The Unblinking Stare Nov 24, 2014 - As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton wholeheartedly backed the drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen
The drone war in Pakistan.
By Steve Coll
At
the Pearl Continental Hotel, in Peshawar, a concrete tower enveloped by
flowering gardens, the management has adopted security precautions that
have become common in Pakistan’s upscale hospitality industry: razor
wire, vehicle barricades, and police crouching in bunkers, fingering
machine guns. In June, on a hot weekday morning, Noor Behram arrived at
the gate carrying a white plastic shopping bag full of photographs. He
had a four-inch black beard and wore a blue shalwar kameez and a flat
Chitrali hat. He met me in the lobby. We sat down, and Behram spilled
his photos onto a table. Some of the prints were curled and faded. For
the past seven years, he said, he has driven around North Waziristan on a
small red Honda motorcycle, visiting the sites of American drone
missile strikes as soon after an attack as possible.
Behram
is a journalist from North Waziristan, in northwestern Pakistan, and
also works as a private investigator. He has been documenting the drone
attacks for the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, a Pakistani nonprofit
that is seeking redress for civilian casualties. In the beginning, he
said, he had no training and only a cheap camera. I picked up a photo
that showed Behram outdoors, in a mountainous area, holding up a
shredded piece of women’s underwear. He said it was taken during his
first investigation, in June, 2007, after an aerial attack on a training
camp. American and Pakistani newspapers reported at the time that drone
missiles had killed Al Qaeda-linked militants. There were women nearby
as well. Although he was unable to photograph the victims’ bodies, he
said, “I found charred, torn women’s clothing—that was the evidence.”
Since
then, he went on, he has photographed about a hundred other sites in
North Waziristan, creating a partial record of the dead, the wounded,
and their detritus. Many of the faces before us were young. Behram said
he learned from conversations with editors and other journalists that if
a drone missile killed an innocent adult male civilian, such as a
vegetable vender or a fruit seller, the victim’s long hair and beard
would be enough to stereotype him as a militant. So he decided to focus
on children.
Many of the prints had
dates scrawled on the back. I looked at one from September 10, 2010. It
showed a bandaged boy weeping; he appeared to be about seven years old.
There was a photo of a girl with a badly broken arm, and one of another
boy, also in tears, apparently sitting in a hospital. A print from
August 23, 2010, showed a dead boy of perhaps ten, the son of an Afghan
refugee named Bismillah Khan, who lived near a compound associated with
the Taliban fighting group known as the Haqqani network. The boy’s skull
had been bashed in.
Armed
drones are slow-moving pilotless aircraft equipped with cameras,
listening devices, and air-to-ground missiles. They can hover over their
targets for hours, transmitting video feed of the scene below, and then
strike suddenly. They can be flown by remote control from great
distances. The models used by the C.I.A.—the Predator and the
Reaper—look like giant robotic flying bugs, with unusual flaps and
pole-like protrusions. Pilots steer them and fire missiles while sitting
before video monitors; during a C.I.A. mission over Pakistan, a pilot
might be at a base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, or as far away as Nevada.
Last
year, in a speech at the National Defense University, President Obama
acknowledged that American drones had killed civilians. He called these
incidents “heartbreaking tragedies,” which would haunt him and those in
his chain of command for “as long as we live.” But he went on to defend
drones as the most discriminating aerial bombers available in modern
warfare—preferable to piloted aircraft or cruise missiles. Jets and
missiles cannot linger to identify and avoid noncombatants before
striking, and, the President said, they are likely to cause “more
civilian casualties and more local outrage.”
The
President’s commitment to what his Administration calls “surgical
strikes” against terrorists and guerrillas has come to define his
approach to war and counterterrorism. The decision to enter into a
conflict with the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS,
in which a precision air war, including the use of drones, figures
heavily, is the latest, and perhaps the riskiest, manifestation of a
growing reliance on targeted air strikes to manage terrorist threats.
The strategy against ISIS is derived from the President’s
experience commanding the C.I.A.’s drone war in Pakistan, and from
similar but less active drone campaigns in Yemen and Somalia.
The conflict with ISIS
once again pits the world’s most technologically advanced military
against a stateless guerrilla group. In such a contest, civilian
casualties are not only a moral issue; they constitute a front in a
social-media contest over justice and credibility. This summer, when the
Administration opened its air assault in northern Iraq, ISIS media specialists tweeted photos of children who reportedly had been killed and wounded earlier by American drones in Yemen.
Obama’s
advocacy of drones has widespread support in Washington’s
foreign-policy and defense establishments. As Secretary of State,
Hillary Clinton wholeheartedly backed the drone campaigns in Pakistan
and Yemen. Republican hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who
otherwise criticize the President as effete and indecisive, are also
enthusiastic. But do drones actually represent a humanitarian advance in
air combat? Or do they create a false impression of exactitude? And do
they really serve the best interests of the United States?
Pakistan
has absorbed more drone strikes—some four hundred—than any other
country, and has been a test bed for the Administration’s hypotheses
about the future of American airpower. Between mid-2008 and mid-2013,
C.I.A.-operated drones waged what amounted to an undeclared, remotely
controlled air war over North and South Waziristan, a sparse borderland
populated almost entirely by ethnic Pashtuns. As the campaign evolved,
it developed a dual purpose: to weaken Al Qaeda, and to suppress Taliban
fighters who sought to cross into Afghanistan to attack American troops
after Obama ordered a “surge” of forces there, in December, 2009.
(Drone strikes continue in Pakistan; seventeen have been reported so far
this year.) The drone war in Pakistan took place during an increasingly
toxic, mutually resentful period in the long, unhappy chronicle of
relations between the United States and Pakistan. To many Pakistanis,
including Army officers and intelligence officials in the Inter-Services
Intelligence Directorate, or I.S.I., drone strikes have symbolized
American arrogance. Within the C.I.A. and the White House, a belief took
hold that Pakistani generals and intelligence chiefs were unreliable
partners in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Administration
officials concluded that since Pakistan wouldn’t help adequately to
protect U.S. soldiers and American cities, they would send drones to do
the job.
