The problem is the power to use them, not the drones themselves

I haven't thought much about drones since I had to worry about scheduling and clearing airspace for them when I was still in the Army deployed to Iraq. My deepest thoughts regarding them was to always remind myself not to put a tactical UAV over a target house before the raid hits.  As a strategic tool of national security, they struck me as just that: a tool. It is an alternative to a manned aircraft, but with lesser capabilities. No big deal and not something to waste grey cells on.

But then this was published in the NY Times yesterday. I am shocked at the authority the President has to determine who and what is a viable and legal target for precision strikes. I don't blame the President for this extreme power - it's the Congress' job to check his power and they're not doing that. They passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force against terrorists in 2001 and have not updated it since, leaving the President with extraordinary power.  Our strikes (manned or unmanned) in Pakistan, Yemen, and Horn of Africa seem to be against appropriate targets and are conducted in places where we have the authority to do so. It's the ability of the President to decide which individuals should be killed is astounding.

What concerns me about unmanned strike assets is the potential they have, in an environment where a small coterie have wide-ranging discretion to use them, to enable the United States to make a significant moral or strategic blunder. Even though I generally agree with Dan Trombly that many concerns about drones are not relevant today, that does not predict that the concerns he dispenses with will not be valid in the future. At the moment, UAV technology is not so advanced as to make it our primary strike platform across the globe (technology more limited by budgets and policy than capability). And we currently use UAVs in conflicts with the authority of the state where they are deployed. But what happens when we have a president not as scrupulous as President Obama?

My concern about about drones is not the drones themselves. The article linked about has little to nothing to do with drones themselves. My concern is about unchecked power. My concern is that people who can potentially rise to power high enough to direct the use of drones will use them foolishly because of the drones' inherent characteristics. The fact that the United States can now execute a (limited) bombing campaign without putting a single U.S. citizen into harms way is quite alluring - and that capability will on increase with time. With such extensive power, how long until will it be until we have a President who will use this mere tool to conduct attacks that were unfounded, unchecked, or fall short of jus ad bellum criteria. How long will it be until we have a President who orders an attack somewhere but does not understand the nth order effects that might trigger a sizable or regional war? Drones make these types of attacks easier and more palatable because the initial consequences (no loss of American lives) are negligible. We can invest so little and yet realize significant returns, surely, and that makes it so easy to use. But plans don't work out, intel is bad, collateral damage is not acceptable, thinking is muddled - things often assumed as irrelevant before an op but become quite relevant in the aftermath. Especially when it's so easy to execute the strike.

The United States should continue to use drones and develop drone technology for use against its enemies. It is only a tool and it does save (or has the potential to save) American lives while allowing the United States to protect its interests, making it a very valuable tool of American military power.  What we need to do, as a nation, is re-look what powers we vest with the President and ensure it isn't too easy for him or her to use force contrary to our ideals or interests. As drones advance, their use will become alluring to those with interventionist bents who believe that political capital comes cheaply if you don't have any skin in the game. You can't lose what you don't wager and I don't trust that everyone who might have power in the future will understand that using drones is still a wager, even if it's not American lives. Congress should start laying the groundwork now passing new laws to ensure when that person does come to power it's not too late.

The soundtrack to the descent into chaos?

To complement Londonstani's excellent reporting over at Abu Muqawama on what's happening the other side of the Durand Line, this New York Times video feature on how Pakistani pop stars and the educated youth regard the TTP and the West is worth 9 minutes of your time.

Money line at about 3:40:

You talk to a musician over here and you ask him what's the problem, he won't come out with the most fantastic insightful answer for you. He'll come out with the most rhetorical, most cliched crap.

If only that was limited to Pakistani pop stars. Or musicians.

Baitullah Mehsud dead?

This morning the news reported that one of Mehsud's wives had been killed in a drone strike. As the day went on, intelligence officials apparently became increasingly confident that the Pakistani Taliban leader had been killed as well. The Times reports:

The C.I.A. missile strike in Pakistan’s tribal areason Wednesday may have killed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the country’s fearsome Taliban militia, American and Pakistani officials said Thursday.

Officials in Washington and Islamabad were scrambling to make sense of intercepted communications that seemed to indicate that Mr. Mehsud might have been killed in the strike, and by Thursday evening American officials said they were growing increasingly confident that the Taliban leader was dead.

Still, they cautioned that it could be weeks before they could be certain, given the difficulty of getting to the remote location in South Waziristan to perform DNA tests.

Andrew Exum wonders what effect Mehsud's death would have on Pakistan's appetite for continued fighting in Waziristan.

But it's my sense that many in Pakistan consider Mehsud to basically be the root of their problems and that taking him out would be the natural end to a campaign against the militants in FATA and the NWFP. So should we worry that the death of Mehsud might, perversely, mean a relaxation of the Pakistani Army's campaign against Pakistan's insurgent groups? Or will this instead fill them with confidence to carry on?

