As the US and its allies ponder what to do about Syria, one
suggestion advanced by the protagonists of armed intervention is to use
unmanned drones to attack Syrian government targets. The proposal is a
measure of the extraordinary success of the White House, CIA and Defence
Department in selling the drone as a wonder weapon despite all the
evidence to the contrary.
The attraction of the drone for President Obama and his
administration five months before the presidential election is
self-evident. The revelation that he personally selected targets from
the top ranks of al-Qa’ida for assassination by remote control shows the
President as tough and unrelenting in destroying America’s enemies. The
program is popular at home because the cost appears not to be large
and, most importantly, there are no American casualties. The media
uncritically buys into claims of the weapon’s effectiveness,
conveniently diverting voters’ attention from the US army’s failure to
defeat puny opponents in two vastly expensive campaigns in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
The Republicans cried foul, alleging that the
administration is selectively leaking highly classified secrets to
portray Obama as a man of decision untroubled by liberal qualms in the
defence of his country. The White House expressed itself deeply shocked
by such a claim of political opportunism, and last week the US Attorney
General, Eric Holder, appointed two lawyers to track down the leakers,
though without giving them special powers to do so.
Almost unquestioned in all this is the utility of the drone strikes
and whether they really are the wonder weapon they are claimed to be.
After all, air forces have been over-selling precision bombing as a way
of winning wars on the cheap since Lord Trenchard ran the RAF in the
1920s. Politicians of all nations have been attracted by new war-winning
armaments or commando-type organisations. Examples include Churchill in
the Second World War and President Kennedy, who favoured the Green
Beret special units and helicopter-borne forces in Vietnam. The media
has traditionally gobbled up and publicized tales of magically effective
arms or the derring-do of elite detachments, often ignoring their lack
of long-term military success.
The most striking but understated feature of the drone strikes in
the Northwest Frontier districts of Pakistan is that they could not take
place without the co-operation of the Pakistani army and its
all-powerful military intelligence branch, the ISI. Some government
co-operation is essential in Yemen, too, though less so than in Pakistan
because of the weakness of the Yemeni state.
The problem is that high-precision weapons still need ground-based
intelligence to identify targets. In Pakistan, the ISI says privately
that its agents provide the details without which the drones would not
know whom to pursue and eliminate. The difficulty for those guiding the
drones from command posts far away has not changed much since “precision
bombing” in the Second World War or the far more accurate missile
strikes in Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Large, immovable facilities or power
stations are easy to identify; individuals are not. In 2003, President
Bush brought forward the start of the bombing and missile strikes
because US intelligence believed it knew the exact location of Saddam
Hussein in south Baghdad. This was destroyed by missiles, but research
after the war showed that Saddam had never been near the place.
Up-to-the minute intelligence about who is in what house, and when
they are there, requires a network of local agents who can communicate
their information immediately. It is very unlikely that the ISI would
allow the CIA to have this sort of network in Pakistan. The crucial
information that enabled the US to find and identify Osama bin Laden in
Abbotabad reportedly came from the ISI itself.
Of course, an assassination target might be stupid enough to give
away his or her position by using a mobile, satellite phone or some
other form of electronic communication. But few insurgent groups today
are likely to give away their position so easily.
The result of reliance on the ISI is that it is Pakistani military
intelligence officers, and not President Obama or his security and
military staff, who really determine what sort of person is killed by
the unmanned drones. This is in keeping with Pakistan’s cynical but
successful approach to dealing with the US since 9/11. This is to be, at
one and the same time, its best ally and worst enemy.
It means allowing the US to kill or capture members of al-Qa’ida in
Pakistan, successes that have important electoral benefits for any
administration in Washington. At times, Pakistan may look to the US to
eliminate a troublesome member of the Pakistan Taliban such as its
leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who over-reached himself in the eyes of the
Pakistan authorities and was killed by a drone strike in 2009. Over the
years, the White House or the CIA has been able to claim successes, such
as the elimination of the second in command of al-Qa’ida or the killing
of most top al-Qa’ida commanders, as if Bin Laden’s old organisation
were the same size as the Pentagon.
What we have not seen is the effective use of US drones against the
Afghan Taliban and its allies, who rely on their safe havens in
Pakistan. It is here that the Afghan Taliban’s leadership is based, and
its ability to retreat into Pakistan has ensured the US military failure
in Afghanistan, just as it ensured the Soviet Union’s inability to wipe
out the insurgents fighting its forces in the 1980s. The lack of good
US intelligence on the Afghan Taliban leadership is striking. How else,
as happened a few years ago, would a shopkeeper from Quetta be able to
extract a large sum of money and pose as a Taliban leader in peace
negotiations in Kabul?
Unmanned drone strikes are all about American domestic politics
rather than about the countries where they are used. They cater to
illusions of power, giving Americans a sense that their technical
prowess is unparalleled, despite the Pentagon’s inability to counter
improvised explosive devices, which are no more than old-fashioned mines
laid in or beside roads. The drones have even been presented as being
more humanitarian than other forms of warfare, simply by claiming that
any dead males of military age killed in a strike must have been enemy
combatants.
The downside to these exaggerated successes is that the White House
and the US security agencies believe more of their own propaganda than
is good for them. Ramshackle insurgent movements in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Yemen are not like regular armies, in which the elimination
of officers or senior cadres might be a crippling blow to the
organization. Just as important, in the long term, assassination
campaigns do not win wars, and they create as many enemies as they
destroy.
PATRICK COCKBURN is the author of “Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr,
the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq. counterpunch@
counterpunch.org