President Obama and
C.I.A. officials characterize the drone campaign as a major success,
because it significantly reduced the ability of “core Al Qaeda”—the
organization founded by Osama bin Laden—to carry out terrorism on
American soil and against American and British aviation. Moreover,
Obama’s advisers argue, the drone war achieved this while inflicting few
civilian casualties. And, they say, the machines helped the United
States avoid conventional bombing or ground raids in Pakistan, which
would have put American troops at risk and created even greater chaos
and anger in an unstable country that possesses more than a hundred
nuclear weapons.
In a 2012 report
that was based on nine months of data analysis and field interviews, a
team of law students from New York University and Stanford concluded
that the dominant narrative in the U.S. about the use of drones in
Pakistan—“a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the United
States safer by enabling ‘targeted killing’ of terrorists, with minimal
downsides or collateral impacts”—is false. The researchers found that
C.I.A.-operated drones were nowhere near as discriminating toward
noncombatants as the agency’s leaders have claimed. Various estimates
have put the civilian death toll in the hundreds. An analysis of media
reports by the New America Foundation concluded that drones probably
killed some two hundred and fifty to three hundred civilians in the
decade leading up to 2014. Researchers working under Chris Woods at the
London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism conducted field
interviews to supplement a separate analysis of media reporting. They
estimated that American drones killed between four hundred and nine
hundred and fifty civilians.
The
C.I.A.’s position is that these nongovernmental counts are much too high
and have been influenced, if inadvertently, by Pakistani government and
Taliban propaganda. Early last year, the White House reviewed an
internal classified count compiled by the C.I.A. of civilian deaths from
drone strikes. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Select
Committee on Intelligence, disclosed the count’s existence at a
congressional hearing. She said that classified documents showed that
civilian deaths caused by C.I.A. drones each year were “typically in the
single digits.” The review remains unpublished—in part, a former
Administration official said, because the White House couldn’t resolve
internal debates about the reliability of its methodology. There was
also reluctance to publish a specific number, since it would only invite
more questions and might expose the scope of classified drone
operations. (A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.)
The
proportion of civilians compared to combatants killed on the ground
during American wars since Vietnam has been disputed by researchers. But
even the most conservative estimates of civilian casualties place the
ratio at one-to-one. In the 1999 NATO-led war in Serbia,
where jets used laser-guided and other precision bombs, around five
hundred Serbian civilians and three hundred Serbian soldiers were
killed, according to the Independent International Commission on Kosovo.
The total death toll from drone strikes in Pakistan is estimated at
between two thousand and four thousand. Even if one accepts a civilian
death toll of nine hundred and fifty-seven—the highest nongovernmental
estimate—drones have probably spared more civilians than American jets
have in past air wars. And if the numbers Feinstein cited are accurate,
drones killed more than twenty fighters for every civilian—a huge leap
in precision. Nevertheless, even by that estimate hundreds of families
in North and South Waziristan would have suffered the death of an
innocent—hardly the foundation for an imagined new age of less
provocative American bombing.
There
are many reasons to be skeptical of the C.I.A.’s unpublished, lower
estimate. According to former Obama Administration officials, the
C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, which oversees the agency’s drone
operations, generates an after-action report, which includes an
assessment of whether there was collateral damage. The center has a
specialized, independent group that conducts post-strike investigations.
The investigators grade the performances of their colleagues and
bosses—not exactly a recipe for objectivity. But it seems clear that,
over time, the Administration’s record improved significantly in
avoiding civilian casualties.
In
2008, the last year of the Bush Administration, at least one child was
reported killed in a third of all C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan,
according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism—a shocking
percentage, if it is accurate. In Obama’s first year in office, the
figure was twenty per cent—still very high. By 2012, it was five per
cent.
Former participants in drone
operations attribute the improvement in part to a second-generation
armed drone, the Reaper, which allowed operators to scrutinize targets
for longer periods on a single flight. Earlier drones carried
five-foot-long Hellfire missiles, originally designed to destroy battle
tanks; over time, the accuracy of Hellfires improved. The Reaper can
also fire a missile, known as the Small Smart Weapon, that is less than
two feet long and can take out an individual without killing people in
the next room. Strike statistics suggest that, as the C.I.A. improved
its procedures for sparing noncombatants, operators fired less often at
private homes in North Waziristan, where women and children might also
be present. After September, 2010, drones attacked suspected militants
riding in vehicles more often than before. “There have been multiple
improvements to tailor warheads’ blast radiuses to meet particular
target characteristics,” David Deptula, who served as a deputy chief of
staff for intelligence in the Air Force’s drone program until 2010,
said.
Exactly why and how this
change may have been ordered, like much else about the evolution of
drone warfare, remains an official secret. The Obama Administration has
shielded from public examination essential facts about how often
targeting failed and innocents died, and why. In the Bush Administration
and the Obama Administration alike, secrecy has defeated public candor
and accountability.
Shortly
after American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon, on September 11,
2001, computers at the C.I.A. flashed an instruction: “Immediate
Evacuation.” From the seventh floor of the Old Headquarters Building,
John Rizzo, the agency’s highest-ranking career lawyer, watched traffic
jams form at the exits from the agency’s campus. He decided to stay put,
as he recounted in a recent memoir. It was clear that the country had
suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack, almost certainly by Al
Qaeda, which the C.I.A. had been pursuing for several years. Rizzo took
out a yellow legal pad and scribbled notes for what he assumed the
agency would now require: a new Memorandum of Notification, or M.O.N., a
bedrock document of any C.I.A. covert-action program.
A
C.I.A. covert action seeks to surreptitiously influence events abroad
while allowing the United States to deny the project’s existence. The
National Security Act of 1947 legalized covert action as long as a
President finds that it does not violate the Constitution or U.S. law
and is required to protect the nation. A President must sign a written
“Finding” that authorizes the program. Memorandums of Notification are
highly classified follow-on documents—specific orders from a President
to the C.I.A. describing the scope and the necessity of the operation.
