On August 5th, officials at the Central Intelligence Agency, in Langley,
Virginia, watched a live video feed relaying closeup footage of one of the
most wanted terrorists in Pakistan. Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban
in Pakistan, could be seen reclining on the rooftop of his father-in-law's
house, in Zanghara, a hamlet in South Waziristan.
It was a hot summer night, and he was joined outside by his wife and his
uncle, a medic; at one point, the remarkably crisp images showed that Mehsud,
who suffered from diabetes and a kidney ailment, was receiving an intravenous
drip.
The video was being captured by the infrared camera of a Predator drone,
a remotely controlled, unmanned plane that had been hovering, undetected,
two miles or so above the house. Pakistan's Interior Minister, A. Rehman
Malik, told me recently that Mehsud was resting on his back. Malik, using
his hands to make a picture frame, explained that the Predator's targeters
could see Mehsud's entire body, not just the top of his head. "It was a perfect
picture," Malik, who watched the videotape later, said. "We used to see James
Bond movies where he talked into his shoe or his watch. We thought it was
a fairy tale. But this was fact!" The image remained just as stable when
the C.I.A. remotely launched two Hellfire missiles from the Predator. Authorities
watched the fiery blast in real time. After the dust cloud dissipated, all
that remained of Mehsud was a detached torso. Eleven others died: his wife,
his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, a lieutenant, and seven bodyguards.
Pakistan's government considered Mehsud its top enemy, holding him responsible
for the vast majority of recent terrorist attacks inside me country, including
the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, in December, 2007,
and the bombing, last September, of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which
killed more man fifty people. Mehsud was also thought to have helped his
Afghan confederates attack American and coalition troops across the border.
Roger Cressey, a former counterterrorism official on the National Security
Council who is now a partner at Good Harbor, a consulting firm, told me,
"Mehsud was someone both we and Pakistan were happy to see go up in smoke."
Indeed, there was no controversy when, a few days after the missile strike,
CNN reported that President Barack Obama had authorized it.
However, at about the same time, there was widespread anger after the Wall
Street Journal revealed that during the Bush Administration the C.I.A.
had considered setting up hit squads to capture or kill Al Qaeda operatives
around the world.
The furor grew when the Times reported that the C.I.A. had turned
to a private contractor to help with this highly sensitive operation: the
controversial firm Blackwater, now known as Xe Services. Members of the Senate
and House intelligence committees demanded investigations of the program,
which, they said, had been hidden from them. And many legal experts argued
that, had the program become fully operational, it would have violated a
1976 executive order, signed by President Gerald R Ford, banning American
intelligence forces from engaging in assassination.
Hina Shamsi, a human-rights lawyer at the New York University School of Law,
was struck by the inconsistency of the public's responses. "We got so upset
about a targeted-killing program that didn't happen," she told me. "But the
drone program exists." She said of the Predator program, "These are targeted
international killings by the state." The program, as it happens, also uses
private contractors for a variety of tasks, including flying the drones.
Employees of Xe Services maintain and load the Hellfire missiles on the aircraft.
Vicki Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer, who now teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy,
in Annapolis, observed, "People are a lot more comfortable with a Predator
strike that kills many people than with a throat-slitting that kills one."
But, she added, "mechanized killing is still killing."
The U.S. government runs two drone programs. The military's version, which
is publicly acknowledged, operates in the recognized war zones of Afghanistan
and Iraq, and targets enemies of US. troops stationed there. As such, it
is an extension of conventional warfare. The C.I.A.'s program is aimed at
terror suspects around the world, including in countries where U.S. troops
are not based. It was initiated by the Bush Administration and, according
to Juan Zarate, a counterterrorism adviser in the Bush White House, Obama
has left in place virtually all the key personnel. The program is classified
as covert, and the intelligence agency declines to provide any information
to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in
charge, or how many people have been killed.
Nevertheless, reports of fatal air strikes in Pakistan emerge every few days.
Such stories are often secondhand and difficult to confirm, as the Pakistani
government and the military have tried to wall off the tribal areas from
journalists. But, even if a precise account is elusive, the outlines are
clear: the C.I.A. has joined the Pakistani intelligence service in an aggressive
campaign to eradicate local and foreign militants, who have taken refuge
in some of the most inaccessible parts of the country.
