Category Archives: remote warfare

‘Disappeared’ Pakistanis — innocent and guilty alike — have fallen into a legal black hole

Without a single reference to President Obama’s drone war in Pakistan, extrajudicial detention of prisoners at Guantanamo, the torture of suspected terrorists, CIA-run secret prisons, rendition, presidential authorization to assassinate US citizens, or the United States’ long history of supporting governments that use their power to suppress political dissent by making their opponents “disappear,” the New York Times reports:

The Obama administration is expressing alarm over reports that thousands of political separatists and captured Taliban insurgents have disappeared into the hands of Pakistan’s police and security forces, and that some may have been tortured or killed.

The issue came up in a State Department report to Congress last month that urged Pakistan to address this and other human rights abuses. It threatens to become the latest source of friction in the often tense relationship between the wartime allies.

The concern is over a steady stream of accounts from human rights groups that Pakistan’s security services have rounded up thousands of people over the past decade, mainly in Baluchistan, a vast and restive province far from the fight with the Taliban, and are holding them incommunicado without charges. Some American officials think that the Pakistanis have used the pretext of war to imprison members of the Baluch nationalist opposition that has fought for generations to separate from Pakistan. Some of the so-called disappeared are guerrillas; others are civilians.

“Hundreds of cases are pending in the courts and remain unresolved,” said the Congressionally mandated report that the State Department sent to Capitol Hill on Nov. 23. A Congressional official provided a copy of the eight-page, unclassified document to The New York Times.

Separately, the report also described concerns that the Pakistani military had killed unarmed members of the Taliban, rather than put them on trial.

Two months ago, the United States took the unusual step of refusing to train or equip about a half-dozen Pakistani Army units that are believed to have killed unarmed prisoners and civilians during recent offensives against the Taliban. The most recent State Department report contains some of the administration’s most pointed language about accusations of such so-called extrajudicial killings. “The Pakistani government has made limited progress in advancing human rights and continues to face human rights challenges,” the State Department report concluded. “There continue to be gross violations of human rights by Pakistani security forces.”

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Obama’s indiscriminate slaughter in Pakistan can only encourage new waves of militancy

Mehdi Hasan writes:

Speaking at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in May, Barack Obama spotted teen pop band the Jonas Brothers in the audience. “Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but, boys, don’t get any ideas,” deadpanned the president, referring to his daughters. “Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming.” The crowd laughed, Obama smiled, the dinner continued. Few questioned the wisdom of making such a tasteless joke; of the US commander-in-chief showing such casual disregard for the countless lives lost abroad through US drone attacks.

From the moment he stepped foot inside the White House, Obama set about expanding and escalating a covert CIA programme of “targeted killings” inside Pakistan, using Predator and Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles (who comes up with these names?) that had been started by the Bush administration in 2004. On 23 January 2009, just three days after being sworn in, Obama ordered his first set of air strikes inside Pakistan; one is said to have killed four Arab fighters linked to al-Qaida but the other hit the house of a pro-government tribal leader, killing him and four members of his family, including a five-year-old child. Obama’s own daughter, Sasha, was seven at the time.

But America’s Nobel-peace-prize-winning president did not look back. During his first nine months in office he authorised as many aerial attacks in Pakistan as George W Bush did in his final three years in the job. And this year has seen an unprecedented number of air strikes. Forget Mark Zuckerberg or the iPhone 4 – 2010 was the year of the drone. According to the New America Foundation thinktank in Washington DC, the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan more than doubled in 2010, to 115. That is an astonishing rate of around one bombing every three days inside a country with which the US is not at war.

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Obama’s escalating robot war in Pakistan is making a terror attack more likely

Johann Hari writes:

Imagine if, an hour from now, a robot plane swooped over your house and blasted it to pieces. The plane has no pilot. It is controlled with a joystick from 7,000 miles away, sent by the Pakistani military to kill you. It blows up all the houses on your street, and so barbecues your family and your neighbors until there is nothing left to bury but a few charred slops. Why? They refuse to comment. They don’t even admit the robot planes belong to them. But they tell the Pakistani newspapers back home it is because one of you was planning to attack Pakistan. How do they know? Somebody told them. Who? You don’t know, and there are no appeals against the robot.

Now imagine it doesn’t end there: These attacks are happening every week somewhere in your country. They blow up funerals and family dinners and children. The number of robot planes in the sky is increasing every week. You discover they are named “Predators,” or “Reapers” — after the Grim Reaper. No matter how much you plead, no matter how much you make it clear you are a peaceful civilian getting on with your life, it won’t stop. What do you do? If there were a group arguing that Pakistan was an evil nation that deserved to be violently attacked, would you now start to listen?