They can be concise, sometimes as short as a single page.
On
September 17, 2001, President George W. Bush signed a new
counterterrorism M.O.N., partly based on Rizzo’s input. It was “multiple
pages” in length, according to Rizzo. He had worked at the C.I.A. since
1976 and he regarded this document as the “most comprehensive, most
ambitious, most aggressive, and most risky Finding or M.O.N. I was ever
involved in.” Among its provisions, “one short paragraph” authorized
targeted killings of Al Qaeda terrorists and their allies. “The language
was simple and stark.” That paragraph became the foundation for the
C.I.A.’s drone operations.
George
Tenet, the agency’s director at the time, supplemented the M.O.N. with
internal guidelines that set down in greater detail how an individual
believed to be actively involved in terrorist plots could be nominated
and approved for capture or killing. Among other things, the guidelines
instructed drone supervisors to avoid civilian casualties “to the
maximum extent possible,” according to a former senior intelligence
official. It was a decidedly lawyerly and elastic standard.
Pakistan’s
President, Pervez Musharraf, an Army general who had seized power in a
1999 coup, became a trusted partner as the Bush Administration’s Global
War on Terror unfolded. When American-led forces invaded Afghanistan, in
the fall of 2001, many Al Qaeda leaders and foot soldiers—Arabs,
Uzbeks, Chechens—escaped into Pakistan. They settled mainly in a region
known as FATA, for Federally Administered Tribal Areas,
which includes North and South Waziristan and has been a staging ground
for jihadist warfare since the nineteen-seventies. Pakistan’s generals
and politicians, who come mainly from the country’s dominant, more
developed province of Punjab, treated Waziristan’s residents “as if they
were tribes that were living in the Amazon,” the journalist Abubakar
Siddique, who grew up in the region and is the author of “The Pashtun
Question,” told me.
In 2002,
Musharraf sent Pakistan’s Army into South Waziristan to quell Al Qaeda
and local sympathizers. In 2004, the Army intensified its operations,
and, as violence spread, Musharraf allowed the C.I.A. to fly drones to
support Pakistani military action. In exchange, Musharraf told me, the
Bush Administration “supplied us helicopters with precision weapons and
night-operating capability.” He added, “The problem was intelligence
collection and targeting. . . . The Americans brought the drones to
bear.”
Musharraf allowed the C.I.A.
to operate drones out of a Pakistani base in Baluchistan. He told me
that he often urged Bush Administration officials, “Give the drones to
Pakistan.” That was not possible, he was told, “because of
high-technology transfer restrictions.”
On
June 17, 2004, a C.I.A. drone killed Nek Muhammad, a Pakistani jihadi
leader in Wana, in South Waziristan, who had coöperated with Al Qaeda
and led attacks against the Pakistani military. That strike and three
subsequent ones in North Waziristan during 2005 were carried out with
prior approval from I.S.I., a senior C.I.A. official who served in the
region told me. “I would show them the Predator footage and I would say,
‘This is what is happening—massive training camps.’ ” He added, “Every
one of these shots was with Pakistani approval.”
For
several years, the Bush Administration used drone strikes sparingly. At
the C.I.A., according to Brian Glyn Williams, a historian at the
University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth (his book “Predators: The
C.I.A.’s Drone War on Al Qaeda” was published last year), some career
officers were reluctant to use drones, because they had “seen the agency
burned in the past.” Some also feared that too many strikes would
destabilize Pakistan and jeopardize Musharraf’s position.
In
2006, Bush chose Michael Hayden, a former Air Force general, to be the
agency’s director. The Counterterrorism Center also got a new leader.
His cover name, which has been reported elsewhere, is Roger. Former
colleagues describe him as an acerbic, chain-smoking convert to Islam.
At a time when Al Qaeda showed signs of revived potency, he argued that
drone strikes could weaken its leadership and prevent terrorist attacks
on the United States.
That year, an
Uzbek militant who had been arrested and detained in Afghanistan told
his American interrogators that they should check out the bottom of the
wheeled duffel he had been toting when he was taken in. They pulled the
bag out of storage and found, according to a senior government official
involved in the case, “an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper,
folded up,” in a hole next to the wheel. It contained Al Qaeda’s “code
system,” the official said—that is, code words used in radio and
cell-phone communications to discuss meeting arrangements and plans for
violent operations.
The paper also
mapped militants’ facilities in the vicinity of Miranshah, one of North
Waziristan’s main towns, the official recalled. The breakthrough led to
an ambitious mapping and analysis effort involving satellite photography
of Miranshah residences. The National Security Agency searched for the
code words in archived transcripts of intercepted phone calls, in order
to discover undetected plots and to pinpoint the locations of Al Qaeda
leaders. Soon, this effort was also supporting American drone strikes in
North Waziristan.
In
July, 2008, President Bush approved a plan, proposed by Hayden, to
increase drone strikes on Pakistani soil, mainly in North and South
Waziristan. Taliban fighters were pouring into Afghanistan from fata,
without much interference from Pakistan, to attack American troops.
“These sons of bitches are killing Americans. I’ve had enough,” Bush
told Hayden, according to Bob Woodward’s “Obama’s Wars” (2010). No
longer would the United States seek permission from Pakistan to strike
or notify Pakistani generals in advance. (Musharraf, who had been
coddled and protected by Bush for years, was facing impeachment and
resigned a month later.)
Hayden
approved changes to the internal C.I.A. targeting and strike guidelines.
These changes gave rise to what would become known as “signature
strikes.” The new rules allowed drone operators to fire at armed
military-aged males engaged in or associated with suspicious activity
even if their identities were unknown. (To justify this looser approach,
a former Administration official said, C.I.A. lawyers relied on
instructions in an M.O.N. that permitted strikes on terrorist property
and facilities.)