The first two C.I.A. air strikes of the Obama Administration took place on
the morning of January 23rd -- the President's third day in office. Within
hours, it was clear that the morning's bombings, in Pakistan, had killed
an estimated twenty people. In one strike, four Arabs, all likely affiliated
with Al Qaeda, died. But in the second strike a drone targeted the wrong
house, hitting the residence of a pro-government tribal leader six miles
outside the town of Wana, in South Waziristan. The blast killed the tribal
leader's entire family, including three children, one of them five years
old. In keeping with US. policy, there was no official acknowledgment of
either strike.
Since then, the C.I.A. bombardments have continued at a rapid pace. According
to a just completed study by the New America Foundation, the number of drone
strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President. During his first
nine and a half months in office, he has authorized as many C.I.A. aerial
attacks in Pakistan as George W. Bush did in his final three years in office.
The study's authors, Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, report that the
Obama Administration has sanctioned at least forty'-one C.I.A. missile strikes
in Pakistan since taking office -- a rate of approximately one bombing a
week. So far this year, various estimates suggest, the C.I.A. attacks have
killed between three hundred and twenty-six and five hundred and thirty-eight
people. Critics say that many of the victims have been innocent bystanders,
including children.
In the last week of September alone, there were reportedly four such attacks
-- three of them in one twenty-four-hour period. At any given moment, a former
White House counterterrorism official says, the C.I.A. has multiple drones
flying over Pakistan, scouting for targets. According to the official, "there
are so many drones" in the air that arguments have erupted over which remote
operators can claim which targets, provoking "command-and-control issues."
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the defense contractor that manufactures
the Predator and its more heavily armed sibling, the Reaper, can barely keep
up with the government's demand. The Air Force's fleet has grown from some
fifty drones in 2001 to nearly two hundred; the C.I.A. will not divulge how
many drones it operates. The government plans to commission hundreds more,
including new generations of tiny "nano" drones, which can fly after their
prey like a killer bee through an open window.
With public disenchantment mounting over the U.S. troop deployment in
Afghanistan, and the Obama Administration divided over whether to escalate
the American military presence there, many in Washington support an even
greater reliance on Predator strikes. In this view, the U.S., rather than
trying to stabilize Afghanistan by waging a counter-insurgency operation
against Taliban forces, should focus purely on counterterrorism, and use
the latest technology to surgically eliminate Al Qaeda leaders and their
allies. In September, the conservative pundit George Will published an
influential column in the Washington Post, "Time to Get Out of
Afghanistan," arguing that "America should do only what can be done from
offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, air strikes and small,
potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border
with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters." Vice-President Joseph Biden
reportedly holds a similar view.
It's easy to understand the appeal of a "push-button" approach to fighting
Al Qaeda, but the embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably
little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and
geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force. And, because
of the C.I.A. program's secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability
in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside
a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at
war.
Should something go wrong in the C.I.A.'s program -- last month, the Air
Force lost control of a drone and had to shoot it down over Afghanistan --
it's unclear what the consequences would be. The Predators in the C.I.A.
program are "flown" by civilians, both intelligence officers and private
contractors. According to a former counterterrorism official, the contractors
are "seasoned professionals -- often retired military and intelligence
officials." (The intelligence agency outsources a significant portion of
its work.) Within the C.I.A., control of the unmanned vehicles is split among
several teams. One set of pilots and operators works abroad, near hidden
airfields in Afghanistan and Pakistan, handling takeoffs and landings. Once
the drones are aloft, the former counterterrorism official said, the controls
are electronically "slewed over" to a set of "reachback operators," in Langley.
Using joysticks that resemble video-game controllers, the reachback operators
-- who don't need conventional flight training -- sit next to intelligence
officers and watch, on large flat-screen monitors, a live video feed from
the drone's camera.
