Category: News

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At the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, retired/fired General Stanley McChrystal gave a ringing endorsement of drone warfare, only to subsequently mention, footnote-style, that the so-called precision bombing of drones don’t always spare civilians. “We should be using drones a lot,” he said. But “We need to understand what drones are not.”

The Atlantic’s John Hudson:

[McChrystal] described a chilling account of the wrongful execution of a civilan farmer in Afghanistan by a U.S. drone strike. “We fired a missile and killed him and found out he was a farmer,” McChrystal said. After the assassination, McChystal replayed the event to Afghan President Hamid Karzai on a laptop who told McChystal the farmer was engaged in routine irrigation work just prior to the missile strike–an activity the U.S. military should’ve been familiar with. “You have to know these sorts of things,” McChrystal told the crowd.

A loose-lipped general is an enlightening thing. Remember, McChrystal also explained matter-of-factly to the New York Times how the US military “have shot an amazing number of people [in Afghanistan], but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.” He also, rather adroitly, explained the logic of what he called “insurgent math.” That is, “for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.”

The talk of drones being “precise” is mostly ideological. The term is used as if it isn’t inherently relative, but it must be. Relative to an atom bomb, drones are “precise.” Relative to a sniper rifle, drones are…what?

The state and the military always claim their weapons are precise. In WWII, the US parted with the British in their night time carpet bombings of civilian areas. New technology, they said, made it possible to do “precision bombing.” The Norden bombsight, which could calculate the bomb’s trajectory for accuracy, was said to have been able to hit a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet.

But “in reality,” writes Yuki Tanaka in Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History, “‘precision bombing’ was a euphemism, as the bombs regularly fell at least a quarter mile from the target.” The US Strategic Bombing Survey, issued in September 1945 concluded that “in the over-all, only about 20% of the bombs aimed at precision targets fell within this target area.”

The propaganda about our military being humanitarian and our bombs being precise is the same now as it was then. The reason the dogma about the “precision” of drones is so widespread throughout the public, is because not enough US generals make a point to mention the mistaken killings of civilian farmers in rural Afghanistan.

Dexter Filkin’s writes in the New Yorker about the potential for civil war to break out in Afghanistan once the US “leaves” in 2014. He interviews Abdul Nasir, who was present in Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded and witnessed what happened when they left. What happened was civil conflict and warlordism throughout the 1990s, leading to effective Taliban control over most, but not all, of the country.

…with the United States planning its withdrawal by the end of 2014, Nasir blames the Americans for a string of catastrophic errors. “The Americans have failed to build a single sustainable institution here,” he said. “All they have done is make a small group of people very rich. And now they are getting ready to go.”

These days, Nasir said, the nineties are very much on his mind. The announced departure of American and NATO combat troops has convinced him and his friends that the civil war, suspended but never settled, is on the verge of resuming. “Everyone is preparing,” he said. “It will be bloodier and longer than before, street to street. This time, everyone has more guns, more to lose. It will be the same groups, the same commanders.” Hezb-e-Wahdat and Jamiat-e-Islami and Hezb-e-Islami and Junbish—all now political parties—are rearming. The Afghan Army is unlikely to be able to restore order as it did in the time of Najibullah.

…Nashir grew increasingly vehement. “Mark my words, the moment the Americans leave, the civil war will begin,” he said. “This country will be divided into twenty-five or thirty fiefdoms, each with its own government.”

The glaring reality of impending civil war will undoubtedly be used as a justification for maintaining increased US troop levels in Afghanistan. If and when that argument fails, due either to budgetary constraints or lack of political will and public support, the same glaring reality will be used to justify tens of thousands of troops and Special Operations Forces beyond 2014 and continued propping up of the Kabul government and its defunct security forces.

That the war is a failure is known to everybody. As Filkins writes, “After eleven years, nearly two thousand Americans killed, sixteen thousand Americans wounded, nearly four hundred billion dollars spent, and more than twelve thousand Afghan civilians dead since 2007, the war in Afghanistan has come to this: the United States is leaving, mission not accomplished.” The Taliban actually control entire parts of the country, where they “collect taxes, maintain law and order, and adjudicate disputes,” Filkins writes. Nasir tells Filkins, the “country will be divided into twenty-five or thirty fiefdoms, each with its own government,” as soon as they Americans leave.

The bulwark against a return to Taliban rule, we are told by the Obama administration, is continuing to support, arm, and train the Afghan security forces. But as a former US official told Filkins, “several hundred soldiers in the Afghan Army are thought to be agents for the Taliban or for Pakistan.” He “said that the killers of some of the twenty-two coalition soldiers who died this year while training Afghan forces had been planted in the Army by the Taliban or by Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s main intelligence branch.” Those that aren’t Taliban are weak and ineffectual.

In Foreign Affairs, Christopher Swift attempts to debunk what he calls the “drone blowback fallacy.” After visiting Yemen and investigating the issue himself, he argues that US drone attacks aren’t a significant motivator of al-Qaeda recruits.