For one thing, the campaign slowed down dramatically after the Swat offensive. We've been hearing for weeks about how the Pakistani Army is preparing for bloody and protracted fighting in Waziristan, and how they were making final preparations for an offensive. As far as I can tell, that hasn't happened yet. There are a lot of bombs being dropped from F-16s, and that's all well and good, but I'm reasonably sure this long-awaited ground offensive has yet to take place. Does that seem more or less likely now if Mehsud is dead? I know my answer.

Islamabad has already demonstrated its indifference to any ideas we may have about seeking Pakistani help interdicting the flow of fighters and/or materiel westward and northward across the Durand Line. In fact, Pakistani officials have even complained about the coalition's Helmland offensive, suggesting that it does nothing to improve the situation and only causes more problems for them. And now we think that the death of their "ace of spades" is going to motivate them to go in and clean out the whole area, the cost of which effort seems to dramatically outweigh the benefit for them?

This isn't North Korea. Pakistan may not do what we like or expect, but that tends to be a problem with our expectations, not their rationality. How long is it going to take us to absorb the simple lesson that the war in Afghanistan, in the final analysis, probably does Pakistan much more good than harm?

Bin Laden's son killed by drone strike?

One more thing to add to the debate about the usefulness of drone strikes in Pakistan, perhaps.

U.S. officials believe Saad bin Laden — a son of Osama bin Laden — has been killed by an American missile in Pakistan.

Saad bin Laden reportedly spent years under house arrest in Iran before traveling last year to Pakistan, according to former National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell.

It's believed he was killed by Hellfire missiles fired from a U.S. Predator drone sometime this year.

A senior U.S. counterterrorism official tells NPR that without a body to conduct DNA tests on, it's hard to be completely sure. But he characterized U.S. spy agencies as being "80 to 85 percent" certain that Saad bin Laden is dead.

The U.S. counterterrorism official says Saad bin Laden wasn't important enough to target personally — that he was "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Drones and sovereignty

Today the Wall Street Journal editorial page continues the fightback against those who call for a cessation of drone strikes in northwest Pakistan.

Several Taliban training camps in the Pakistan hinterland were hit last week by missiles fired from American unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or drones, reportedly killing some 20 terrorists. Remarkably, some people think these strikes are a bad idea.

To get a sense of what U.S. drone strikes have accomplished in the past two years, recall the political furor that followed a July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which found that al Qaeda had "protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland [i.e., U.S.] attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership. . . . As a result, we judge that the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment." The media declared we were losing the war.

Less than a year later, then-CIA director Michael Hayden offered a far more upbeat assessment to the Washington Post.

What changed? At least part of the answer is that the U.S. went from carrying out only a handful of drone attacks in 2007 to more than 30 in 2008.

I don't have any problem with the contention that the near-term campaign against Al Qaeda is aided by drone strikes; this is almost certainly true. On the broader question of strikes as a beneficial part of the overall counterinsurgency campaign, I've gone from being anti- to roughly agnostic.

Having said that, this particular editorial sort of misrepresents the case of those who oppose drone strikes on the Pakistani side of the border.

Lord Bingham, until recently Britain's senior law lord, has recently said UAV strikes may be "beyond the pale" and potentially on a par with cluster bombs and landmines. Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen says "the Predator [drone] strikes have an entirely negative effect on Pakistani stability." He adds, "We should be cutting strikes back pretty substantially."

In both cases, the argument against drones rests on the belief that the attacks cause wide-scale casualties among noncombatants, thereby embittering local populations and losing hearts and minds. If you glean your information from wire reports -- which depend on stringers who are rarely eyewitnesses -- the argument seems almost plausible.

As Andrew Exum and others (notably his co-authors on the CNAS report Triage) have remarked, U.S. military figures on civilian deaths as a result of Predator attacks are almost irrelevant; as much as we talk about "being first with the truth," stories in the Pakistani (and global) media, often fueled by enemy propaganda -- those very "wire reports" of which the Journal is so disdainful -- are generally considered more credible in the region.

Which brings me around to my point, which is this: more than just creating additional enemies through the death of innocents, one of the major down-sides to a continued drone campaign is that it underlines the Pakistani government's inability to exercise sovereignty and control over its own territory. If we recognize that the very most fundamental imperative of our engagement in South Asia is the prevention of regime collapse and security of nuclear weapons in Pakistan, then this concern is magnified.

Proponents of an assassination-from-the-air campaign typically try to gloss over more sophisticated objections by arguing that the deaths of some small number of civilians (certainly smaller than what's reported in the news, I tell you!) are justified by the significance of the targets we've eliminated. But sometimes you lose even when you win.