are set to be an ever-increasing element of US foreign policy, until and/or unless you guys put someone a little more far-thinking in the White House. This current "strategy" - not that it deserves that term - is really conceptually not much better than "Hey, let's glass the entire Middle East and let God sort 'em out." It's kind of a piecemeal version of that.

[Zarathustra]

The 6 big myths that turned us against drone strikes

#4 Drone strikes create more terrorists

The impression that drone strikes create additional terrorists is not entirely grounded in reality. The truth is that Islamist extremism is midwifed by the ideology of global jihad and political Islam.

The bulk of the Taliban fighters come from the Punjab province that has become a hub of extremism in recent years. These fighters come from urban, middle class families. Neither the Punjab province faces drone strikes nor have these militants ever lost a relative and family member in any of the drone strikes. The history of Islamic extremism in Pakistan dates back to days much earlier the use of the drone technology. [link]

‘Minimal’ drone effects on Pakistan militant recruits: ICG

ISLAMABAD: US drone strikes in Pakistan have a “minimal” impact on militant recruitment, a respected think tank said Tuesday, contrary to arguments the controversial programme creates more extremists than it kills. [link]

Doh! Stupid fact-based opinion ...

Is that your opinion, too, or are you merely referencing someone else's opinion which you don't share? If this is your opinion, when did you change your mind on the recruiting power of remote control bombings? Or the value of doing so when it could kill our enemies?

When the subject was whether or not we should bomb a funeral for a known terrorist, attended by 190 Taliban militants, your response was:

The decision [not to bomb] was probably made because things like Americans bombing religous Muslim funerals by remote control becomes recruiting material for the insurgency. It'd be smeered all over Arabic TV. And, unfortunately, the US has problems enough in this regard, no good reputation to stand on. The damage from the news of this atrocity would far outweigh the benefit of taking out a couple dozen fighters.

Back then it was a funeral. Today it's a wedding. Not much difference, as far as I can tell (aside from the fact that the wedding was full of civilians and the funeral was full of bad guys). Both are religious ceremonies. But now the President is different, and so you're here justifying it. But your tune used to be entirely different on such matter. In fact, you called such things, "war crimes."

Either the US position is that there are war crimes or that there are no war crimes.

If there are no war crimes, then we can't put Hussein or the Milosovich or anyone else on trial and hold them responsible, we cannot prosecute terrorists for crimes, or anything else.

If there are war crimes, then we should not do any.

The US, of course, always wants it both ways. War crimes are something someone else does. It's okay when we do it. This is the same as the US refusing to let the UN try US soldiers for war crimes.

The US uses the rules of war to get what they want, and ignores them to get what they want.

Personally, I don't think we'll lose the war for not taking out those Taliban guys. If it's that freaking close, then we should disengage now.

Heck, maybe they were burying Osama been with llamas.

In both cases you argue against taking out our enemy with drones, based on the damage to us being much greater than the benefits of taking out the enemy.

So when and why did your position change?

[Fist and Faith]

Also, drone strikes do NOT kill fewer civilians than NO military weapons.

[TheFallen]

So when and why did your position change?

While awaiting WF's response to the above with bated breath, why don't we hold a sweepstake on what his answer will be as to the "when" part of Z's question. We'll all toss ten bucks into the pot, select a date and whoever's closest wins the money.

I'll get the ball rolling here and take a wild stab in the dark... my money's on the completely random date of January 20th 2009.

As to the "why" part of any response to Z's question, I wouldn't even dream of beginning to dare to presume to guess...

[Hashi Lebwohl]

I followed the link to the article wayfriend posted and from there I searched for the International Crisis Group, the group which conducted the study and published the paper which was cited by the Dawn.com article. Browsing their site, I was able to find a summary of the report and the ICG's recommendations to the governments of both Pakistan and the United States, as well as a link to the actual 50-page article itself. Let's see what the report has to say for itself in the section titled "Winning Hearts and Minds or Losing Allies?", shall we?

In debates on the drone issue, the argument is commonly put forward that drones produce more terrorists than they kill: militant groups exploit real and fabricated accounts of civilian deaths to enlist fresh recruits, including the relatives of drone strike victims, for jihad against the U.S. and its allies.133 The actual benefit to extremist groups, including in terms of recruitment, appears, however, minimal. A local analyst who has extensively researched security and governance in FATA notes that while anti-drone rhetoric does draw some converts, “the loss of a Baitullah Mehsud or a Qari Hussain is much more damaging than the recruitment of a few dozen foot soldiers”.134

Moreover, militant recruitment is a complex process, achieved more often on economic than ideological grounds. FATA residents often rely on various militant jihadi and criminal networks for patronage in the absence of a functioning state, civil society, and traditional tribal structures that have been decimated by militants. Forced recruitment is also common, with households in militant-controlled areas made to contribute men to the jihad.135 Any voluntary enlistment in response to drone strikes may well be comparatively minimal.

