Charlottesville Blogs

Joshua Foust had a really thoughtful post at Registan today, in which he started to assess the "effectiveness" of the drone-implemented, extra-judicial killings that the U.S. military has undertaken against hundreds of claimed "militant leaders" in northwest Pakistan over the past six years.

His conclusion:

The end result of this incessant drone war against militant leadership is that the leadership itself is far more radical and far less willing to negotiate an end to their insurgency than they were in 2004. While the drones could be called a stunning success in going after al Qaeda, they’ve also been used for years to go after the Pakistani Taliban—and in both cases the men who replaced the dead commanders were more vicious and less amenable to overtures from governments to discuss an end to the violence.

While a (very) brief look at the leadership of these organizations cannot really say much about their success or failure in aggregate, it can highlight some of the second order consequences of a somewhat overly narrow focus on degrading leadership. Successful though it may be—and if [the figures presented here by researchers at the New America Foundation are] to be believed, then a large majority of drone targets are actual bad guys—the drone war still carries with it serious consequences. Even within the insurgency in Northwest Pakistan, we cannot conclusively say that drones have had a major effect on operations, considering how much worse the area has gotten as strike frequency increased (we cannot draw anything more than a correlation on this front). Al Qaeda’s expeditionary reach may have been curtailed, but it seems to have been at the cost of vast swaths of Pakistan… and even Afghanistan. Have we been shooting ourselves in the foot?
So Foust is identifying two significant negatives that, he says, either did follow, or may have followed, from the U.S. military's launching of the "drone war" in Pakistan:

1. "The leadership itself is far more radical and far less willing to negotiate an end to their insurgency than they were in 2004." Foust describes this as unequivocally an "end result" of the drone war.

2. The situation in Northwest Pakistan-- I'm assuming he's referring to the political situation, the socioeconomic situation and the general conditions in which the area's people live-- have gotten worse. Foust describes this only as an observable "correlation", without claiming to establish any actual responsibility of the drone war for having caused it.
But still. Given how much respect I have for Foust's grasp of the dynamics in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I think we have to take seriously his argument that the net geostrategic effect of the drone war has probably been that it has been counter-productive.

To understand the scale of this "extra-judicial killing" phenomenon, go look at the NAF tables, which tell us that from 2004 until now, the U.S. military has launched 117 killer-drone strikes in Pakistan, killing somewhere between 846 and 1,238 people in Northwest Pakistan, of whom between 561 and 866 were described as "militants".

Of the 117 killer-drone attacks, 21 have been launched in just the nine weeks of this year to date; and reportedly, a total of 55 since Pres. Obama's inauguration.

I am very glad Foust has brought his thoughtful, public-policy form of cost-benefit analysis to the question of drone-based killings. But there is another form of analysis that should be applied, too, that I think is even more important: that is, an analysis of the validity/justifiability of these kinds of operations under international law.

I shall leave aside for the moment the issue of Pakistan's national sovereignty. Not because I think it's unimportant, but because I believe, as Foust does, that the strikes are carried out with the Pakistani government's full knowledge and therefore, at some level with its acquiescence, or possibly cooperation.

Rather, I want to look at the whole ethics and legal situation of a policy whereby a network of U.S. military officers that spans several continents undertakes a process whereby a person is determined to be a "valid target for killing"; he is then located; and then, a series of steps are undertaken that send that inanimate killing machine, the drone, somewhere into his vicinity, and it targets and kills him.

Okay, first of all, this is not a precision, "one-bullet" type of killing. You can see from the NAF figures that if 117 strikes were reported, resulting in a minimum of 846 deaths, then each strike killed, on average, around seven people. Or perhaps, more than ten people.