Signature strikes
are “not a concept known to international humanitarian law,” according
to Christof Heyns, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial,
summary, or arbitrary executions. The proper standard for attacking a
person under the laws of war is whether the person has a “continuous
combat function” or is “directly participating in hostilities.” If a
signature strike rests on “targeting without sufficient information to
make the necessary determination, it is clearly unlawful,” Heyns argues
in a 2013 report submitted to the U.N. General Assembly. The Obama
Administration’s position is that, relying on intelligence sources, the
C.I.A.’s remote operators could determine whether armed men were
involved in violence directed against American personnel and interests.
Under the laws of war, which the Administration asserted were applicable
in fata, it isn’t necessary to know the names of enemy guerrillas before attacking.
After
mid-2008, the drone program changed quickly into a more conventional,
if unacknowledged, air war. In the three months between August and
October, drones struck North and South Waziristan at least twenty
times—more strikes than in the previous four years. The C.I.A.’s
operators repeatedly hit Al Qaeda or Taliban targets when women and
children were present. On September 8, 2008, missiles demolished a North
Waziristan home belonging to Jalaluddin Haqqani, the defiantly
anti-American leader of the Haqqani network. He was absent, but Al
Qaeda’s chief in Pakistan, Abu Haris, was reportedly killed. Eight women
and five children also died, according to a ledger of drone strikes
maintained by the FATA government. The ledger records ten
other cases of civilian casualties between September and December of
2008. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, children were
killed in seven of these instances. When I asked Hayden about those
statistics, he replied, “The C.I.A. never had to be reminded of the
value of human life. I’m a G.I. and I know the laws of armed conflict:
Necessity, distinction, and proportionality are the three rules.” Hayden
declined to comment specifically about the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism
program in Pakistan, but he added that unmanned aerial vehicles provide
“an unblinking stare at a target and the opportunity to be incredibly
precise.”
In
November, Hayden briefed President-elect Obama. According to Gregory
Craig, who subsequently joined the new Administration as White House
counsel, “Hayden had obviously spent a lot of time, energy, and
intellectual resources preparing to explain the drone program—to
reassure us about why it was such a successful counterterrorism tool.”
Hayden’s presentation was effective, Craig said. “I walked out of there
convinced.”
On
January 23, 2009, three days after Obama took office, two C.I.A. drones
struck inside Pakistan—one in South Waziristan and one in North
Waziristan. Both attacks reportedly killed civilians. The strike in
North Waziristan hit a private home in the village of Zeraki. According
to an affidavit from two witnesses, filed in a complaint to the United
Nations Human Rights Council, the dead included an eighth-grade boy and
schoolteachers. The South Waziristan strike killed a pro-government
peace negotiator who was a tribal leader and four of his family members,
entirely in error, according to “Kill or Capture” (2012), a book about
Obama’s counterterrorism policy by the former Newsweek reporter Daniel Klaidman.
According
to Klaidman, John Brennan, at the time Obama’s counterterrorism
adviser, briefed the President about the South Waziristan mistake and
Obama asked how it could have happened, given the weapons’ supposed
pinpoint accuracy. The President delivered sharp words to C.I.A.
officials about the targeting error. Yet he ordered no changes in drone
targeting rules at the time, Klaidman reported.
Brennan
was a career C.I.A. analyst and a former station chief in Riyadh. He
had advised Obama during the 2008 Presidential campaign. Invited to join
the Administration, he supported and managed his former agency’s
advocacy of the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. Brennan also
had the experience and the gravitas to push back at the C.I.A. Obama
grew to trust him deeply on counterterrorism policy, according to former
Administration officials.
To
succeed Hayden as the agency’s director, Obama selected Leon Panetta, a
former chairman of the House Budget Committee, who was known for his
bluntness. During the Clinton Administration, he had headed the Office
of Management and Budget and served as White House chief of staff. He
had barely any intelligence experience. New C.I.A. directors, especially
those who are outsiders, are typically advised not to alienate career
C.I.A. officers serving on the front lines. Unlike F.B.I. directors, who
are appointed to ten-year terms, C.I.A. directors come and go; the
agency’s bureaucracy has learned to outlast them. Counterterrorism
Center leaders saw the drone campaign as their most important operation,
and Panetta backed them fully. As he familiarized himself with the
C.I.A., Panetta judged the Counterterrorism Center to be “very
effective, well run, well resourced, well managed,” a former
Administration official told me. In 2009, Panetta oversaw some fifty
lethal drone attacks; more than half of them produced civilian deaths,
according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. “American policy
was to avoid civilian casualties wherever possible,” Panetta wrote in
his recently published memoir. An operation that deliberately targeted
women or children alongside terrorist suspects “was to be authorized
only under extraordinary circumstances.” Panetta described cases in
which he gave such permission, while seeking to “balance duty to country
and respect for life.”
In December,
2009, a Jordanian doctor whom the C.I.A. had recruited as an agent
inside Al Qaeda blew himself up at an American base in Khost,
Afghanistan, killing six agency officers and a contractor. He had really
been working for the Pakistani Taliban. The attack was “a big emotional
moment for Panetta,” the former Administration official said. The
following year, the number of drone strikes inside Pakistan doubled.
“The C.I.A. really went to war,” a participant in White House
discussions about the attacks recalled, and Brennan and Obama were
supportive. “The White House stood back.”
At
dusk in Islamabad one evening early this summer, I drove to Fatima
Jinnah Park, a vast expanse of footpaths, fields, and eucalyptus trees.
It was filled with strolling couples and families on picnics. An
acquaintance had arranged a meeting with half a dozen young men from
North Waziristan, most of them university students, who had lived
through parts of the American drone war in their home villages and
towns. In a coffee shop, we sat on plastic chairs in a semicircle and
ordered soft drinks. The young men wore polo shirts and bluejeans. Most
of them came from relatively privileged tribal families that had
suffered during the Taliban’s rise to power in Waziristan. The students
asked me not to identify them.
