Center for a New American Security

I just finished Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann's essay on drone strikes in Foreign Affairs and recommend it. I especially agreed with the concluding recommendations, which address the two things that bother me most about the drone program thus far: perceptions and accountability.

Few in the U.S. government -- because the drone program has been, in the words of our new secretary of defense, "the only game in town" when it comes to targeting militants in Pakistan* -- have been willing to admit that the program could have second- and third-order effects that might off-set tactical gains. There is some evidence to suggest the drone strikes are not unpopular within the tribal areas themselves, but they are highly unpopular in Pakistan as a whole and in, one suspects, the Pakistani diaspora community. If we kill bad guys in the tribal areas, great. But if killing bad guys in the tribal areas makes people in Walthamstow or Connecticut want to blow themselves up**, not great. It seems to me that we have been willfully ignorant of the ways in which the program might be radicalizing militants outside the places where we can kill them and that what is a great CT platform is, in the absence of a broader strategy, a crappy CVE platform.

Bergen and Tiedemann suggest ways to make the program more transparent, which might address popular grievances. Bergen and Tiedemann also recommend transferring control of the program over from the intelligence community to the Department of Defense. Again, I think this makes a lot of sense because it would make the program both more transparent and also subject to more robust chains of accountability. Bergen and Tiedemann argue such a transfer of control would have other advantages, and they make a strong case.

Not that I think this will ever happen. The drone program has been, if nothing else, a great way for the intelligence community to justify its budget since 9/11, and various agencies will be reluctant to surrender control for both substantive reasons and budgetary reasons.

Contrary to popular belief, I have never been an anti-drone fundamentalist. But I do think the drone program has been a tactic executed in the absence of a strategy and without proper transparency and oversight. Bergen and Tiedemann's recommendations would go a long way toward addressing some of my main concerns.

*Aside from, apparently, Seal Team 6.

**Or lead someone to plant a bomb in Times Square, which is a total hypothetical, of course, and would never happen in real life.

Gah!!!

Chris: I do not care how many civilians drone strikes actually kill. And I do not care how many civilians Americans think drone strikes in Pakistan kill.

I care only about how many civilians Pakistanis think drone strikes kill. As one of the world's experts on Pakistani public opinion, you should be able to provide that number to me, right? Because all you can tell me right now is the Pakistani press is dutifully reporting whatever the Taliban tells them ... and I already know that. I don't care in the slightest about what Pakistani generals or the CIA is telling you behind closed doors. It does not matter. I care about what those Pakistani generals are telling their public. I care, in other words, less about reality as defined by verifiable facts and figures and more about reality as it is interpreted in Pakistan and within Pakistani diaspora communities.

Honestly, I have been making this point over and over again for a year now. But the only thing the CIA and other agencies and departments have done since then is to have stepped up their information operations campaign aimed at U.S. public opinion -- i.e. to have convinced Americans that drones are a good idea. But who cares, honestly, whether or not the Americans who read www.foreignpolicy.com know how many civilians die in drone attacks or think drones are a good idea? I certainly don't. I care more about the people who stand to be most easily radicalized by the strikes.

C'mon, dude, get out there, do some polling, crunch some numbers, and then come tell me I'm wrong. Until then, stop telling me what I and everyone else in America already knows.

Update: Some good commentary on drones from Mosharraf Zaidi here and here. (h/t Abu A.)

Update II: And this is exactly why drone strikes should be carried out by the military. This is actually a good news story. Mistakes were made, mistakes were acknowledged and investigated, and people were held accountable.

Update III: Hey, here's some damn good advice from a journal article co-authored by one C. Christine Fair:

Third, there is an urgent need for focused analyses of the impacts of policy interventions on both the supply of and demand for violence. U.S., Pakistani, and international agencies are not configured to rigorously evaluate the impacts of their programming. Given the state of knowledge in this area, policy implementers should be building impact evaluation into their programming, and they ought to establish a more robust process for disseminating the lessons learned.