This sounds like a sketch for the next James Cameron movie — but it is in fact an accurate description of life in much of Pakistan today, with the sides flipped. The Predators and Reapers are being sent by Barack Obama’s CIA, with the support of other Western governments, and they killed more than 700 civilians in 2009 alone — fourteen times more than the 7/7 attacks in London. Last month there was the largest number of robot plane bombings ever: 21. Over the next decade, spending on drones is set to increase by 700 percent.

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Preemptive strikes or preemptive revenge in Waziristan?

Newsweek reports:

For weeks now, as missiles from American drones have snuffed out their leaders and terrorized their recruits in the remote mountains of Pakistan’s North Waziristan area, Al Qaeda fighters have kept their spirits up by telling each other they were about to have their revenge. “It’s like they’ve just been waiting for news, as if they were all excited about something big about to happen in the West,” says an Afghan Taliban intelligence officer known to Newsweek who operates as a liaison between his organization and Al Qaeda. For security reasons he would not allow his name to be published. The source said one senior Qaeda activist told him that Europeans and Americans think “our minds and bodies are in the mountains of the [Pakistan] tribal areas, but soon we will carry out a visible offensive with long-term consequences in their own Western homes and cities.”

Reports out of Britain overnight suggest that more than bravado may be at work here: according to anonymous sources cited by Sky News foreign-affairs editor Tim Marshall, intelligence agencies have uncovered terrorist plans to launch simultaneous commando-style attacks in Germany, France, and Britain that would be reminiscent of the slaughter in Mumbai almost two years ago. Such attacks have been a major concern of Western police forces because they require no special weaponry — just guns, training, and a will to die fighting.

Marshall says that the dramatic increase in drone attacks over the last few weeks is intended to disrupt the plot against European targets. One drone strike reportedly killed the head of Qaeda operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, known as Shaikh Fateh, just last Saturday. Marshall quoted his sources telling him the Qaeda plot was in an “advanced but not imminent stage” and that intelligence agencies had been tracking the operatives “for some time.” The implication is that the onslaught of drone attacks, especially in the last month, has succeeded in thwarting the plot.

If the plot is not at an imminent stage, one wonders why the Eiffel Tower has been evacuated twice this month. But whether imminent or advanced, the logic behind the response to the threat — escalating drone attacks in Pakistan — ought to hinge on where these Qaeda commando teams are now located.

ABC News reports on intelligence gathered from a suspected German terrorist who is now being held at Bagram airbase near Kabul. “The captured German reportedly said several teams of attackers, all with European passports, had been trained and dispatched from training camps in Waziristan and Pakistan.”

If they’ve already been dispatched, what’s the point of launching drone attacks on these training camps now? Is this about thwarting terrorism or about adopting a combative posture? A way of saying: we’re not doing nothing; we’re doing something. It might not work, but we sure as hell won’t take this lying down.

Or maybe it’s what might be called preemptive retribution — a foretaste of what will happen after a major al Qaeda attack.

As Bob Woodward’s new book reveals, “if a Pakistani-based terrorist ever managed to strike inside the United States, the CIA had a ‘retribution plan’ to strike at least 150 camps in Pakistan.”

Retribution is another name for revenge and the inchoate rationale that drives revenge is the desire to eliminate the enemy.

“Who did we get today,” White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel would ask, as though a finite list of drone targets could be whittled down to zero — even while the director of the CIA warned him that this could go on forever.

Almost a decade after 9/11, the mere fact that a retribution plan with 150 targets could be drawn up, is a clear indication of a failed strategy.

Of course this elimination strategy is doomed because it confuses human bodies with the ideas and sentiments that animate them. The bodies can be destroyed but the spirit moves on to animate another combatant. Indeed, the drone can best be seen as the worst kind of force multiplier — one that invigorates the enemy and boosts support among the local population.

As Stephen Farrell astutely noted after being able to observe the Taliban while he was held captive last year, as much as anything else the significance of the drone is not its destructive power but what it signals: the absence of foreign soldiers.

The US commands the sky over Waziristan because it dare not occupy the land.

As for whether a terrorist attack in France is actually imminent, the raised level of alertness prompted by official warnings has been matched by a raised level of suspicion.

Opposition figures and pundits alike have loudly speculated that the troubling pronouncements are actually a ruse to turn attention away from scandals that have implicated government members and from growing protest against pension reform. French media have even suggested that President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose approval ratings are in the doldrums, has borrowed the tactic of the well-timed terrorism scare from the playbook of former U.S. President George W. Bush.