From their suburban redoubt, they can turn the plane, zoom in on the landscape
below, and decide whether to lock onto a target. A stream of additional "signal"
intelligence, sent to Langley by the National Security Administration [sic,
Agency], provides electronic means of corroborating that a target has been
correctly identified. The White House has delegated trigger authority to
C.I.A. officials, including the head of the Counter-Terrorist Center, whose
identity remains veiled from the public because the agency has placed him
under cover.
People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both
awe-inspiring and horrifying. "You could see these little figures scurrying,
and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble
and charred stuff," a former C.LA. officer who was based in Afghanistan after
September 11th says of one attack. (He watched the carnage on a small monitor
in the field.) Human beings running for cover are such a common sight that
they have inspired a slang term: "squirters." Peter W. Singer, the author
of "Wired for War," a recent book about the robotics revolution in modern
combat, argues that the drone technology is worryingly "seductive," because
it creates the perception that war can be "costless." Cut off from the realities
of the bombings in Pakistan, Americans have been insulated from the human
toll, as well as from the political and the moral consequences.
Nearly all the victims have remained faceless, and the damage caused by the
bombings has remained unseen. In contrast to Gaza, where the targeted killing
of Hamas fighters by the Israeli military has been extensively documented
-- making clear that the collateral damage, and the loss of civilian life,
can be severe -- Pakistan's tribal areas have become largely forbidden territory
for media organizations. As a result, no videos of a drone attack in progress
have been released, and only a few photographs of the immediate aftermath
of a Predator strike have been published.
The seeming unreality of the Predator enterprise is also felt by the pilots.
Some of them reportedly wear flight suits when they operate a drone's remote
controls. When their shifts end, of course, these cubicle warriors can drive
home to have dinner with their families. Critics have suggested that unmanned
systems, by sparing these combatants from danger and sacrifice, are creating
what Sir Brian Burridge, a former British Air Chief Marshal in Iraq, has
called "a virtueless war," requiring neither courage nor heroism. According
to Singer, some Predator pilots suffer from combat stress that equals, or
exceeds, that of pilots in the battlefield. This suggests that virtual killing,
for all its sterile trappings, is a discomfiting form of warfare. Meanwhile,
some social critics, such as Mary Dudziak, a professor at the University
of Southern California's Gould School of Law, argue that the Predator strategy
has a larger political cost. As she puts it, "Drones are a technological
step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining
political checks on . . . endless war."
The advent of the Predator targeted killing program "is really a sea change,"
says Gary Solis, who teaches at Georgetown University's Law Center and recently
retired from running the law program at the U.S. Military Academy. "Not only
would we have expressed abhorrence of such a policy a few years ago; we did."
In July, 2001, two months before Al Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington
profoundly altered America's mindset, the U.S. denounced Israel's use of
targeted killing against Palestinian terrorists. The American Ambassador
to Israel, Martin Indyk, said at the time, "The United States government
is very clearly on record as against targeted assassinations. . . .
They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that."
Before September 11th, the C.I.A., which had been chastened by past assassination
scandals, refused to deploy the Predator for anything other than surveillance.
Daniel Benjamin, the State Department's counterterrorism director, and Steven
Simon, a former counterterrorism adviser, report in their 2002 book "The
Age of Sacred Terror" that the week before Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. George
Tenet, then the agency's director, argued that it would be "a terrible mistake"
for "the Director of Central Intelligence to fire a weapon like this."
Yet once America had suffered terrorist attacks on its own soil the agency's
posture changed, and it petitioned the White House for new authority. Within
days, President Bush had signed a secret Memorandum of Notification, giving
the C.I.A. the right to kill members of Al Qaeda and their confederates virtually
anywhere in the world. Congress endorsed this policy, passing a bill called
the Authorization for Use of Military Force. Bush's legal advisers modelled
their rationale on Israel's position against terrorism, arguing that the
U.S. government had the right to use lethal force against suspected terrorists
in "anticipatory" self-defense. By classifying terrorism as an act of war,
rather than as a crime, the Bush Administration reasoned that it was no longer
bound by legal constraints requiring the government to give suspected terrorists
due process.
In November, 2002, top Bush Administration officials publicly announced a
successful Predator strike against an Al Qaeda target, Qaed Salim Sinan
al-Harethi, a suspect in the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Harethi was
killed after a Hellfire missile vaporized the car in which he and five other
passengers were riding, on a desert road in Yemen.