Tom Ricks is the one who usually gets the interns at CNAS to do the spade work on his blog, but I was talking with intern Matt Irvine about an event he attended on drone strikes recently and, struck by some of the things Bruce Riedel in particular said (like the fact that he was sceptical of any and all figures produced by the U.S. government on the strikes), I asked Matt to write up a synopsis for the blog (since it also nicely dovetails with another good debate we had this week).

Is there a better place to discuss human intelligence, covert action and targeted assassination than the International Spy Museum? Probably not.

 

So it was fitting for the museum to host a discussion of the CIA’s Predator drone program in Pakistan on Wednesday. The panel of Tom Parker, Peter Bergen and Bruce Riedel, offered some of the best commentary and analysis of the Predator program to date.

 

Parker, from Amnesty International, started off with a healthy dose of skepticism about U.S. government data, citing frequent inaccurate battlefield reporting. Riedel concurred by saying, "I am skeptical of numbers ... I am skeptical of people who claim they have found the solution -- I see a lot of hubris right now."

 

Commenting on recent trends in Pakistan, Bergen argued that U.S. and Pakistani interests are aligned now more than ever and that the program has compromised the safe haven in the FATA. Nonetheless, only 9% of Pakistanis have a favorable view of the program. Later on, Riedel made the point clear, “Are the Pakistanis comfortable with this? Hell no.” But the program goes on.

 

The program “only operates because of old fashion spying,” leading targeted groups to worry about “traitors in their midst,” says Riedel. This is a legacy of a “human intelligence infrastructure” established during the late Bush administration.

 

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst, took issue with Leon Panetta’s 2009 claim that the drone strikes are “the only game in town.” They aren’t, and that’s a good thing. The strikes, according to Riedel, are part of a broader global strategy to fight al Qaeda.

 

The drone program, as analyzed by Bergen at the New America Foundation, is not just targeting al Qaeda. Instead, it is attacking a larger Pakistani Taliban network. According to Riedel, “al Qaeda operates in a syndicate of groups with no single leader, no single agenda.”

 

Citing the cases of abu Dujanah al Khorasani, who carried out the December 30th suicide attack at a CIA base in Khost, and Ilyas Kashmiri, the organizer of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Riedel argued that individuals operate between one group and another…“This is a multilayered, intricate and operationally driven syndicate.”

 

The drone program is just part of Obama’s broader strategy against al Qaeda, which is four parted: First, aggressively pursue al Qaeda and its allies in the safe haven. Second, go after al Qaeda’s financing in new ways. Third, diplomatically engage the world to isolate al Qaeda and its supporters. Tellingly, this week’s nuclear summit’s punch-line was the al Qaeda threat. Third, attack the al Qaeda narrative and ideology. According to Riedel, President Obama’s Cairo speech was a point for point refutation of the bin Laden-Zawahiri narrative. This is one of the reasons why the President is pushing heavily on the Israel-Palestine peace process.

 

Al Qaeda and its allies have adapted to counter the drone program in the last year. Recent plots, including Ft. Hood and the Christmas Day demonstrate that al Qaeda has realized they “don’t need a home run, they’ll single, they’ll take a bunt.” The counter-attack in Khost and the Mumbai attacks are two additional responses to the drone program. The first struck at the human intelligence networks feeding the targeting operation and the CIA personnel closest to it. The second was a harbinger for the future, an attempt to inflame India-Pakistan tensions and divert attention from the FATA. Riedel predicted another major terrorist operation in India in the next six months.

 

Metrics for success are often blurry but Riedel tried to offer some. First, post-mortem tributes to killed jihadists offer measures of effectiveness. Second, al Qaeda propaganda can be measured. Most interestingly, Ayman al Zawahiri, who used to be al Qaeda’s “Chatty Cathy” has been silent since December 2009 (notably before the CIA base attack). “He may have left the FATA,” speculates Riedel. Third, the sophistication and frequency of al Qaeda and affiliate operations. And fourth, the presence of al Qaeda operatives in Pakistani cities. Are leaders leaving the FATA?