Second, scroll down the NAF report through the incident-by-incident reporting for 2010. In 21 drone-killing strikes so far this year, between 112 and 186 people were reported killed. But the same local and global media reporting that arrived at those death tolls were able to name only ten actual identified "Al Qaeda/Taliban leaders" who were killed! Four of those named leaders were killed in one strike. In the majority of strikes, no named "leaders" were identified, at all. Thus, the drone killings seem not to be used only for killing known individuals identified (through some very opaque process) to be "leaders", but also, very frequently, for killing anyone participating in what may look from a distance like a "gathering" of "Al Qaeda/Taliban militants".

At the time of their being killed, are these alleged "militants" engaged in combat against the U.S. military? It would be hard to make such a claim, since the U.S. military has no publicly identified military units engaged in combat on Pakistani soil.

Therefore, it would seem to me that for the U.S. military to be going out at proactively hunting down and killing people, even allegedly "militant" people, who are located outside any zone of combat, is extra-judicial killing, not lawful combat.

The fact that the members of the U.S. military who "pull the trigger" on the drone are sitting in secure circumstances many hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the battlefield makes these killings feel even more dishonorable.

And then, let us look at the whole, presumed "information stream" on which the relevant commanders make their decisions to kill or not to kill. In a judicial killing (an execution), such as we have far too many of here in the U.S., the person to be killed is at least clearly identified by name, and the accusations against him or her have been extensively presented and tested in a court of law.

In the case of these killings carried out by our government in distant Pakistan, we have in most cases absolutely no idea what the "evidence" against any of the targets might be-- or even, in most cases, who they are. They are simply individuals judged by some body or grouping inside the U.S. military to be "suspicious", a "a threat", or "possible militant leaders", or whatever.

Where are the criteria? Where is the process that tests these accusations-- that makes certain that a gathering, say, of men with guns in some corner of Waziristan is not simply a group going to accompany a groom to his wedding?

Nobody knows.

That is what makes this whole process of distance-killing so eery, so unaccountable and Star Chamber-like.

And it comes as no surprise that it really upsets the people on the ground, in Northwest Pakistan, a lot.

The U.S. military clearly seemed to "learn" a lot in this realm from the Israelis, who have used extra-judicial killings against distant enemies a lot, over the course of many decades, but most especially since the 1990s, in Gaza. It was the Israelis, too, who pioneered the use of airborne drones to execute those killings.

The Israelis' use of extra-judicial killings (= assassinations) was never judged legal under international law, by anyone else. And nor should the U.S. military's increasingly frequent use of this tactic-- in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In addition, in Gaza, over the many years the Israelis used drone-based assassinations, they were never "effective" in terms of decapitating the leaderships of Hamas and its allied groups and leaving them in operational disarray. Instead, Israel's repeated use of the tactic led Hamas to adapt in numerous ways, including by placing heavy stress on constantly raising up and testing new generations of successor leaders, by dispersing its assets, and so on.

In Pakistan, guess what, the militants have been doing the same thing. Indeed, it's quite possible that the popular resentment aroused by the Americans' use of the drone-based killings may result in the building of a well-entrenched popular movement where none was before.

Tragic. It's like humankind has learned nothing over the last 200 years. Except now it is grown-up American boys in military uniforms, with video-games, who are sowing havoc many thousands of miles away from our shores.

Breaking news: late Wednesday evening in Cairo, Abu Mazen and his buddies at the Arab League decided there will be no 'proximity talks' between the PLO and Israel.

I'm kind of interested in the way Abu Mazen is getting Amr Moussa to front for him these days. It does indicate a serious lack of his own confidence in the depth of his support among Palestinians... But that matter is tangential to the main story here, which is--

The Amazingly Unsuccessful 'Diplomatist' Joe Biden!

Biden, lest we forget, is the man who in an interview with George Stephanopoulos last July, publicly gave Israel carte blanche to attack Iran whenever it wanted.

Biden was also, back in the pre-2003 day, one of Ahmed Chalabi's main supporters in the U.S., and an enthusiastic backer of the idea of partitioning Iraq.