Paul Wolfowitz, then the Deputy Defense Secretary, praised the new tactic,
telling CNN, "One hopes each time that you get a success like that, not only
to have gotten rid of somebody dangerous but to have imposed changes in their
tactics, operations, and procedures." At first, some intelligence experts
were uneasy about drone attacks. In 2002, Jeffrey Smith, a former C.I.A.
general counsel, told Seymour M. Hersh, for an article in this magazine,
"If they're dead, they're not talking to you, and you create more martyrs."
And, in an interview with the Washington Post, Smith said that ongoing
drone attacks could "suggest that it's acceptable behavior to assassinate
people. . . . Assassination as a norm of international conduct exposes
American leaders and Americans overseas." Seven years later, there is no
longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official U.S. policy. "The
things we were complaining about from Israel a few years ago we now embrace,"
Solis says. Now, he notes, nobody in the government calls it assassination.
The Predator program is described by many in the intelligence world as America's
single most effective weapon against Al Qaeda. In May, Leon Panetta, the
C.LA.'s director, referred to the Predator program as "the only game in town"
in an unguarded moment after a public lecture. Counterterrorism officials
credit drones with having killed more than a dozen senior Al Qaeda leaders
and their allies in the past year, eliminating more than half of the C.I.A.'s
twenty most wanted "high value" targets. In addition to Baitullah Mehsud,
the list includes Nazimuddin Zalalov, a former lieutenant of Osama bin Laden;
Ilyas Kashmiri, Al Qaeda's chief of paramilitary operations in Pakistan;
Saad bin Laden, Osama's eldest son; Abu Sulayman al-Jazairi, an Algerian
Al Qaeda planner who is believed to have helped train operatives for attacks
in Europe and the United States; and Osama al-Kini and Sheikh Ahmed Salim
Swedan, Al Qaeda operatives who are thought to have played central roles
in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in East Africa.
Juan Zarate, the Bush counterterrorism adviser, believes that "Al Qaeda is
on its heels" partly because "so many bigwigs" have been killed by drones.
Though he acknowledges that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group's
top leaders, remain at large, he estimates that no more than fifty members
of Al Qaeda's senior leadership still exist, along with two to three hundred
senior members outside the terror organization's "inner core." Zarate and
other supporters of the Predator program argue that it has had positive ripple
effects. Surviving militants are forced to operate far more cautiously, which
diverts their energy from planning new attacks. And there is evidence that
the drone strikes, which depend on local informants for targeting information,
have caused debilitating suspicion and discord within the ranks. Four Europeans
who were captured last December after trying to join Al Qaeda in Pakistan
described a life of constant fear and distrust among the militants, whose
obsession with drone strikes had led them to communicate only with elaborate
secrecy and to leave their squalid hideouts only at night. As the
Times has reported, militants have been so unnerved by the drone program
that they have released a video showing the execution of accused informants.
Pakistanis have also been gripped by rumors that paid C.I.A. informants have
been planting tiny silicon-chip homing devices for the drones in the tribal
areas.
The drone program, for all its tactical successes, has stirred deep ethical
concerns. Michael Walzer, a political philosopher and the author of the book
"Just and Unjust Wars," says that he is unsettled by the notion of an
intelligence agency wielding such lethal power in secret. "Under what code
does the C.I.A. operate?" he asks. "I don't know. The military operates under
a legal code, and it has judicial mechanisms." He said of the C.I.A.'s drone
program, "There should be a limited, finite group of people who are targets,
and that list should be publicly defensible and available. Instead, it's
not being publicly defended. People are being killed, and we generally require
some public justification when we go about killing people."
Since 2004, Philip Alston, an Australian human-rights lawyer who has served
as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary
Executions, has repeatedly tried, but failed, to get a response to basic
questions about the C.I.A.'s program-first from the Bush Administration,
and now from Obama's. When he asked, in formal correspondence, for the C.I.A's
legal justifications for targeted killings, he says, "they blew me off" (A
C.I.A spokesperson told me that the agency "uses lawful, highly accurate,
and effective tools and tactics to take the fight to Al Qaeda and its violent
allies. That careful, precise approach has brought major success against
a very dangerous and deadly enemy.") Alston then presented a critical report
on the drone program to the U.N. Human Rights Council, but, he says, the
U.S. representatives ignored his concerns.