 

No matter their merits, the use of drones is unlikely to expand beyond the tribal areas, says Riedel. FATA is unique, “you couldn’t do what we’re doing here in other parts of the world.” The FATA has a 5th century infrastructure and is not urbanized. Expanding programs into Baluchistan would increase collateral damage and cross Pakistani red lines.

 

Finally, Riedel cautioned against becoming “drone addicted…This is going to be a war of attrition,” but there will be no USS Missouri. The Predator is a tactical instrument to degrade current enemy capabilities and ranks, and must fit within a comprehensive regional strategy to counter al Qaeda and its allies.

I do not usually make it to think tank events in DC, but I made the time today to sit in at the start of the Brookings Institute's Defense Challenges and Future Opportunities confab put together by the awesome Pete Singer, he of Wired for War fame. Dave Kilcullen moderated the first panel of the morning on irregular war, and the first presentation of that panel was a keeper.

Veteran intelligence analyst Matt Frankel, on leave from his service in the intelligence community as a federal executive fellow at Brookings, gave a compelling presentation on high value targeting (HVT) campaigns and their utility. His findings:

1. HVT campaigns are more effective against centralized opposition -- but decentralization is the trend.
2. HVT campaigns do not work in a vaccum. They have to be connected to a broader CT or COIN strategy.
3. Indigenous attacking forces have the edge in HVT campaigns, mainly due to local knowledge.
4. Along the same line, third party HVT campaigns are less likely to succeed, and in order for them to do so, the objectives of the host nation must be alligned with those of the third party.
5. Capture when you can, kill when you must. Obviously, the intelligence yield is better in the case of the former. Dead mean tell no tales.
6. Understanding enemy organizational dynamics is vital. What will the effect on an enemy organization be? And -- and this is my concern -- are we killing the people we might need to do a deal with later?

Frankel's presentation matches up with a lot of what I have often argued, which for the most part has been based either on my personal experiences (I learned the danger of ignoring Lesson #2 in Iraq in 2003, for example) or case study analysis (fun fact: Hizballah's HVT campaign against the SLA in southern Lebanon was more successful than the IDF's HVT campaign against Hizballah, lending support to Lessons #3 and #4). I am pretty sure Frankel's analysis supports a lot of the concerns Dave and I have had about the drone program in Afghanistan and Pakistan (namely, that it ignores Lessons #1, #2 and #6), but I would want to see Frankel's presentation in an article supported by footnotes and with methodology laid out in greater detail. Regardless, Frankel's presentation was a great one, and I was sorry that an obligation at CNAS kept me from hearing the discussion that followed it.

A few months ago, I allowed my housemate's subscription to the Washington Post to lapse and used my Delta Skymiles to buy a subscription to the Wall Street Journal. I quite like the Journal, even though its news side has perhaps grown unncessarily partisan in the past year, because it forces me to read articles about subjects -- namely, finance -- that I would not normally study. Also, longtime friends Yochi Dreazen and Charles Levinson report for the paper, and Jason Gay's sports column is one of the funniest things you'll read in any given week. (He had a line about the Washington Wizards' "shooting percentage" that caused me to snort oatmeal last week.)

Today, though, my newfound friends at the Journal mention me in the lead editorial in such a way that I need to slightly correct the record. In a rare editorial praising the president, the Journal's editorial board gives a big thumbs up to drone strikes against al-Qaeda but add:

"Critics such as counterinsurgency writers David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum allege that drones have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians."

The Journal is not saying "Kilcullen and Exum are idiots", but they are, I think, twisting an argument the two of us have raised.

To begin, the Journal seems most concerned -- understandably, I might add -- with how many civilians are actually being killed. The reason Dave and I cited open source reporting out of Pakistan is because we were more concerned with how many civilians are perceived to be dying in drone strikes. There's a difference there, and it goes back to my larger concern that drone strikes are a tactic unaccompanied by a more comprehensive strategy incorporating an effective strategic communications plan. Here's what we wrote:

Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent — hardly “precision.” American officials vehemently dispute these figures, and it is likely that more militants and fewer civilians have been killed than is reported by the press in Pakistan.