Last month, I traveled to Yemen to study how AQAP operates and whether the conventional understanding of the relationship between drones and recruitment is correct. While there, I conducted 40 interviews with tribal leaders, Islamist politicians, Salafist clerics, and other sources…But to my astonishment, none of the individuals I interviewed drew a causal relationship between U.S. drone strikes and al Qaeda recruiting. Indeed, of the 40 men in this cohort, only five believed that U.S. drone strikes were helping al Qaeda more than they were hurting it.

…As much as al Qaeda might play up civilian casualties and U.S. intervention in its recruiting videos, the Yemeni tribal leaders I spoke to reported that the factors driving young men into the insurgency are overwhelmingly economic.

There is countervailing evidence of a very similar sort. The Washington Post reported in May precisely the opposite findings, although the methodologies appear to be similar.

an unintended consequence of the attacks has been a marked radicalization of the local population.

The evidence of radicalization emerged in more than 20 interviews with tribal leaders, victims’ relatives, human rights activists and officials from four provinces in southern Yemen where U.S. strikes have targeted suspected militants. They described a strong shift in sentiment toward militants affiliated with the transnational network’s most active wing, al-Qaeda in the ­Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.

…”These attacks are making people say, ‘We believe now that al-Qaeda is on the right side,'” said businessman Salim al-Barakani, adding that his two brothers — one a teacher, the other a cellphone repairman — were killed in a U.S. strike in March.

The difference in results here probably has a lot to do with the demographics of people each investigation targeted for questioning, as well as the questions asked. I don’t doubt that, as Swift’s analysis provides, many al-Qaeda recruits in Yemen do it for economic reasons. But there seems to be evidence agreeing with the Post’s findings embedded within Swift’s findings. Swift reports that “ordinary Yemenis see the drones as an affront to their national pride.” Well, yes, affronts to national pride have been known throughout history to motivate revenge attacks. A tribal militia commander explained to Swift that Yemenis could “accept [drones] as long as there are no more civilian casualties.” Except that they continue to kill civilians and those ill-defined as militants.

The reality is that the evidence supporting the notion that al-Qaeda recruits are motivated by drones gets even more concrete. The so-called Christmas Day Underwear Bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attempted a botched suicide attack on an American airliner. It is widely understood to be one of the closest calls in the catalogue of post-9/11 terrorist attacks. Abdulmutallab explicitly cited drones and general US militarism in Yemen and other Muslim countries to be a motivating factor in his attack.  In his court statement, Abdulmutallab said it was “in retaliation of the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Palestine, especially in the blockade of Gaza, and in retaliation for the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and beyond, most of them women, children, and noncombatants.” Abdulmutallab claimed to have made contact with Anwar al-Awlaki. Here’s was Awlaki had to say about the Christmas Day plot: “The more crimes America commits the more mujahedeen will be recruited to fight against it. The operation of our brother Umar Farouk was in retaliation to American cruise missiles and cluster bombs that killed the women and children in Yemen.”

Let’s also consider the other most high-profile attempted attack on US soil, carried out by Faisal Shahzad, the so-called Times Square Bomber. In his court statement, Shahzad said he wanted to put a stop to “the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and…the occupation of Muslim lands.” Killing American civilians in Times Square was justified, he said, because the drones, “they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims….I am part of the answer to the US terrorising the Muslim nations. I’m avenging the attacks…”

Abdulmutallab was a Nigerian who flew to various countries in order to get involved in the Yemen-inspired jihad against US aggression, while Shahzad was a Pakistani American who was in Pakistan’s tribal areas during drone strikes. Admittedly, they are not the typical Yemenis turning to al-Qaeda. And we should not be too surprised if those Yemenis interviewed by Swift did not explicitly draw a connection between drones and al-Qaeda recruitment. Most of those Yemenis are very poor, very uneducated and are faced with, as Swift puts it, “the best of several bad options” with al-Qaeda, which has been trying very hard to provide services and a chance out of poverty for loyal locals.

But clearly, they are not currently the greatest threat to the US. The closest things to successful terrorist attacks on the American homeland of late are the homegrown or Abdulmutallab type. The Yemeni locals who choose al-Qaeda in order to receive their $400 per month are the ones that will continue fighting an insurgency against US forces and US-trained Yemeni forces for the foreseeable future. But the real threat comes from people who want to avenge Washington’s constant bloodletting and bombing in Yemen and beyond.

Experts generally agree that the constant drone strikes in Yemen do serve as a recruitment tool for al-Qaeda and are successful as such. And as the Yemeni youth activist Ibrahim Mothana recently wrote in the New York Times, “Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology but rather by a sense of revenge and despair.” Swift’s case is hardly closed and shut. It’s well known that drone attacks in Pakistan have spawned a generation of anti-American sentiment. And the Yemen situation is still evolving.

Update: Just to add one more thing which should be obvious but often needs reiteration in debates like these, the issue of blowback is not necessarily the fundamental issue in the context of the Obama administration’s drone strikes. Even if Swift’s conclusions were true, which they obviously aren’t, and there was no risk of blowback, it would still be outrageously unacceptable for the President of the United States to create kill lists, launch drone strikes into non-warzones, against people they suspect of having ties to militant groups even though they can’t even identify their targets most of the time. The fact that this is strategically counterproductive is secondary to its moral and legal offense.