June 2013, "Obama won't end the drone war, but Pakistan might," AlJazeera.com, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
"Drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries is not in the US national interest, and mires the country in endless war."
"On June 7, the CIA launched a drone strike in Mangroti, North Waziristan, killing nine people. Days earlier, taking oath as Pakistan's new prime minister, Nawaz Sharif had asked the US to respect his country's sovereignty and refrain from further attacks. ...
| It is unlikely that the US State Department would have approved of these attacks. Its executor, the CIA, was likely also its author. The global "war on terror" has been a boon for the CIA. Under Bush, the agency regained the licence to kill....Obama expanded and formalised this paramilitary function. ... | ||
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The Obama administration has manoeuvered around the restrictions on the use of military force outside declared war zones by putting Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) forces temporarily under CIA command, using the agency's "Title 50" authority to operate globally. This authority was granted to the CIA with purely intelligence gathering activities in mind; Obama has used it to sanction lethal military operations from Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia.
The CIA and the Pentagon have dwarfed the State Department in both resources and influence. In The Way of the Knife (2013), an important investigation into the evolution of the Obama administration's counterterrorism policies, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Mazzetti notes the political convenience of using the secretive CIA as the president's preferred foreign policy tool. This affinity has in turn allowed the agency to exert influence over foreign affairs that exceeds that of diplomats.
Mazzetti relates instances where, at cabinet meetings, Panetta as CIA director was able to overrule Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, and her ambassador in Islamabad without demurral from Barack Obama.
Violence was undesirable, but he would continue using it; perpetual war was unwise, but his would continue indefinitely; America was at a crossroads, but he would maintain the current course; fear must not be the basis of policy, but his are based on a frightful catalogue of potential threats; the "total defeat of terror" was impossible, but he would not relent until he had finished the work of "defeating al-Qaeda and its associated forces".
Obama exhorted Americans to ask "hard questions", but answered with comforting bromides. He pronounced himself "troubled" by the stifling of investigative journalism, but offered its cause as remedy: his own Justice Department.
He eloquently denounced the monstrosity that is Guantanamo, but incredibly denied what Mazzetti, and Daniel Klaidman in his book Kill or Capture (2012), have revealed: that the Obama administration has dealt with the complications of capturing and detaining terrorism suspects by ordering them killed instead.
Some quarters hailed Obama's speech as a step back from the militarist excess of his predecessor. The acknowledgments of error and the performance of anguish were meant to emphasise this break. But the speech offered little redress. The hope that it appeared to offer was abridged in action.
'Signature strikes'
The only concrete proposal, a restrictive targeting criteria codified in a Presidential Policy Guidance, which in principle should have ended "signature strikes", was quickly undermined by administration officials who told the press that the attacks would continue regardless. It also nullified Obama's claim that a "high threshold" had been set for lethal action against "potential terrorist targets, regardless of whether or not they are American citizens". Far from reassuring non-Americans, it should alarm US citizens.
The CIA is likely to resist any shift in policy that mandates relinquishing such power. But unless the conflict between the CIA's institutional imperatives and US national interest is resolved, blood will continue to spill and the world will grow more dangerous.
This unresolved tension is also manifest in the ambivalence of presidential rhetoric. Last month, Obama laid out his new national security strategy in a magnificent soliloquy. But in aiming for Hamlet, Obama delivered Gollum....
The drone war will not end by a presidential epiphany. It will need political pressure and practical obstacles to stop it - mostly outside the US. Few Democrats are willing to criticise Obama, and Republicans rarely shrink from actions that result in dead foreigners; as long as the war's cost are borne by others, it is unlikely that a critical mass of opinion would emerge to force a reconsideration of policy.
But unlike Americans, citizens in the targeted states are directly exposed to the war's blowback. The need to pressure their governments into withholding cooperation with the drone war is more urgent. Only resistance in the targeted states can force Washington to stand down.
There is a precedent for this. The US launched its very first drone strike in Yemen in 2002. The strike was carried out with the cooperation of the Yemeni government with the understanding that, in order to avoid fraught questions of jurisdiction and legality, Yemen would take responsibility for it.
The charade soon fell through however when, during a television interview, Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy defence secretary, claimed the assassination as a US achievement. Slighted and humiliated, Ali Abdullah Saleh, then the president of Yemen, angrily refused the US permission to carry out further attacks as long as Bush remained in office.
The varying intensity of attacks in Pakistan also suggests the degree to which they have been enabled by its governments. Between June 2004, when the first drone struck Pakistan; and August 2008, when Pervez Musharraf stepped down as president, there were a total of 17 attacks.
But the war escalated sharply once the pliant Asif Ali Zardari assumed office: a total of 351 attacks, including many "signature strikes", were launched during his tenure. It appeared Zardari had granted the US the carte blanche that his successor had withheld.
Zardari was forced to reconsider cooperation only after tensions emerged between the US and the Pakistani military in 2011. Meanwhile in Yemen, as the Saleh government was weakened by protests, attacks escalated. Their numbers dropped only after stability returned.
The drone war can only proceed as long as targeted states acquiesce in it or are too weak to resist. Strong governments that have popular legitimacy can prove barriers. This month's strike in Pakistan was the CIA's attempt to forestall this possibility by forcing upon the new government an onerous choice: to lose favour with Washington by resisting or lose credibility at home by remaining silent."...
The author is "a Glasgow-based sociologist, born in Chitral and raised in Abbottabad and Peshawar."
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