The main causes for the spread of militancy in FATA are not drone strikes but domestic factors. These include the absence of the state and insecurity due to the resulting political, legal and economic vacuum; and the military’s support of, provision of sanctuaries to, and peace deals with militant groups. Heavy-handed and selective military operations have caused more damage to civilian life and infrastructure than to militant groups. This is clear, for example, in the Haqqani network’s expansion from its stronghold in North Waziristan to adjoining Kurram Agency, which has secured the group new routes to Afghanistan and expanded its capacity to strike NATO and Afghan forces.136 These factors underscore the limitations of the drone program in degrading the long-term operational capabilities and ability of violent extremists to regroup, rearm and recruit.

An effective and comprehensive U.S. counter-terrorism strategy should, therefore, focus on applying pressure in earnest on Pakistan’s military to end support to any Pakistani Taliban faction; to jihadis who are oriented against India, such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba; and to the Afghan insurgents, particularly the Haqqani network, which is linked to al-Qaeda. If the military or elements within it continue to prevaricate on such commitments, the U.S. should apply existing conditions on military aid. As a last resort, it should consider invoking targeted and incremental sanctions, including travel and visa bans and the freezing of financial assets of key military leaders and military-controlled intelligence agencies that support extremist elements
responsible for planning and conducting attacks from Pakistan’s territory against its neighbourhood and beyond.

The U.S. should also encourage and support the elected government’s efforts to
incorporate FATA into the constitutional mainstream. So far, Washington’s “stabilisation’” assistance in FATA is disbursed through discredited state institutions, such as the political agent, a federal bureaucrat, and the FATA secretariat. Created by Musharraf in 2006 to reinforce the military and civil bureaucracy’s control over the tribal borderlands, the secretariat is subject to very limited internal and external accountability.137 Inherently unable to enforce law and order or to govern accountably and effectively, these institutions are part of the problem and not the solution. Since significant funds are channelled to these institutions, and often through them to military
entities such as the Frontier Works Organisation (FWO),138 the U.S. assistance
program has inadvertently bolstered players with the least incentive to reform FATA and the most capacity to block such reforms.

Washington should instead condition assistance on tangible steps by Islamabad to implement political, legal and administrative reforms in FATA that the major political parties, including the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Awami National Party (ANP),139 have vowed to support. The reform process should go well beyond the August 2011 reforms, which, while positive, have failed to address fundamental issues of governance and basic rights.140 Islamabad should be urged to abolish the FATA secretariat and return its responsibilities to the relevant KPK line ministries, and to institute an effective law enforcement apparatus in FATA. The U.S. should then provide technical, financial and other support to that reformed system.

To clarify the acronym, FATA refers to Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Now, let us also take a peek at the ICG recommendations for the United States.

2. Demonstrate respect for the international humanitarian law principles of humanity, distinction, proportionality and military necessity, including by:

a) halting reported signature strikes that target groups of men based on behaviour patterns that may be associated with terrorist activity rather than known identities; and

b) ending the reported practice of counting all military-aged men in a strike zone as combatants unless sufficient evidence proves them innocent posthumously.

3. Develop a rigorous legal framework for the use of drones that defines clear roles for the executive, legislative and judicial branches and introduces a meaningful level of regular judicial and congressional oversight.

4. Convert the drone program from a covert CIA operation to a military-run program overseen by the Defense Department, with oversight by the Senate and House Armed Services Committees and appropriate judicial review.

To bolster the Pakistani civilian government’s ability to protect its citizens and bring violent extremists to justice

8. Implement existing conditions on military aid if the Pakistan military or elements within it do not take concrete steps to end support to the Haqqani network, the Quetta Shura, the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and other extremist groups, including factions of the Pakistani Taliban; and consider as a last resort imposing targeted and incremental sanctions, including travel and visa bans and the freezing of financial assets of key military leaders and military-controlled intelligence agencies responsible for supporting extremist elements that plan and conduct attacks from Pakistani territory against its neighbourhood and beyond.

9. Shift the priority of security assistance to making Pakistan a strong criminal justice partner by supporting the modernisation and enhancing the counter-terrorism capacity of the police and civilian law enforcement agencies.

10. Condition FATA aid on tangible steps by Pakistan’s federal government to extend the state’s writ in the tribal belt and implement political reforms – including by abolishing the FATA secretariat and returning its responsibilities to KPK line ministries and instituting an effective law enforcement apparatus – and then provide technical, financial and other support to that new system.