Since he became Vice-President, Biden has had a role "orchestrating" Washington's Iraq policy on behalf of the president... Well, we've seen how that's been going... To be fair, that is not as horrendously badly as it might have been going... But it hasn't been going brilliantly, either-- certainly not as brilliantly as most of the US MSM have been saying.

Biden has not done a particularly good job there, I think.

But he has really been bombing in Palestine.

Yes, of course we can and should lay the primary blame for what's been happening in Jerusalem this past couple of days squarely on the Israeli government, the body that greeted Biden, on his first visit to Israel as vice-president, with not one but two announcements about the construction of new settler housing.

Notable that Yossi Sarid writes in Thursday's Haaretz that,

Don't believe Benjamin Netanyahu for one moment when he says he "never knew" [about the 1,600 new settler housing units announced Tuesday.] The Jerusalem planning committee is only too aware of what the bosses want, and the government has decided to step up construction in greater Jerusalem. Dispossession and taking possession, kicking out and moving in - that's what it's all about.

This is one visit Joe Biden will not quickly forget. First he was compelled to sit through 25 minutes of an annoying speech in his honor by our president. Shimon Peres really believes that he is the destination for pilgrims from all over the world who drink in his musings and are intoxicated by his vision.

Later, Biden was given a certificate memorializing his mother, but the glass broke. Once again, Bibi didn't pay attention, leaned on it and shattered it. No fear, his speeches have always diverted attention from such mishaps. And finally, to add a finishing touch of infuriating disgrace, the Haredi neighborhood Ramat Shlomo was dumped on the vice-presidential head.

Truth be told, the Obama administration just about asked for this slap. In Jerusalem, the lesson has been learned that the White House doesn't fulfill its obligations - it just goes through the motions by issuing insincere rebukes.
Insincere rebukes, indeed.

Juan Cole and Pat Lang, two very seasoned analysts of Middle eastern dynamics, are just two of the people who say that, on hearing of the new settlement construction, Biden should simply have ordered up his plane and left Israel, rather than sitting there, going through the rest of the charade of the visit, while saying something on the record about how the Obama administration "condemns" the new construction.

I'm assuming Biden decided on this course of action after consultation with Washington. (He took 90 minutes to decide what to do.) Do he and his boss the Prez have no idea how disgusted most of the people in the world are with the fact that, though from time to time Washington might say something critical of Israel-- meantime Washington never holds Israel to serious account, for anything, including "grave breaches of international humanitarian law" like implanting its settlers into occupied territories?

And the U.S. Congress continues to shovel money to Israel. U.S. diplomacy continues to get completely bent out of shape by defending Israel's actions in every international forum, at every turn, and by zealously pursuing Israel-driven agendas throughout the entire Middle East, including with regard to Iraq and Iran.

And these actions by the administration and Congress put the lives of U.S. service-members deployed around the world, often in pursuit of Israel-driven agendas, in significant additional risk.

Regarding Biden, Pat Lang has this intriguing little vignette in his latest post:

I was in Biden's senate office on one occasion when Biden's Zionism boiled over in a truly repulsive display of temper. I was there with my Arab employer to visit the senator... The Arab made some pro forma positive reference to the "peace process." Biden flew into a rage, grew red in the face and shouted that this was an insincere lie and that his guest knew that it was only Arab stubbornness that prevented "little Israel' from living in peace. His "guest" sat through this with what dignity he could manage. I would have walked out on him if I had been alone.

... And meanwhile, George Mitchell, Mr. "Senior Peace Envoy", has completely dropped off the map.

It is honestly not clear to me at all, right now, what it is that Obama and his people are hoping to achieve in the Arab-Israeli arena. Their entire "peace diplomacy" is in shambles. It's as if Obama really doesn't care any more about any of the lofty-- but oh-so-important-- goals he articulated back in the first days and weeks of his presidency. But he should realize that letting his "peace diplomacy" fall into disarray, as he has now done, is something that will have consequences far, far beyond Israel and Palestine. And quite possibly, more rapidly than anyone in Washington realizes.