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Droning On

Droning On
No need to be naive: we all know that in quasi-military operations against drug lords, their not-necessarily-so-innocent significant others and their completely innocent children are bound to get killed sometimes. The same goes for operations against terrorists operating, say, out of Pakistan’s Northwest Territories: However precise the weaponry, it’s hard to kill a significant leader without taking out family and friends, some of whom really will be just innocent bystanders.

Sensitivity to that point no doubt accounts for the Obama administration’s claim that no innocent civilians have been killed in drone attacks in the last year, which has been greeted with general incredulity.

But there’s another point–one that’s been generally lost sight of in the debate about the precision, effectiveness, morality and legality of drone attacks. In a law-enforcement operation, it’s expected that some effort will be made to apprehend suspects, so that they can be tried in courts of law and their guilt or innocence determined. That’s the main reason it’s considered unacceptable to just kill suspects willy nilly, along with their family and friends.

Of course the campaign against terrorists has been framed since 9/ll as a Global War on Terror, which might be taken as an adequate rationale for just killing individuals on suspicion. But in practice, some semblance of due process has been observed. Militants taken into captivity have been taken to Guantanomo, attempts at legal prosecution have followed, etc. Implicitly, it’s recognized that the struggle against Islamic terrorism has an important element of international law enforcement–like, say, an operation against piracy.

So, even apart from the issues of precision and effectiveness that have been aired in recent articles by Dennis C. Blair and by Peter Berger and Katherine Tiedemann, drone warfare is a dubious proposition.

Can it be made less dubious?

In closely parallel trains of thought, former national intelligence director Blair and Berger & Tiedemann of the New America Foundation have proposed making the drone program more transparent (perhaps by even releasing videos of attacks), by transferring Pakistan drone operations from the CIA to the military (so that they will be more accountable), and by explicitly involving Pakistan’s political and military leadership in their execution (to mollify hostile public opinion and critics, who naturally have magnified estimated civilian casualties).

The trouble with the third point in particular is that Pakistan’s leadership has wanted to avoid taking open responsibility for drone warfare precisely because, as many polls have shown,  most Pakistanis despise Americans and admire Al Qaeda. Making drone warfare more open and accountable* is not going to change that, as one writer pointed out trenchantly in the letter to the New York Times responding to a Blair op-ed. (“Dennis C. Blair’s analysis of the efficacy of drone strikes in Pakistan is correct . . . but his solution is, as the caterpillar said to Alice, ‘wrong from beginning to end.’ ”) This is why Pakistani military leaders have on occasion called for terminating the drone program altogether, as my fellow blogger Robert Grace has noted, even as others have more or less openly conceded its existence, as Berger & Tiedemann note. (Grace’s careful discussion of the legalities of targeted assassination deserves a close read.)

Contrary to the well-intentioned and avowedly constructive critics of the drone program, there’s no squaring the circle. In terms of political realities on the ground, any drone warfare in Pakistan, whether effective or ineffective, surgical or blunt, will complicate rather than help relations. In terms of grand strategy, the operation borders on being non-sensical: Pakistan bars drone attacks targeting Al Qaeda’s global leadership, which naturally is what the United States wants to target most, but encourages attacks against the country’s domestic Al Qaeda, involving the US unnecessarily in domestic political strife. As law enforcement, drone warfare involving the murder of individuals only suspected of crime cannot  be justified.

So if, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has famously said, drone warfare is the “only game in town,” then the answer is to get out of the game as fast as possible. As by now everybody knows, the Obama administration has enormously escalated drone warfare. But now that the back of Al Qaeda has been broken, it also can be radically de-escalated in the name of bigger principles.

In terms of establishing the conditions for a world without weapons of mass destruction, it would be highly desirable to end drone warfare and to treat it as a slightly regrettable and strictly exceptional episode. Compared to the precision weapons available today only to the world’s most advanced industrial nations, nuclear weapons are blunt instruments, weapons of brute force. To the extent less advanced nations are reminded on a daily basis of their countries’  technological and military inferiority, so much greater will be the temptation to even the balance by getting the next-best thing, an atomic bomb.

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* That greater legal accountability is itself a dubious proposition. Michael Ignatieff, in Virtual War, referred to the “extraordinary growth [seen during the Serbian and Kosovo operations] in the power and influence of military lawyers at every level of the targeting and deployment process”—”a veritable casuistry of war.” The advent of ultra-precision weaponry had led to the notion, Ignatieff went to say, that eventually war could be “clean and mistake free.” Though Ignatieff did not quite say so outright, this Matrix-like vision of war in which every target is vetted by batteries of military lawyers and every death is perfectly chosen and executed–that vision is itself so creepy, it almost makes one long for the days when we just hurled huge shells at each other, letting the body parts fly as they might.

 

 

 

Author

William Sweet

Bill Sweet has been writing about nuclear arms control and peace politics since interning at the IAEA in Vienna during summer 1974, right after India's test of a "peaceful nuclear device." As an editor and writer for Congressional Quarterly, Physics Today and IEEE Spectrum magazine he wrote about the freeze and European peace movements, space weaponry and Star Wars, Iraq, North Korea and Iran. His work has appeared in magazines like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and The New Republic, as well as in The New York Times, the LA Times, Newsday and the Baltimore Sun. The author of two books--The Nuclear Age: Energy, Proliferation and the Arms Race, and Kicking the Carbon Habit: The Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy--he recently published "Situating Putin," a group of essays about contemporary Russia, as an e-book. He teaches European history as an adjunct at CUNY's Borough of Manhattan Community College.