Even if we concede the point that, at least as far as Pakistan in concerned, drones do not cause the recruitment of new militants we are left with the other findings and recommendations of this report (from May 2013) which are contrary to the current Administration policy of "kill 'em all, let God/Allah sort 'em out". The ICG clearly recommends major changes to the drone program.
If, on the other hand, we are to ignore the changes recommended by the ICG then there is no logical reason we should not also ignore their reasoned claim that drone strikes do not cause recruitment to increase.

In conclusion, let me present one other section of the report entitled "Social, Economic and Psychological Impact"

Drones can hover for hours and days over an area to gather information that operators use to identify targets, guide missiles and assess the immediate impact of a strike. 74 “The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death”, wrote The New York Times journalist David Rohde in his account of being held hostage by the Taliban. 75
According to some studies based on interviews with witnesses, when a drone is heard overhead, uncertainty over whether it will strike understandably provokes anxiety among FATA residents in frequently targeted areas.
76 Many in FATA believe that local informants, providing intelligence and placing locator chips to guide drones towards potential militant targets, undermine the security of their communities. Militants have tortured suspected informants into coerced confessions, and occasionally release video footage of their subsequent executions, warning the local population of the consequences of collaborating with the U.S. 77 Residents in FATA also believe that informants possibly provide false information and exploit their position to settle vendettas with local rivals. 78 The U.S. targeting policy is problematic because of its reported reliance on so-called “signature strikes”
targeting groups of men based on behaviour patterns that may be associated with terrorist activity rather than known identities. 79 Some legal scholars claim that the sign ature strikes approach impedes FATA’s cultural and conflict-resolution activities, for example by leading to the targeting of
tribal jirgas (councils of elders). It is contended that tribal elders now fear convening such meetings, and communities have even become reluctant to hold funerals lest they attract drone strikes. 80 For instance, in the 17 March 2011 drone attack on a jirga in North Waziristan’s Datta Khel town, only four out of 40 men killed are believed to have been militants; the rest are thought to have been maliks (tribal leaders) and other tribesmen. 81 These reported strikes, by fuelling local alienation, likely do far more harm than good. However, the Pakistani military and militants, each in their own way, and not drone strikes, are primarily responsible for distorting FATA’s cultural and social fabric, as discussed later in this report.

[Zarathustra]

Apparently, "fair quoting" was important (though not explained) last week. So in the interests of this goal, I'd like to point out some other content from WF's sources on the last page:

The drone’s promise of precision killing and perfect safety for operators is so seductive, in fact, that some scholars have raised a different moral question: Do drones threaten to lower the threshold for lethal violence?

“In the just-war tradition, there’s the notion that you only wage war as a last resort,” said Daniel R. Brunstetter, a political scientist at the University of California at Irvine who fears that drones are becoming “a default strategy to be used almost anywhere.”

With hundreds of terrorist suspects killed under President Obama and just one taken into custody overseas, some question whether drones have become not a more precise alternative to bombing but a convenient substitute for capture. If so, drones may actually be encouraging unnecessary killing.

Washington must remain mindful of the built-in limits of low-cost, unmanned interventions, since the very convenience of drone warfare risks dragging the United States into conflicts it could otherwise avoid.

The truth is that all the public numbers are unreliable. Who constitutes a civilian is often unclear; when trying to kill the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, for example, the United States also killed his doctor. The doctor was not targeting U.S. or allied forces, but he was aiding a known terrorist leader. In addition, most strikes are carried out in such remote locations that it is nearly impossible for independent sources to verify who was killed.

...with the war on terrorism almost 12 years old and bin Laden dead, critics, such as the Georgetown University law professor Rosa Brooks, have begun questioning whether the AUMF still justifies drone strikes today. As Brooks has argued, “Many of the groups now being identified as threats don’t fall clearly under the AUMF’s umbrella—and many don’t pose a significant danger to the United States.”

The fact remains that by using drones so much, Washington risks setting a troublesome precedent with regard to extrajudicial and extraterritorial killings. Zeke Johnson of Amnesty International contends that “when the U.S. government violates international law, that sets a precedent and provides an excuse for the rest of the world to do the same.”

The U.S. government also needs to guard against another kind of danger: that the relative ease of using drones will make U.S. intervention abroad too common. The scholars Daniel Brunstetter and Megan Braun have argued that drones provide “a way to avoid deploying troops or conducting an intensive bombing campaign” and that this “may encourage countries to act on just cause with an ease that is potentially worrisome.”