Alston describes the C.I.A. program as operating in "an accountability void,"
adding, "It's a lot like the torture issue. You start by saying , we'll just
go after the handful of 9/11 masterminds. But, once you've put the regimen
for waterboarding and other techniques in place, you use it much more
indiscriminately. It becomes standard operating procedure. It becomes all
too easy. Planners start saying, 'Let's use drones in a broader context.'
Once you use targeting less stringently, it can become indiscriminate."
Under international law, in order for the U.S. government to legally target
civilian terror suspects abroad it has to define a terrorist group as one
engaging in armed conflict, and the use of force must be a "military necessity."
There must be no reasonable alternative to killing, such as capture, and
to warrant death the target must be "directly participating in hostilities."
The use of force has to be considered "proportionate" to the threat. Finally,
the foreign nation in which such targeted killing takes place has to give
its permission.
Many lawyers who have looked at America's drone program in Pakistan believe
that it meets these basic legal tests. But they are nevertheless troubled,
as the U.S. government keeps broadening the definition of acceptable high-value
targets. Last March, the Obama Administration made an unannounced decision
to win support for the drone program inside Pakistan by giving President
Asif Ali Zardari more control over whom to target. "A lot of the targets
are nominated by the Pakistanis -- it's part of the bargain of getting Pakistani
cooperation," says Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer who has served as
an adviser to the Obama Administration on Afghanistan and Pakistan. According
to the New America Foundation's study, only six of the forty-one C.I.A. drone
strikes conducted by the Obama Administration in Pakistan have targeted Al
Qaeda members. Eighteen were directed at Taliban targets in Pakistan, and
fifteen were aimed specifically at Baitullah Mehsud. Talat Masood, a retired
Pakistani lieutenant general and an authority on security issues, says that
the U.S.'s tactical shift, along with the elimination of Mehsud, has quieted
some of the Pakistani criticism of the American air strikes, although the
bombings are still seen as undercutting the country's sovereignty. But, given
that many of the targeted Pakistani Taliban figures were obscure in U.S.
counterterrorism circles, some critics have wondered whether they were legitimate
targets for a Predator strike. "These strikes are killing a lot of low-level
militants, which raises the question of whether they are going beyond the
authorization to kill leaders," Peter Bergen told me. Roger Cressey, the
former National Security Council official, who remains a strong supporter
of the drone program, says, "The debate is that we've been doing this so
long we're now bombing low-level guys who don't deserve a Hellfire missile
up their ass." (In his view, "Not every target has to be a rock star.")
The Obama Administration has also widened the scope of authorized drone attacks
in Afghanistan. An August report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
disclosed that the Joint Integrated Prioritized Target List -- the Pentagon's
roster of approved terrorist targets, containing three hundred and sixty-seven
names -- was recently expanded to include some fifty AFghan drug lords who
are suspected of giving money to help finance the Taliban. These new targets
are a step removed from Al Qaeda. According to the Senate report, "There
is no evidence that any significant amount of the drug proceeds goes to Al
Qaeda." The inclusion of Afghan narcotics traffickers on the U.S. target
list could prove awkward, some observers say, given that President Hamid
Karzai's running mate, Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim, and the President's
brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, are strongly suspected of involvement in narcotics.
Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston
University, who has written extensively on military matters, said, "Are they
going to target Karzai's brother?" He went on, 'We should be very careful
about who we define as the enemy we have to kill. Leaders of Al Qaeda, of
course. But you can't kill people on Tuesday and negotiate with them on
Wednesday."
Defining who is and who is not too tangential for the U.S. to kill can be
difficult. John Radsan, a former lawyer in the C.I.A's office of general
counsel, who is now a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, in St.
Paul, Minnesota, says, "You can't target someone just because he visited
an Al Qaeda Web site. But you also don't want to wait until they're about
to detonate a bomb. It's a sliding scale." Equally fraught is the question
of how many civilian deaths can be justified. "If it's Osama bin Laden in
a house with a four-year-old, most people will say go ahead," Radsan says.