Some
had come of age as Taliban volunteers. One said that, after 2001, when
he was ten or eleven, he carried plastic buckets from house to house to
collect money for the organization. Taliban warriors were seen as
heroes. “Our parents went to the jihad during the nineteen-eighties,” a
student said. He meant the C.I.A.-backed campaign against the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan. “Eight or ten years ago, we were all in favor
of the Taliban.”
That changed. One
young man described how the Taliban had kidnapped his father for ransom.
Others talked of arbitrary rules and detentions once the Taliban
asserted power, after 2007, when they were teen-agers. “We are between
two extremes,” another student said. “We face regular forces and we also
face irregular forces with long hair, beards, and their codes of
conduct. It was very difficult to resist them. They imposed their own
brand of Islam. If you did not coöperate, you were kidnapped, you were
beheaded.”
The Taliban are
“terrorists,” he continued. But he considered the United States a
greater menace, because, as the world’s leading military power, it
“controlled all of this, or could have.” But America pursued its own
objectives, he said, mainly with drone strikes. “Our economy has been
destroyed, our social structure has been destroyed.”
“The
drones create a lot of misery in our area,” one student said. “So do
the Arabs.” He meant Al Qaeda. “Why are the Arabs coming to our country?
Why are they not fighting in their own countries? But we also say to
America: If you say the Taliban are terrorists, yes, we agree. They are.
But who created them?”
As
night fell and we talked on, some of the young men acknowledged that
the drone strikes they had seen or heard about from family members have
been highly accurate. A few thought that drones offered a better way to
bomb Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders in their home towns than F-16s flown
by Pakistani pilots, whose bombing could be much more erratic, placing
more local civilians at risk. But they also talked about the suffering
their families had endured—kidnappings, homes abandoned under
pressure—and their own struggles to obtain an education. In their
telling, the relative precision of the aircraft that assailed them
wasn’t the point.
Being
attacked by a drone is not the same as being bombed by a jet. With
drones, there is typically a much longer prelude to violence. Above
North Waziristan, drones circled for hours, or even days, before
striking. People below looked up to watch the machines, hovering at
about twenty thousand feet, capable of unleashing fire at any moment,
like dragon’s breath. “Drones may kill relatively few, but they terrify
many more,” Malik Jalal, a tribal leader in North Waziristan, told me.
“They turned the people into psychiatric patients. The F-16s might be
less accurate, but they come and go.”
Predator and Reaper drones emit what, on the ground, sounds like a flat, gnawing buzz. (Locals sometimes refer to a drone as a bangana,
a Pashto word for “wasp.”) “In the night, we have seen many times the
missile streaking,” Ihsan Dawar, a Pakistani reporter from North
Waziristan, told me. “It creates a whoosh-like sound coming out.”
The
targeted killing of Taliban and Al Qaeda members had a boomerang
effect: it spurred the militants to try to identify spies who might have
betrayed them. Around North Waziristan’s main towns, Miranshah and Mir
Ali, which took the brunt of the strikes, paranoia spread.
The
Taliban blamed local maliks, government-subsidized tribal leaders who
had long presided over the area’s war economy—smuggling, arms dealing,
mining, and government contracting—often by engaging in corruption.
Taliban gunmen seeking control of local rackets executed maliks and
their family members in the hundreds. In local bazaars, the Taliban
distributed DVDs of their socially superior victims confessing that they
had spied for C.I.A. drone operators.
The
confessions included elaborate narratives about how the agency
supposedly distributed “chips,” or homing beacons, to local spies. The
spy would toss a chip over a neighbor’s wall or into a Taliban jeep, to
guide drone missiles to it. The men also confessed that the C.I.A. had
given out special pens with invisible ink which were used to mark
Taliban vehicles for destruction.
According
to the accounts of former detainees, the Taliban tortured their
prisoners, so the confessions can hardly be taken at face value. The
Taliban also had a powerful motive to force the maliks to admit to
spying: such confessions “take the edge off the revenge motivation of
the malik’s tribe and family,” a researcher who grew up in North
Waziristan and works in development in Islamabad told me. “People see
the video and say, ‘Oh, well, if he was a spy tossing around chips, then
he deserves to die.’ ”
Homing
beacons are common in policing and espionage. The C.I.A. no doubt uses
such devices. Yet it’s far from clear whether actual C.I.A. spies in
North Waziristan operated by planting chips. The cameras and the
telephone-tracking equipment on drones would also allow the C.I.A. to
identify and follow targets.
“As a
journalist, I haven’t seen any chip,” Dawar told me. “I don’t know if it
has any reality behind it or is just a myth.” Yet many people believe,
he added, that a chip “throws off ultraviolet rays or some kind of magic
ray and the missile comes and hits the target.”
Not
only do many civilians in Waziristan credit the existence of chips but
many Taliban do, too. “Once, when I was home, we had a Taliban commander
come to our guesthouse and ask to spend the night,” the researcher in
Islamabad recalled. “He slept in the guesthouse, but he made his driver
and two guards sleep in the car and stand around it all night to prevent
someone from using the magic pen.”
Families
in North Waziristan typically live within large walled compounds.
Several brothers, their parents, and their extended families might share
a single complex. Each compound may contain a hujra, or
guesthouse, which usually stands just outside the main wall. In the
evening, men gather there to eat dinner and talk war and politics. A
rich man signals his status by building a large hujra with comfortable guest rooms for overnight visitors. The less well-heeled might have a hujra with just two rooms, carpets, rope cots, and cushions.
Taliban and Al Qaeda commanders moved from hujra to hujra
to avoid detection. The available records of drone strikes make clear
that the operators would regularly pick up commanders’ movements, follow
them to a hujra attached to a private home, watch for hours—or
days—and then fire. Many documented strikes took place after midnight,
when the target was presumably not moving, children were asleep, and
visitors would have returned home.