“The French people aren’t duped,” says Socialist Party official and former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal in a remark typical of the skeptics. “The fight against terrorism is a serious and discreet effort, incompatible with sudden alert announcements — made, by chance, as protests surge. There’s an element of stagecraft in this that’s out of line and even dangerous.”

The lesson of the last decade should be that what governments do to prevent terrorism matter less than what they do afterwards.

Thus far, local horror has been a reliable catalyst for global folly.

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“Who did we get today?”

Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, reveals that the White House was so enamored with the CIA’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, that chief of staff Rahm Emanuel would regularly call the CIA director, Leon Panetta, asking, “Who did we get today?”

Emanuel may have been posing the question because, like President Obama, he shares a perverse thrill in remote killing. Or, he might have asked because Predator warfare turns out to be far less accurate than it proponents would like us to believe.

A legal dispute that was being hammered out in a Boston court this summer, revealed that in its haste to deploy drones, the CIA was willing to use location analysis software that could result in strikes that would be as much as 42 feet off target!

That’s the difference between aiming at one house and destroying the house next door.

Leaving aside the question about how accurate ones intelligence might be about who is inhabiting either house, or the legal issues of what constitutes the battlefield and what can justify extrajudicial killing, or the moral issue of defining innocent bystanders as “collateral damage” — this looks like a case of not being able to shoot straight.

The Register reports:

The CIA is implicated in a court case in which it’s claimed it used an illegal, inaccurate software “hack” to direct secret assassination drones in central Asia.

The target of the court action is Netezza, the data warehousing firm that IBM bid $1.7bn for on Monday [Sept 20]. The case raises serious questions about the conduct of Netezza executives, and the conduct of CIA’s clandestine war against senior jihadis in Afganistan and Pakistan.

The dispute surrounds a location analysis software package – “Geospatial” – developed by a small company called Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi), which like Netezza is based in Massachusetts. IISi alleges that Netezza misled the CIA by saying that it could deliver the software on its new hardware, to a tight deadline.

When the software firm then refused to rush the job, it’s claimed, Netezza illegally and hastily reverse-engineered IISi’s code to deliver a version that produced locations inaccurate by up to 13 metres [42 feet]. Despite knowing about the miscalculations, the CIA accepted the software, court submissions indicate.

This report comes on the heals of an earlier report which revealed that the military’s use of unencrypted communications channels in Iraq allowed militants to view live video images being transmitted by drones. As the Wall Street Journal reported in December:

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

Given that President Obama has authorized as many drone attacks since the end of March as his predecessor did in the previous four years, and given that in Pakistan there is a widespread belief that these attacks indiscriminately kill innocent people, and given that this perception is fueling a deepening hatred of America, one might imagine that revelations about the weaknesses of the drone program would result in a serious reexamination of its value.

On the contrary, the CIA is now intensifying its campaign of missile attacks and launched more drone strikes this month than at any time in the previous six years.

(For more background on the Geospatial story, see this report.)

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Risk-free killing and the fear of death

There was an age when those afraid of dying knew they should, if they could, stay away from war. They could instead, if so inclined, read about war and fantasize about battlefield heroics from the comfort of an armchair. Nowadays, America’s newest class of warriors enjoy the same comfort with as little risk.

Tom Engelhardt writes:

The drone is our latest wonder weapon and a bragging point in a set of wars where there has been little enough to brag about.

CIA director Leon Panetta has, for instance, called the Agency’s drones flying over Pakistan “the only game in town” when it comes to destroying al-Qaeda; a typically anonymous U.S. official in a Washington Post report claims of drone missile attacks, “We’re talking about precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare”; or as Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command told author Peter Singer, speaking of the glories of drones: “They don’t get hungry. They are not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”

Seven thousand of them, the vast majority surveillance varieties, are reportedly already being operated by the military, and that’s before swarms of “mini-drones” come on line. Our American world is being redefined accordingly.

In February, Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post caught something of this process when he spent time with Colonel Eric Mathewson, perhaps the most experienced Air Force officer in drone operations and on the verge of retirement. Mathewson, reported Jaffe, was trying to come up with an appropriately new definition of battlefield “valor” — a necessity for most combat award citations — to fit our latest corps of pilots at their video consoles. “Valor to me is not risking your life,” the colonel told the reporter. “Valor is doing what is right. Valor is about your motivations and the ends that you seek. It is doing what is right for the right reasons. That to me is valor.”

There is a simple calculus upon which American warfare depends: the fewer Americans get killed, the longer the war can continue.