"But if it's three or four children? Some say that's too many. And if he's
in a school? Many say don't do it." Such judgment calls are being made daily
by the C.I.A., which, Radsan points out, "doesn't have much experience with
killing. Traditionally, the agency that does that is the Department of Defense."
Though the C.I.A:s methodology remains unknown, the Pentagon has created
elaborate formulas to help the military make such lethal calculations. A
top military expert, who declined to be named, spoke of the military's system,
saying, "There's a whole taxonomy of targets." Some people are approved for
killing on sight. For others, additional permission is needed. A target's
location enters the equation, too. If a school, hospital, or mosque is within
the likely blast radius of a missile, that, too, is weighed by a computer
algorithm before a lethal strike is authorized. According to the recent Senate
Foreign Relations Committee report, the U.S. military places no name on its
targeting list until there are "two verifiable human sources" and "substantial
additional evidence" that the person is an enemy.
In Israel, which conducts unmanned air strikes in the Palestinian territories,
the process of identifying targets, in theory at least, is even more exacting.
Military lawyers have to be convinced that the target can't reasonably be
captured, and that he poses a threat to national security. Military specialists
in Arab culture also have to be convinced that the hit will do more good
than harm. "You have to be incredibly cautious," Amos Guiora, a law professor
at the University of Utah, says. From 1994 to 1997, he advised Israeli commanders
on targeted killings in the Gaza Strip. "Not everyone is at the level appropriate
for targeted killing," he says. "You want a leader, the hub with many spokes."
Guiora, who follows the Predator program closely, fears that national security
officials here lack a clear policy and a firm definition of success. "Once
you start targeted killing, you better make damn sure there's a policy guiding
it," he says. "It can't be just catch-as-catch-can."
Daniel Byman, the director of Georgetown University's Center for Peace and
Security Studies, argues that, when possible, "it's almost always better
to arrest terrorists than to kill them. You get intelligence then. Dead men
tell no tales." The C.I.A.'s killing of.Saad bin Laden, Osama's son, provides
a case in point. By the time that Saad bin Laden had reached Pakistan's tribal
areas, late last year, there was little chance that any law-enforcement authority
could capture him alive. But, according to Hillary Mann Leverett, an adviser
to the National Security Council between 2001 and 2003, the Bush Administration
would have had several opportunities to interrogate Saad bin Laden earlier,
if it had been willing to make a deal with Iran, where, according to U.S.
intelligence, he lived occasionally after September 11th. "The Iranians offered
to work out an international framework for transferring terror suspects,
but the Bush Administration refused," she said. In December, 2008, Saad bin
Laden left Iran for Pakistan; within months, according to NPR., a Predator
missile had ended his life. "We absolutely did not get the most we could,"
Leverett said. "Saad bin Laden would have been very, very valuable in terms
of what he knew. He probably would have been a gold mine."
Byman is working on a book about Israel's experiences with counterterrorism,
including targeted killing. Though the strikes there have weakened the
Palestinian leadership, he said, "if you use these tools wrong, you can lose
the moral high ground, which is going to hurt you. Inevitably, some of the
intelligence is going to be wrong, so you're always rolling the dice. That's
the reality of realtime intelligence."
Indeed, the history of targeted killing is marked by errors. In 1973, for
example, Israeli intelligence agents murdered a Moroccan waiter by mistake.
They thought that he was a terrorist who had been involved in slaughtering
Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, a year earlier. And in 1986 the
Reagan Administration attempted to retaliate against the Libyan leader Muammar
Qaddafi for his suspected role in the deadly bombing of a disco frequented
by American servicemen in Germany. The U.S. launched an air strike on Qaddafi's
household. The bombs missed him, but they did kill his fifteen-month-old
daughter.
The C.I.A.'s early attempts at targeting Osama bin Laden were also problematic.
After Al Qaeda blew up the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, in August,
1998, President Bill Clinton retaliated, by launching seventy-five Tomahawk
cruise missiles at a site in Afghanistan where bin Laden was expected to
attend a summit meeting. According to reports, the bombardment killed some
twenty Pakistani militants but missed bin Laden, who had left the scene hours
earlier.