North
Waziristan residents and other Pakistanis I spoke with emphasized how
difficult it would be for a drone operator to distinguish between
circumstances where a Taliban or Al Qaeda commander had been welcomed
into a hujra and where the commander had bullied or forced his way in. If the Taliban “comes to my hujra
and asks for shelter, you have no choice,” Saleem Safi, a journalist
who has travelled extensively in Waziristan, told me. “Now a potential
drone target is living in a guest room or a guesthouse on your compound,
one wall away from your own house and family.”
“You can’t protect your family from a strike on a hujra,”
another resident of North Waziristan said. “Your children will play
nearby. They will even go inside to play.” The researcher in Islamabad
said, “There is always peer pressure, tribal pressure, to be
hospitable.” He went on, “If you say no, you look like a coward and you
lose face. Anyway, you can’t say no to them. If a drone strike does take
place, you are a criminal in the courts of the Taliban,” because you
are suspected of espionage and betrayal. “You are also a criminal to the
government, because you let the commander sleep in your hujra.”
In such a landscape, the binary categories recognized by international
law—combatant or noncombatant—can seem inadequate to describe the
culpability of those who died. Women, children, and the elderly feel
pressure from all sides. A young man of military age holding a gun
outside a hujra might be a motivated Taliban volunteer, a reluctant conscript, or a victim of violent coercion.
During 2009 and 2010, many of the deaths of children and other civilians recorded contemporaneously by the FATA government occurred during strikes on hujras
and homes. Noor Behram’s photography and that of other journalists
occasionally brought the faces of injured or dead children to public
attention, through the Pakistani press and Western human-rights groups.
The photos offered a narrative of civilian suffering and became
propaganda tools for Taliban media outlets. Targeting errors also became
a front in an information war waged by I.S.I. against the United
States.
For decades, I.S.I.
officers have harbored deep ambivalence about their putative allies at
the C.I.A. (According to Pew Research Center opinion polls, a majority
of Pakistanis believe that the United States is an enemy of their
country.) Beginning in 2009, the Obama Administration, led by the
special representative Richard Holbrooke, sought to lessen the mistrust
by launching a “strategic dialogue” with Pakistan’s military and
intelligence leaders, as well as with Pakistan’s weak elected civilian
politicians. By early 2011, however, that effort had failed. In late
January of that year, on a street in Lahore, Raymond Davis, a C.I.A.
contractor, shot and killed two men who he believed were trying to kill
him, touching off a furor. I.S.I. leaders felt that the C.I.A.’s
unilateral operations inside Pakistan had got out of control. Now, when
civilians died in drone strikes, I.S.I. helped to whip up public
protests.
“That anti-American
narrative was basically sponsored by the Army and I.S.I.,” Ahmed Rashid,
a Pakistani journalist and the author of “Descent Into Chaos” (2008),
an investigation of Pakistan’s borderlands after the American invasion
of Afghanistan, told me. “We all knew it was being orchestrated. The
Americans knew, the public knew, the Pakistani media knew. But nobody
said anything. Nobody had the courage to say anything.” In Washington,
evidence that I.S.I. was exploiting C.I.A. strikes to stir anti-American
sentiment reduced what incentives the Obama Administration might have
had to own up to genuine mistakes: to do so would only play into
I.S.I.’s hands.
Still, around this
time, as C.I.A. drone operators became more experienced and the
technology improved, they shifted away from targeting terrorist
“hideouts” and hujras and toward targeting militants’ vehicles, according to the FATA
ledger of drone strikes. Between March and August, 2010, two-thirds of
all C.I.A. drone strikes in North and South Waziristan killed people in
compounds or guesthouses. During the next six months, more than half of
the strikes hit cars, jeeps, or motorcycles.
The
Obama Administration might have benefitted from describing in public
how it was adjusting tactics to spare innocent lives. It might have
investigated reported errors and compensated survivors, as the U.S.
military has done routinely since 2005 whenever it mistakenly kills
civilians in Afghanistan. Instead, the law and the logic of secrecy
surrounding the C.I.A. campaign silenced the Administration. Jon Stewart
riffed freely about drones on “The Daily Show,” but at the State
Department, a former official there recalled, “we didn’t even know if we
were allowed to write the word ‘drone’ in an unclassified e-mail.”
The
real mistake, according to Ahmed Rashid, was that the C.I.A. went along
with Pakistan’s hypocrisy in denying that it knew anything about the
drone program. To cover up Pakistan’s official lies, the United States
undermined its own credibility. “Somewhere along the way, the Americans
should have drawn a line,” Rashid said.
Datta
Khel lies about twenty-five miles southwest of Miranshah, toward the
border with Afghanistan. Near the town’s market and bus depot is an open
area suitable for an assembly. On the morning of March 17, 2011,
roughly thirty-five maliks, government-approved tribal leaders, had
gathered for a jirga, a traditional dispute-resolution meeting. The subject was a feud over a chromite mine.
“There
were two tribes in the area, Manzarkhel and Maddakhel,” the tribal
leader Malik Jalal told me. “The dispute was between these two tribes.
They were taking chromite out, but there was a question of who owned
what.” The Pakistani government knew of the jirga session. Khasadars, or local police, paid by the government, were in attendance, according to court filings.
That
morning, Jalal was a little more than two miles away. “I could see the
drones in the air, and I actually saw the missiles fly and then heard
the explosions,” he said. “When I reached the spot, I saw many body
parts.” The FATA government’s contemporaneous ledger of
strikes recorded that forty-one people died, and it noted, “The attack
was carried out on a jirga and it is feared that all the killed were local tribesmen.”
Angry protests erupted in Pakistan. A few Taliban may have been present at the jirga,
but the majority were not anti-American fighters, Pakistani officials
told reporters at the time. General Ashfaq Kayani, then Pakistan’s Army
chief, issued a rare public statement of dissent about C.I.A.
operations: “It is highly regrettable that a jirga of peaceful
citizens, including elders of the area, was carelessly and callously
targeted with complete disregard to human life.”
