Is “America’s Drone War Out of Control”? That is the provocative headline—minus the question mark—of Gideon Rachman’s Financial Times column. He is not alone in attacking the policy of using drone strikes against terrorist targets abroad—a policy initiated by the Bush administration and greatly expanded under President Obama. Such strikes are coming in for increasing criticism for supposedly being just as lawless as “renditions,” detentions without trial, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” warrantless wiretapping and all the other features of the war on terrorism to which civil libertarians object. One suspects that the criticism, now a mild buzz, would reach a crescendo if a Republican were in the White House: Obama’s policies are harder to criticize for the left than those of a President McCain or Romney.
It is perhaps just as well to have a more open debate about what has so far been a relatively covert policy, which has extended from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan to other lands, from Pakistan to Yemen, where U.S. ground troops are not committed. Critics of drone strikes do, in fairness, make some legitimate points about what criteria are used to designate targets and how, in the absence of judicial review, we can achieve accountability for mistakes. There is also legitimate fear that by creating collateral damage such strikes may create more enemies than they eliminate and, less persuasively, that such strikes could create a precedent for authoritarian regimes to follow suit. (Do countries like Russia and Iran really need American inspiration to target their perceived enemies abroad?)
But what critics do not have is a compelling alternative to offer. Should we simply stop all drone strikes and declare that our response to terrorism will be limited to trying to arrest and extradite suspects?
Not even Rachman goes that far. At the end of raising lots of objections to the drones he offers a meek proposal that drones should “be reclaimed from the realm of covert warfare” and should instead be employed “by the military and openly scrutinized by politicians and press.” This rather ignores the reality that the segment of the U.S. military most likely to take control of drone strikes is the Joint Special Operations Command, whose operations are super-secret and hardly “scrutinized by politicians and press”—unless they have either a monumental success or screw-up.
No doubt there are more extreme drone opponents who would be willing to simply stop all such strikes. How, then, do they suggest that we deal with the threat of terrorism emanating from countries such as Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia, where it is simply not practical to send FBI agents to arrest terrorist suspects? Indeed, we are facing this very quandary today in Libya, where the administration is relying on the FBI to identify suspects in the Benghazi consulate attack—so far with no luck. Remember: the whole reason why the drone strikes started in the first place is because fighting terrorism through domestic law enforcement was tried before 9/11 and found badly wanting.
I have my own problem with drone strikes—I don’t think they are the complete answer to terrorism. They are, in fact, only part of what should be a broader counterinsurgency and state-building strategy in at-risk countries. Unfortunately, we have failed to develop such a comprehensive approach and instead rely too heavily on targeted drone strikes. The answer, however, is not to end the drone strikes. They remain our best instrument for disrupting terrorist plots that, if successful, might well force the U.S. to put large numbers of ground troops in harm’s way. The answer is to maintain the drone strikes while building up our softer instruments of suasion so as to help defeat Islamist extremists.
There is an easy answer to the ethics of drone strikes. n nAs Obama is intimately involved in the decision making, picking out individuals for death on the basis of cards he holds in his hands, and since Obama is 'sort of like a god', I would suggest that as long as Obama is doing the selections for death, the process can be viewed as being ordained by heaven. n nRest easy your tired brow, Gideon Rachman.
Mr. Boot: Alternatively, we could actually go to war against our enemies. Seriously – drone strikes, like counterinsurgency, are tactics that allow us to ignore strategies designed to destroy our enemies. It's as though in WW2 we sent out Raider units to pick off a few Germans or Japanese here and there and pretended we would – could – win the war that way. COIN is NOT a choice a Great Power should make, or a game it should play. Wars are the continuation of politics, right? If we feel strongly enough about the behavior of an opponent, we need to go to war to change that behavior – by destroying their polity. It worked in WW2 and the Civil War (the only times we've tried it), and is the only legit way to fight a war. If we aren't enough interested in winning to destroy their polity and the civil and human infrastructure that attacked us or that we oppose, to actually go to war and do so, then we are just killing and dying in a non-serious, non-strategic game no one wins, but everyone loses. Go to war – or go home. And, no, we are NOT at war now – we are engaged in ahistorically limited combat operations with absolutely insane ROE. If we don't care enough to win and destroy the ability of the opponent to ever again attack us, we have no business killing them, and dying as we do so. Who was an economic and military and political ally 20 years after the end of hostilities? A Germany we did not actually defeat in 1918 (accession to the 14 Poiints was not regarded in Germany as "defeat", as you know), or a Germany we absolutely defeated in 1945? A Japan we absolutely defeated in 1945, or a Vietnam in 1995, an Iraq or Afghanistan 20 years hence?
"If we feel strongly enough about the behavior of an opponent, we need to go to war to change that behavior – by destroying their polity" n nBut the polities- I assume you mean the governments where they are operating from? – are hardly full supporters of these groups. In fact, many of these groups are at war with the governments. Or parts of them. Certainly that's true in Afghanistan and, to a large extent, Pakistan. n nThe problem for us is that these are stateless actors. They operate in lawless regions of these countries where no government can operate. We can destroy the Pakistan government but will that stop the Taliban? I don't think so.
The only reason Obama authorizes drones at all is because it's the only way to stop the Armed Forces from insurrection in light of his preference to have zero American footprint anywhere in the world at all. His background is the bull horn and the protest. His view of the world is that every problem is and can be solved by, a mob. Given his druthers he'd turn the entire Armed Forces into a angry swarm of Molotov Cocktail wielding 'Peace Corp" volunteers.
"What’s the Alternative to Drones?" People who voted for Mitt Romney…. Oh sorry, I thought we were talking about something else…
Let's see: selective bombing –sorry, kinetic intervention– undertaken at the whim of the President, across national borders of countries with which we may or may not be at war, employing explosives to kill individuals who may or may not be legitimate military targets, routinely killing bystanders caught in the blast, who are then re-classified as guilty-by-proximity, which avoids the messiness of capture and interrogation, which –because it is out of sight is out of mind– gives progressives enough cover to ignore it. And since it is conducted by a man that many in this country think possesses the Mandate of Heaven, it is beyond reproach, anyway. Seriously, if anyone in any other country were doing this it would be called one thing only: terrorism. This is the Obama administration approach to 'asymmetrical warfare": to define symmetry down.