The development of the Predator, in the early nineteen-nineties, was supposed
to help eliminate such mistakes. The drones can hover above a target for
up to forty hours before refuelling, and the precise video footage makes
it much easier to identify targets. But the strikes are only as accurate
as the intelligence that goes into them. Tips from informants on the ground
are subject to error, as is the interpretation of video images. Not long
before September 11, 2001, for instance, several U.S. counterterrorism officials
became certain that a drone had captured footage of bin Laden in a locale
he was known to frequent in Afghanistan. The video showed a tall man in robes,
surrounded by armed bodyguards in a diamond formation. At that point, drones
were unarmed, and were used only for surveillance. "The optics were not great,
but it was him," Henry Crumpton, then the C.I.A's top covert-operations officer
for the region, told Time. But two other former C.I.A officers, who
also saw the footage, have doubts. "It's like an urban legend," one of them
told me. "They just jumped to conclusions. You couldn't see his face. It
could have been Joe Schmo. Believe me, no tall man with a beard is safe anywhere
in Southwest Asia." In February, 2002, along the mountainous eastern border
of Afghanistan, a Predator reportedly followed and killed three suspicious
Afghans, including a tall man in robes who was thought to be bin Laden.
The victims turned out to be innocent villagers, gathering scrap metal. In
Afghanistan and Pakistan, the local informants, who also serve as confirming
witnesses for the air strikes, are notoriously unreliable. A former C.I.A.
officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th told me that an
Afghan source had once sworn to him that one of Al Qaeda's top leaders was
being treated in a nearby clinic. The former officer said that he could barely
hold off an air strike after he passed on the tip to his superiors.
"They scrambled together an elite team," he recalled "We caught hell from
headquarters. They said 'Why aren't you moving on it?' when we insisted on
checking it out first." It turned out to be an intentionally false lead.
"Sometimes you're dealing with tribal chiefs," the former officer said. "Often,
they say an enemy of theirs is Al Qaeda because they just want to get rid
of somebody. Or they made crap up because they wanted to prove they were
valuable, so that they could make money. You couldn't take their word." The
consequences of bad ground intelligence can be tragic. In September, a NATO
air strike in Afghanistan killed between seventy and a hundred and twenty-five
people, many of them civilians, who were taking fuel from two stranded oil
trucks; they had been mistaken for Taliban insurgents. (The incident is being
investigated by NATO.) According to a reporter for the Guardian, the
bomb strike, by an F -15E fighter plane, left such a tangle of body parts
that village elders resorted to handing out pieces of unidentifiable corpses
to the grieving families, so that they could have something to bury. One
Afghan villager told the newspaper, "1 took a piece of flesh with me home
and I called it my son."
Predator drones, with their superior surveillance abilities, have a better
track record for accuracy than fighter jets, according to intelligence officials.
Also, the drone's smaller Hellfire missiles are said to cause far less collateral
damage. Still, the recent campaign to kill Baitullah Mehsud offers a sobering
case study of the hazards of robotic warfare. It appears to have taken sixteen
missile strikes, and fourteen months, before the C.I.A. succeeded in killing
him. During this hunt, between two hundred and seven and three hundred and
twenty-one additional people were killed, depending on which news accounts
you rely upon. It's all but impossible to get a complete picture of whom
the C.I.A. killed during this campaign, which took place largely in Waziristan.
Not only has the Pakistani government closed off the region to the outside
press; it has also shut out international humanitarian organizations like
the International Committee for the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.
"We can't get within a hundred kilometres of Waziristan," Brice de la Vingne,
the operational coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Pakistan, told
me. "We tried to set up an emergency room, but the authorities wouldn't give
us authorization."
A few Pakistani and international news stories, most of which rely on secondhand
sources rather than on eyewitness accounts, offer the basic details. On June
14, 2008, a C.I.A. drone strike on Mehsud's home town, Makeen, killed an
unidentified person. On January 2,2009, four more unidentified people were
killed. On February 14th, more than thirty people were killed, twenty-five
of whom were apparently members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, though none
were identified as major leaders. On April 1st, a drone attack on Mehsud's
deputy, Hakimullah Mehsud, killed ten to twelve of his followers instead.