The Obama Administration took a hard line. All of the dead were “terrorists,” an anonymous American official told the Times.
“These people weren’t gathering for a bake sale.” The Associated Press
quoted an anonymous official offering the same talking point: “This was a
group of terrorists, not a charity car wash.”
C.I.A. drones had been unusually active in North Waziristan in the days before the jirga
strike. On March 11th, drones struck a “suspected vehicle boarded by
militants,” according to the Pakistani ledger. That evening, a drone
bombed a village. Two days later, a drone blew up a “state car”
travelling across North Waziristan. On March 16th, a drone destroyed a
compound near Datta Khel. From the available evidence, it seems likely
that C.I.A. targeting analysts tracked a suspect to the jirga and then decided to kill everyone present.
Afterward,
Obama ordered a suspension of C.I.A. drone strikes, according to a
former Administration official. No strikes took place in Pakistan for
almost a month. But the former official said that Obama authorized an
exception to his freeze if the C.I.A. located a “high-value target.”
When drones struck South Waziristan, in mid-April, a debate erupted in
the White House about whether the C.I.A. had violated Obama’s order.
Cameron
Munter, the U.S. Ambassador in Islamabad at the time, and now a
professor at Pomona College, had expressed his deep concern to his
intelligence counterparts in both Islamabad and Washington about the
extent of drone killing. Munter believed it had got out of hand and was
destabilizing Pakistan. According to Mark Mazzetti’s “The Way of the
Knife” (2013), Munter thought the timing of the jirga strike
was “disastrous.” After that attack, he argued again to the C.I.A. that
it would be a good time to cool down. “The drone strike on March 17th,
it exploded—it was just huge,” Munter told me. “But, you see, dealing
with people at the C.I.A., when I raised it with them, they said, ‘You
know this is a never-ending war. Whose side are you on?’ ”
If the Raymond Davis case and the jirga attack strained U.S.-Pakistani relations, the Navy SEAL
raid that killed bin Laden, on May 1st, upended them. Kayani and other
top generals felt humiliated that they had not been informed in advance.
The fact that bin Laden had been hiding less than a mile from
Pakistan’s principal military academy raised the obvious question of who
in Pakistan’s establishment might have helped him. In what appeared to
be an assertion of the C.I.A.’s freedom to operate independently in
Pakistan, the agency resumed drone strikes in North Waziristan five days
after the seal raid, at about the same pace as before.
In
June, John Brennan appeared at a public seminar on counterterrorism at
Johns Hopkins University. Clearly referring to drones, he said, “Nearly
for the past year, there hasn’t been a single collateral death, because
of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve
been able to develop.” That claim would have encompassed the jirga
strike and a hundred and twenty other strikes in North and South
Waziristan dating back to the previous summer, including at least a
dozen cases in which nongovernmental researchers have found probable
civilian deaths.
On November 16,
2011, C.I.A. drone operators killed a twenty-three-year-old American
citizen, Jude Kenan Mohammad, during a nighttime signature strike on a
residence in Babar Ghar, in South Waziristan. His death was confirmed
only eighteen months later by Attorney General Eric Holder. The C.I.A.
apparently did not know of Mohammad’s presence in the house.
Mohammad
had come of age in Raleigh, North Carolina, and had fallen in with
aspiring jihadists; his presence at the site of the attack might
indicate that he had become a volunteer soldier. Yet he was not targeted
for death as an individual, and, given his American citizenship, any
deliberate strike on him would likely have to have been authorized only
after an in-depth review overseen by President Obama.
In
April, 2012, George Stephanopoulos questioned Brennan on the subject of
drones: “Do you stand by the statement you have made in the past that,
as effective as they have been, they have not killed a single civilian?
That seems hard to believe.”
“Well,
what I said was that over a period of time before my public remarks that
we had no information about a single civilian, a noncombatant, being
killed,” Brennan replied.
In
fact, Brennan had not used the “no information” formula in his remarks
at Johns Hopkins the previous year. And his epistemological defense
indicated why it has proved impossible to reconcile the large gap
between the Administration’s count of civilian deaths and those of the
Pakistani government and nongovernmental researchers. The C.I.A. has
never explained the criteria it uses to count a drone victim as a
civilian. Nor has it described what sort of interviews or field
research, if any, the agency’s analysts undertake to investigate
possible mistakes. According to a May, 2012, Times article by
Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Obama embraced a disputed method for
counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect
counts all military-age males in a strike zone as
combatants . . . unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously
proving them innocent.” In briefings to congressional intelligence
committees, the C.I.A. has disputed that characterization, saying that
any person deliberately targeted must be associated with a known
fighting group or enemy facility, or else be observed preparing for
violence.
After the interview with
Stephanopoulos, Brennan, during a speech in Washington, further
qualified his claims about the precision of drones. “Despite the
extraordinary precautions we take, civilians have been accidentally
killed,” he said. “It is exceedingly rare, but it has happened.” He
added, “We take it very, very seriously. We go back and we review our
actions.”
By
mid-2012, Obama had ordered Brennan to reassess drone policy. The
following spring, at the National Defense University, the President
announced a new policy for American drone operations, which remains in
effect. The full rulebook is highly classified. Yet Obama did make one
new standard public. Before striking, drone operators must determine to a
“near certainty” that no civilians are in harm’s way—a considerably
tougher standard than the C.I.A.’s original one, which dates to the Bush
Administration.
Ned Price, a
National Security Council spokesman, while declining to discuss any
C.I.A. operations, said that Obama’s “near certainty” standard was “the
highest that we can set.” He added, “In those rare instances in which it
appears noncombatants may have been killed or injured, after-action
reviews have been conducted to determine why, and to insure that we are
taking the most effective steps to minimize such risk to noncombatants
in the future.”