Maimed Americans don’t count. As for dead or maimed non-Americans, they are a variable part of the calculus, problematic or not depending on the circumstances.

The Pentagon’s love of the drone is Washington’s dread of the dead — let’s not pretend that valor has any place in this equation.

When through the press of a button a soldier in an air-conditioned office rains down death and destruction thousands of miles away, whatever military virtues he might possess, there’s no reason to assume they include bravery. Indeed, the risk-free killing of remote warfare is really the most cowardly form of combat, far removed as it is from battlefields that demand courage because the killers risk being killed.

In Shakespeare’s Henry V, as the Battle of Agincourt is about to commence, the king addresses his men — “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” — heavily outnumbered by the French and facing the risk of imminent slaughter.

Henry — a king who fights with his men and doesn’t simply issue commands — declares:

… he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.

To the extent that there is a noble dimension to warfare it is this: that those willing to kill are also willing to die. Those taking the lives of others do so knowing that just as easily they could lose their own.

The technological advance of war has broken this equation and broken it so thoroughly that not only does the new class of drone-armed killers face no risk of being killed; they may not even lose any sleep.

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Drone strikes like “canon fire”

CNN reports:

Drone-launched missiles are now hitting lower-level al Qaeda and Taliban personnel, camps, training areas, bomb makers, buildings and other targets in the remote region.

“You’ve had an expanded target set for time now, and given the danger these groups pose and their relative inaccessibility, these kinds of strikes — precise and effective — have become almost like the cannon fire of this war. They’re no longer extraordinary or even unusual,” the official said.

The US counterterrorism official who likened Hellfire missile attacks to cannon fire, reached for a comparison which though perhaps ill-conceived is also revealing. If drone warfare is meant to epitomize precision, nothing represents blunt force more than a cannon.

As for the claim that big-name targets have now given way to an expanded range of lower level targets, US officials who still insist that there have been no more than a handful of civilians killed in drone attacks might be posed a basic challenge: How often can they even name the dead?

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Fighting American wars from on high

Tom Engelhardt reflects on the detachment with which the US military, operating from a position akin to that of Olympian gods, has turned people into targets:

[I]n the cities, towns, and villages of the distant lands where Americans tend to make war, civilians die regularly and repeatedly at our hands. Each death may contain its own uniquely nightmarish details, but the overall story remains remarkably repetitious. Such “incidents” are completely predictable. Even General McChrystal, determined to “protect the population” in Afghanistan as part of his counterinsurgency war, has proven remarkably incapable of changing the nature of our style of warfare. Curtail air strikes, rein in Special Operations night attacks — none of it will, in the long run, matter. Put in a nutshell: If you arrive from the heavens, they will die.

Having watched the video of the death of the 22-year-old Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen in that July 2007 video, his father said: “At last the truth has been revealed, and I’m satisfied God revealed the truth… If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?”

Putting aside the controversy during the 2008 presidential campaign over the hunting of wolves from helicopters in Alaska, Noor-Eldeen may not have gone far enough. For that helicopter crew, his son was indeed the wartime equivalent of a hunted animal. An article on the front page of the New York Times recently captured this perspective, however inadvertently, when, speaking of the CIA’s aerial war over Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, it described the Agency’s unmanned drones as “observing and tracking targets, then unleashing missiles on their quarry.”

“Quarry” has quite a straightforward definition: “a hunted animal; prey.” Indeed, the al-Qaeda leaders, Taliban militants, and local civilians in the region are all “prey” which, of course, makes us the predators. That the majority of drones cruising those skies 24/7 and repeatedly launching their Hellfire missiles are named “Predators” should, then, come as no surprise.

Americans are unused to being the prey in war and so essentially incapable of imagining what that actually means, day in, day out, year after year. We prefer to think of their deaths as so many accidents or mistakes — “collateral damage” — when they are the norm, not the exception, not what’s collateral in such wars. We prefer to imagine ourselves bringing the best (of values and intentions) to a backward, ignorant world and so invariably make ourselves sound far kindlier than we are. Like the gods of Olympus, we have a tendency to flatter ourselves, even as we continually remake the “rules of engagement,” those ROEs, to suit our changing tastes and needs, while creating a language of war that suits our tender sensibilities about ourselves.

In this way, for instance, assassination-by-drone has become an ever more central part of the Obama administration’s foreign and war policy, and yet the word “assassination” — with all its negative implications, legal and otherwise — has been displaced by the far more anodyne, more bureaucratic “targeted killing.” In a sense, in fact, what “enhanced interrogation techniques” (aka torture) were to the Bush administration, “targeted killing” is to the Obama administration.

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