On April 29th, missiles fired from drones killed between six and ten more
people, one of whom was believed to be an Al Qaeda leader. On May 9th, five
to ten more unidentified people were killed; on May 12th, as many as eight
people died. On June 14th, three to eight more people were killed by drone
attacks. On June 23rd, the C.I.A. reportedly killed between two and six
unidentified militants outside Makeen, and then killed dozens more people
-- possibly as many as eighty-six -- during funeral prayers for the earlier
casualties. An account in the Pakistani publication The News described
ten of the dead as children. Four were identified as elderly tribal leaders.
One eyewitness, who lost his right leg during the bombing, told Agence
France-Presse that the mourners suspected what was coming: "After the prayers
ended, people were asking each other to leave the area, as drones were hovering."
The drones, which make a buzzing noise, are nicknamed machay (wasps) by the Pashtun natives, and can sometimes be seen and heard, depending on
weather conditions. Before the mourners could clear out, the eyewitness said,
two drones started firing into the crowd. "It created havoc," he said. "There
was smoke and dust everywhere. Injured people were crying and asking for
help." Then a third missile hit. "I fell to the ground," he said.
The local population was clearly angered by the Pakistani government for
allowing the U.S. to target a funeral. (Intelligence had suggested that Mehsud
would be among the mourners.) An editorial in The News denounced the
strike as sinking to the level of the terrorists. The Urdu newspaper
Jang declared that Obama was "shutting his ears to the screams of
thousands of women whom your drones have turned into dust." U.S. officials
were undeterred, continuing drone strikes in the region until Mehsud was
killed.
After such attacks, the Taliban, attempting to stir up anti-American sentiment
in the region, routinely claims, falsely, that the victims are all innocent
civilians. In several Pakistani cities, large protests have been held to
decry the drone program. And, in the past year, perpetrators of terrorist
bombings in Pakistan have begun presenting their acts as "revenge for the
drone attacks." In recent weeks, a rash of bloody assaults on Pakistani
government strongholds has raised the spectre that formerly unaligned militant
groups have joined together against the Zardari Administration.
David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency warfare expert who has advised General
David Petraeus in Iraq, has said that the propaganda costs of drone attacks
have been disastrously high. Militants have used the drone strikes to denounce
the Zardari government -- a shaky and unpopular regime -- as little more
than an American puppet. A study that Kilcullen co-wrote for the Center for
New American Security, a think tank, argues, "Every one of these dead
non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more
recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone
strikes have increased." His co-writer, Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger
who has advised General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan, told me, "Neither
Kilcullen nor I is a fundamentalist -- we're not saying drones are not part
of the strategy. But we are saying that right now they are part of the problem.
If we use tactics that are killing people's brothers and sons, not to mention
their sisters and wives, we can work at cross-purposes with insuring that
the tribal population doesn't side with the militants. Using the Predator
is a tactic, not a strategy."
Exum says that he's worried by the remote-control nature of Predator warfare.
"As a military person, I put myself in the shoes of someone in FATA" --
Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas -- "and there's something
about pilotless drones that doesn't strike me as an honorable way of warfare,"
he said. "As a classics major, I have a classical sense of what it means
to be a warrior." An Iraq combat veteran who helped design much of the military's
doctrine for using unarmed drones also has qualms. He said, "There's something
important about putting your own sons and daughters at risk when you choose
to wage war as a nation. We risk losing that flesh-and-blood investment if
we go too far down this road."
Bruce Riedel, who has been deeply involved in these debates during the past
few years, sees the choices facing Obama as exceedingly hard. "Is the drone
program helping or hurting?" he asked. "It's a tough question. These are
not cost-free operations." He likened the drone attacks to "going after a
beehive, one bee at a time." The problem is that, inevitably, "the hive will
always produce more bees." But, he said, "the only pressure currently being
put on Pakistan and Afghanistan is the drones." He added, "It's really all
we've got to disrupt Al Qaeda. The reason the Administration continues to
use it is obvious: it doesn't really have anything else.".
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