I'm not saying drone strikes cannot be part of the solution (as Dave and I have said time and time again), but I am saying that right now, they're a part of the problem. If I thought drone strikes were incorporated into a coherent strategy rather than a convenient tactic substituting for a strategy, two thirds of my objections would go away.

Just this week, a friend of mine asked me to participate in a panel discussion on drone strikes, and here is how I responded:

I would be up for that as long as no one expects me to be some anti-drone fundamentalist. I have serious reservations about our reliance on drone strikes as a tactic and think they need to be integrated into a more comprehensive strategy. And I think the military should do them, mainly so that we would have the kinds of checks and balances and accountability we (should) get when the U.S. military executes an operation. I’m sure folks in Langley might want my head on a platter for saying this, but I wish our nation’s intelligence services would stop trying to be so operational and would stick to gathering intelligence.

This concern, about which agency or department is the most appropriate agency or department for carrying out these strikes, is a question left unaddressed by the Journal's editorial but one that I think should be asked. I fret drone strikes have become a way for a certain agency in the U.S. government to justify its budget share and relevance in the fight against al-Qaeda. 

I got my first taste of everyone in the 202 area code hating me when Dave and I wrote this op-ed on drone strikes seven months ago and was told by many that I should avoid writing such things lest I hurt my career. (Cue laughter from the readership.) But I am glad there is now a real and more mature debate on the strikes, their merits and their limits today than there was then. And if our op-ed helped start a debate, then I figure I'm doing my job -- even if it annoys the administration and the intelligence community.

In case you missed it or have not forked over the money to buy a copy of the New Yorker, Jane Mayer -- who is even more powerful than Nate -- has written perhaps the very best piece on the use of unmanned drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan. (A good summary can be found here.) There are all kinds of good questions this piece explores, like why Americans get so fired up over targeted killing programs (allegedly cooked up by the Vice President) which utilize special operations forces but do not get too bothered by targeted killing programs that actually exist and use remotely piloted drones. Or what happens when the Central Intelligence Agency takes over what are essentially military operations without the check and balances -- like the UCMJ -- that govern the military when they conduct such operations?

Since Dave Kilcullen and I have written a little bit about these strikes, Mayer asked me what I thought. She slightly mangled my quote, but here it is:

“Neither Kilcullen nor I is a fundamentalist—we’re not saying drones are not part of the strategy. But we are saying that right now they are part of the problem. If we use tactics that are killing people’s brothers and sons, not to mention their sisters and wives, we can work at cross-purposes with insuring that the tribal population doesn’t side with the militants. Using the Predator is a tactic, not a strategy.”

What I actually said was that while drone strikes were part of the problem, they can also be part of the solution. (Mayer thought I said "strategy" instead of solution.) I really think drone strike can be part of an effective, integrated CT and COIN strategy, but they cannot substitute for such a strategy, and I worry that the CIA is carrying out their own campaign in part because a) it's been getting kicked around so much since 9/11 that it is now overly focused on killing high-level al-Qaeda targets rather than gathering intelligence and that b) it's trying to justify and defend its budget through what it can claim is a successful program.

My worries have always centered around how the attacks are perceived on the ground, so it has been frustrating to read careless readers of our argument mistakenly assume we agree with open-source reporting out of Pakistan. To the contrary. I focus on Pakistani press reports because, in a war of perceptions, I am less concerned with how many civilians we are actually killing and more concerned with how many civilians the neutral population thinks we are killing.

There is something else about drones which bothers me. We are all slaves to culture, and I worry that a combination of a background in the light infantry, an upbringing in East Tennessee, and a classical education leaves me repulsed by the very idea of remote-controlled war. Mayer mangled another quote of mine (again, insignificantly), when I said, “As a classics major, I have a classical sense of what it means to be a warrior.” As I recall, I asked that more as a question and included a "maybe" somewhere in there. But maybe I do in fact have a cultural predisposition against drones. I know that undermines my other arguments somewhat, but I feel I should be honest with the readership about my own potential biases here.