In early 2013, Obama
asked Brennan to lead the C.I.A. The President appointed as Brennan’s
deputy Avril Haines, a National Security Council lawyer who had worked
on drone-strike rules and operations. The number of drone strikes
carried out in Pakistan fell. Since Brennan became C.I.A. director,
according to the data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism, there has not been a single documented civilian casualty,
child or adult, as a result of a drone strike in Waziristan.
Obama’s
experience of drone war—including the criticism he has received from
international lawyers and human-rights groups over civilian
casualties—may have motivated him, last year, to tighten targeting
oversight, albeit in secret and while evading accountability for errors
made early in his Administration. Yet the President and his advisers
don’t seem to accept how little credit the United States is ever likely
to receive from targeted populations just because it chooses to bomb
with more accurate drones. On the ground in North Waziristan, drone war
doesn’t feel much different from other forms of air war, in that many
civilians are displaced and frightened, and suffer loss of life and
property.
Despite the drone
campaign’s measurable successes—diminishing the influence of core Al
Qaeda, the group around bin Laden that once planned international
attacks from Waziristan, and of Al Qaeda in Yemen—the terrorist movement
has assumed new shapes in Syria, North Africa, and elsewhere. Pakistan,
Yemen, and Somalia are still beset by jihadist violence.
In
a research paper published this summer, Micah Zenko and Sarah Kreps,
two scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued that the very
precision of drone technology raises the prospect for “moral hazard.”
The reduction in risks may tempt governments to order drones into action
more frequently than they would conventional bombers or missiles. In
other words, drones may spare more innocents but they may also create
more war.
“I think the greatest
problem is the mentality that accompanies drone strikes,” Philip Alston,
an N.Y.U. law professor who investigated drone attacks for the U.N.
between 2004 and 2010, told me. “The identification of a list of
targets, and if we can succeed in eliminating that list we will have
achieved good things—that mentality is what drives it all: if only we
can get enough of these bastards, we’ll win the war.”
One
Sunday evening in Islamabad, as pre-monsoon storm clouds blew over the
Margalla Hills, I crossed the city’s checkpoints to reach the French
Club, an oasis notable for the imported liquor in its private bar. I
accompanied Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a club member. During the Musharraf
years, Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who was trained in London, investigated
political corruption for the government. Later, he joined a private
firm to serve corporate clients. Four years ago, inspired by an American
human-rights lawyer he met in Pakistan, he decided to leave his law
firm for the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, which he now leads. He
spends his days working with investigators like Noor Behram to collect
photographic evidence and sworn testimony about drone-targeting errors,
and to advance lawsuits against the Pakistani government, the C.I.A.,
and sundry American officials.
Akbar
is a portly man, partly bald, with a Vandyke beard. Like many members
of the Pakistani élite, he is well versed in global media culture. We
discussed “Homeland,” contenders for the 2016 U.S. Presidential
election, and European politics. Later, at his law office, we talked for
hours about drones. What sets Akbar apart from Pakistan’s privileged
class is his passionate advocacy for clients from a population that has
virtually no influence or voice even within Pakistan, let alone in
Washington: the residents of North and South Waziristan who do not wish
to fight in a war.
“When
I enter a party, people say, ‘It’s the Taliban’s lawyer,’ ” he told me.
“There are lots of jokes. I’ve stopped saying what I do.” His friends
argue vehemently, he continued, that while “it’s bad if there are a few
civilian casualties” from drones, “there is more damage caused by
Pakistani F-16s, and, anyway, if we don’t stop them they’ll take over
and we’ll all have beards and our wives and daughters will be in
burkas.”
When I asked how he
answered that argument, he replied, “If we’re true liberals, we should
also protect the rights of the Taliban.” (His foundation does not
litigate on behalf of militants or their families.)
Akbar
has trouble getting visas to travel to the United States. After he sued
the C.I.A., he said, his car was stolen and his office was
trashed—events that he assumed were not random. Obama Administration
officials, speaking anonymously to the Times, once accused
Akbar of fronting for I.S.I. in order to harass the C.I.A. He and his
supporters in the West deny that. His foundation’s financial support has
come mainly from the Bertha Foundation and Reprieve, the British
human-rights group. After his lawsuits received widespread publicity in
Pakistan, low-level I.S.I. officers visited him a couple of times; he
told them that he was serving Pakistan’s interests, and they have left
him alone.
For
Pakistani human-rights advocates, the drone war in Waziristan poses a
problem of lesser evils: which is worse, American bombing or Taliban
revolution? Taliban suicide bombers have killed thousands of civilians
in Pakistan’s cities, and the movement is loathed and feared. In June,
the Pakistani Army launched a major assault on the Taliban in
Waziristan. C.I.A. drones reportedly struck Uzbek militants during the
operation. Over all, the Pakistani Army has fought the Taliban to a
stalemate, but the group’s adherents have gained influence in areas of
Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital, and can still launch successful
attacks even in Islamabad. Many Pakistanis understand all too well that
their government lacks the competence and the credibility to suppress
the Taliban. Some among the élite, therefore, welcome—or, at least,
accept—the C.I.A.’s drone strikes as a necessary, temporary compromise.
“From
Day One, I’ve been saying, I’m not against drones,” Akbar said. “It’s
just a machine. It’s more precise than jets. But it’s only as precise as
your intelligence.” Collecting target information from the sky is
difficult; so is gathering information from a semi-hostile partner on
the ground, like I.S.I. Akbar wondered aloud if I.S.I., to discredit the
United States in the eyes of Pakistanis and the world, might “sometimes
give the C.I.A. false targeting information.” It would not be
surprising.
For as long as the
United States does not openly acknowledge targeting errors or pay
compensation for victims, and for as long as the Pakistani government
lies to the public about its complicity in drone killings, the images of
dead civilians that Akbar’s investigators collect and publish will
resonate. “This is not about taking the Taliban side or the American
side,” Akbar said. He believes that the United States should hold itself
to a higher standard than the Pakistani government. “Our work has been
about the fact that there is no transparency or accountability in the
U.S. drone program in Pakistan.” ♦
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