Remember when phrases like "U.S. government violates international law" used to be so important around here? I believe it was 2003-2008. Now, it doesn't even warrant being included in the quoted portions by the very same people who used to worry so much about it ... the very same who are now calling people "partisan hacks" for worrying about innocent lives the U.S. is killing in countries where it hasn't declared war. Once upon a time, even killing the Taliban had to be balanced by how that would make us look, or out of respect for the religious ceremony they were attending. But now the other side can't even complain about civilians getting killed at religious ceremonies without the person raising the concern being labeled with a pejorative.

[wayfriend]

wayfriend, would you not have a problem with Nation X if they droned somebody in the US, and took out your loved ones in the process? Don't you think that would cause you, and a lot of other Americans, to have some seriously bad feelings against X? I don't see how it wouldn't.

I don't see how it wouldn't, either. But that's not the argument I was substantiating earlier.

If we know who they are, and can pinpoint their location sufficiently to kill them with drones, maybe we can stop them in ways that don't kill innocents.

I hope that we stop the drone strikes as well. Don't believe all the character assassinations you read.

[SerScot]

Wayfriend,

What if someone inside the Obama Administration were giving a wink to the other nation while the US was publicly condemning the drone strikes. Would the strikes be okay then?

[wayfriend]

SerScot, I am not expecting anyone in Pakistan to like it, no more than I would like it. But if someone in the US was giving a nation permission to use drones in our country [against people who are attacking them and hiding within our borders, mind], while I would not like it, I could not accuse the other nation of violating our sovereignty. And while I would decry the civilian casualties, I could not accuse this other nation of "not caring" about them if there were no safer alternatives.

You seem to be trying to conflate "liking" with "justifying" here.

Also, the situation you want to construct could never be a parallel one because the US has no areas where military groups operate outside of the law and beyond our means to govern. Nor does any nation have any reason to believe that the US would not go after terrorists within our borders in good faith, nor that would we go after them in ways that were more deplorable than drone strikes.

[SerScot]

Wayfriend,

But does an individual, who happens to work for government, have the power to surrender US sovreignty on their own impitus? In other words, if an under-under-under secretary for the interior tells Mexico it's cool to drone strike US gun shops near the Mexican border, or gives permission to the UK to drone strike pubs raising money for the IRA would such permission be enough to say the US as a sovreign entity has agreed to allow drone strikes?

[Rawedge Rim]

Wayfriend,

But does an individual, who happens to work for government, have the power to surrender US sovreignty on their own impitus? In other words, if an under-under-under secretary for the interior tells Mexico it's cool to drone strike US gun shops near the Mexican border, or gives permission to the UK to drone strike pubs raising money for the IRA would such permission be enough to say the US as a sovreign entity has agreed to allow drone strikes?

Are we, the United States of America, a country, that in this time in history, not 20 or 30, or 40 years ago, but today, able and willing to go after people designated as terrorists residing in our own borders?

OTOH, how's Pakinstan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc. on that same question?

[SerScot]

RR,

So, we were shutting down pubs raising money for the IRA?

[Cail]

Wayfriend,

But does an individual, who happens to work for government, have the power to surrender US sovreignty on their own impitus? In other words, if an under-under-under secretary for the interior tells Mexico it's cool to drone strike US gun shops near the Mexican border, or gives permission to the UK to drone strike pubs raising money for the IRA would such permission be enough to say the US as a sovreign entity has agreed to allow drone strikes?

Are we, the United States of America, a country, that in this time in history, not 20 or 30, or 40 years ago, but today, able and willing to go after people designated as terrorists residing in our own borders?

OTOH, how's Pakinstan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc. on that same question?

I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. The Stasi, the Tonton Macoute, and the KGB were willing and able to do all sorts of nasty shit. Pretty sure the US doesn't have the market cornered on that.

[Rawedge Rim]

RR,

So, we were shutting down pubs raising money for the IRA?

in what year?

[wayfriend]

But does an individual, who happens to work for government, have the power to surrender US sovreignty on their own impitus?

Not in those terms. If you give a foreign national permission to operate within your borders, this is NOT surrendering sovereignty. In fact, it's paramount that this is not the case. Pakistan didn't cede rule of it's territory to the US if they allow drones in.

Politically, I cannot imagine that the US would ever allow someone else to conduct combat or law enforcement excercises within our borders on their own. We would insist on being the primary actor in such cases, but then operate in good faith on behalf of someone elses concern, should such a thing ever come to that.

I have no idea if it's possible in thoery to permit it, though. If you recognize that you aren't "surrendering sovereignty", I cannot see anything against it happening. It would seem to fall under the purview of the state department. If they can authoritatively grant a diplomat immunity, then they can do this I would think.