I am not sure, on the other hand, that my bias does not have some use. One of the best parts in Pete Singer's latest book is when he relates how a U.S. Air Force officer excitedly told him how our technology has made our enemy like the humans in the Terminator movies, hiding below ground for fear of our technology.

"Yeah," Pete wisely asks, "but weren't the humans the heroes of those movies?"

Indeed.

At the very least, though, the classical warrior spirit is alive at 1301 Pennsylvania Avenue. Nate was also a classic geek, and I have been known to steal the Roman helmet Nagl inexplicably keeps in his office and wear it to staff meetings.

Update: Hahahaha. Perfect. Just perfect. Thanks, J.

I don't know about you, but I spent my Independence Day catching up on my Foreign Affairs reading.  The big red title of the current issue is "Saving Afghanistan," which seems pretty misplaced because one of its headline articles by Steven Simon, a combined response to Seth Jones' In the Graveyard of Empires and David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla, is most definitely not interested in saving Afghanistan.

Simon's piece is definitely worth a read, as it presents a very coherent and reasoned critique of the conventional wisdom surrounding the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  I don't think there should be any mistaking that Obama's campaign in Afghanistan is somehow less ambitious than Bush's: Bush talked the talk about building a stable, democratic Afghanistan, but it's the Obama administration that is trying to walk the walk by devoting more resources and promising a "civilian surge" to improve Afghan governance.  I tend to share Simon's concern that our approach in Afghanistan is perhaps guided more by sentiment than rational calculation.  Afghanistan in and of itself is probably not that important to us, certainly not in the way that Iraq is, and there's something troublesome about spending a lot of national resources to stabilize and reconstruct a country that never had much stability or construction in the first place.

That said, I'm also not sold on Simon's take that our Predator drone strikes are a primary solution to our AQ problems there and in Pakistan.  For someone who clearly has such a critical eye for U.S. policy, he seems awfully willing to take official statements about the efficacy of these strikes at face value:

"Thus, if the core concern is terrorism, Washington should concentrate on its already effective policy of eliminating al Qaeda's leadership with drone strikes. In what amounts to a targeted killing program, the United States uses two types of unmanned aerial vehicles -- the Predator and the faster, higher-altitude Reaper, which can carry two Hellfire missiles and precision-guided bombs -- to attack individuals and safe houses associated with al Qaeda and related militant groups, such as the Haqqani network. Most of these strikes have taken place in North or South Waziristan, as deep as 25 miles into Pakistani territory. There were about 36 against militant sites inside Pakistan in 2008, and there have been approximately 16 so far in 2009. Among the senior al Qaeda leaders killed in the past year were Abu Jihad al-Masri, al Qaeda's intelligence chief; Khalid Habib, number four in al Qaeda and head of its operations in Pakistan; Abu Khabab al-Masri, al Qaeda's most experienced explosives expert, who had experimented with biological and chemical weapons; and Abu Laith al-Libi, the al Qaeda commander in Afghanistan. Some 130 civilians have also been killed, but improved guidance and smaller warheads should lead to fewer unintended casualties from now on.

"The logic of this strategy is straightforward. "In the past, you could take out the number 3 al Qaeda leader, and number 4 just moved up to take his place," says one official. "Well, if you take out number 3, number 4, and then 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, it suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to revive the leadership cadre." In consequence, "the enemy is really, really struggling," says one senior U.S. counterterrorism official, who notes "a significant, significant degradation of al Qaeda command and control in recent months." These same officials say that al Qaeda's leadership cadre has been "decimated" and that it is possible to foresee a "complete al Qaeda defeat" in Pakistan."

I'm no doctrinaire one way or another on drone strikes, but I do think there are at least some reasons (which this blog's founder has enumerated) to be wary of the possibility that they're self-defeating in the long run.  The counter-terror crowd in government is really high on their effectiveness, and even Andrew Bacevich seems to endorse them as a means to deny terrorists sanctuary in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  And, as Dan Byman says in this smart piece, there are so few good options here that "relying on bolts from the blue to keep al Qaeda and the Taliban weak and off balance" might be the best thing we've got going.  But shouldn't we be at least a bit skeptical of this policy?  As unpleasant as "nation-building" is, there's also something unpleasant about bombing Afghan and Pakistani villages without a really clear idea of what we're getting for it.  I mean, we are America and we pride ourselves on ideals and humanitarianism--are we comfortable with a policy that offers Afghans and Pakistanis pretty much nothing but the occasional Hellfire missile?  It seems like that deserves to be questioned, even as we also question the wisdom of trying to do nation-building in Afghanistan.  There has to be more to our strategy than that.

Not being privy to any super-secret intelligence (please send some my way if you have any!), my novice questions are: how do we know we're getting the right guys, and as we keep killing them off, how will we be sure that we've got tabs on all the most dangerous up-and-comers?  How can we be sure that this is having such a strong impact on al-Qaeda and the other radical groups we're trying to take down?  (For all their alleged effectiveness, it seems worth noting that our drones have not bagged bin Laden or al-Zawahiri.  And just how many times do we have to kill the al-Qaeda #3?)  Are the civilian casualties caused by these attacks (usually dismissed as the inevitable "collateral damage") creating more jihadis than they kill?  And what creates more terrorist sympathizers, drone strikes or the large-scale troop presence?

 

The Onion is now weighing in.

I love it when readers contact me with "You've probably already seen this, but..."

No, no, the odds are I have not already seen it. I really appreciate the tips from the readership, such as the one pointing toward this IISS briefing on drone strikes. (Thanks, JP.)

A clutch of anonymous intelligence and military officials -- no doubt stung by the degree to which the efficacy of drone attacks in Pakistan has been questioned of late -- have hit back in defense of the strikes in an article written by the reliable Karen DeYoung in today's Washington Post.

Judging by reports from the region through late April, the Obama administration authorized about four or five Predator attacks a month, maintaining a pace set by the Bush administration in August. The CIA, which does not publicly acknowledge the attacks, operates the aircraft, chooses the targets -- ideally with the cooperation of Pakistani intelligence on the ground -- and has White House authority to fire the missiles without prior consultation outside the intelligence agency. A senior Pakistani official said the rate has not diminished in recent weeks, although "you don't hear so much about it" because the strike areas have been more isolated.

"There are better targets and better intelligence on the ground," the Pakistani official said. "It's less of a crapshoot."

A second U.S. military official agreed, saying, "We're not getting civilians, and not getting outrage beyond the usual stuff."

The article did not question the claims made by the officials or offer counter-claims. It did, however, leak this classified memorandum written by General Petraeus just four days ago:

"Anti-U.S. sentiment has already been increasing in Pakistan . . . especially in regard to cross-border and reported drone strikes, which Pakistanis perceive to cause unacceptable civilian casualties," Petraeus wrote. Nearly two-thirds of Pakistanis oppose counterterrorism cooperation with the United States, he said, and "35 percent say they do not support U.S. strikes into Pakistan, even if they are coordinated with the GOP [government of Pakistan] and the Pakistan Military ahead of time."

First off, it is my understanding that there is a growing divide in the special operations community about these strikes. No surprise, the direct-action side of the house is in favor of them, while the indirect-action guys are more skeptical.

Second, I should point out that -- appearances to the contrary -- I am not a hardliner about these strikes. If someone can demonstrate to me that these strikes are not a tactic substituting for a strategy and that they indeed fit into a coherent strategy, I will be a lot less skeptical about them. And if these strikes were accompanied by both effective strategic communications and properly resourced information operations, I would be even less skeptical. Oh, and if you throw in a proper incentive structure for the tribes living in the FATA and NWFP, I would be more or less happy.

But here's what's not going to sway my opinion: pointing out these drone strikes are killing more bad guys and less civilians than is reported in the Pakistani media. I know they are. But I am more concerned about these strikes are perceived than their actual BDA. And if they continue to contribute to the dynamic described by General Petraeus in his memorandum, then I remain an opponent of these strikes until the conditions in the above paragraph are met.