Drones work the enemy to death
By Thomas P.M. Barnett
WORLD NEWS: "U.S. Defends Legality of Killing With Drones," by Keith Johnson, Wall Street Journal, 6 April 2010. FRONT PAGE: "Drones Batter Al Qaeda and Its Allies Within Pakistan," by Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah, New York Times, 5 April 2010.
I am fully onboard with Team Obama on this one: the notion that reaching out and killing terrorists who have declared war on our troops and our nation is not "unlawful"--especially when you're talking ungoverned or poorly controlled areas. It's one thing to go and kill people inside functioning states with judicial systems capable of rooting out such threats, but quite another when you're talking no-gov-lands like Waziristan, when Pakistan's rule is thin to the point of absent. 
From the WSJ piece
Harold Koh, State's legal adviser, puts it this way:
In this ongoing armed conflict, the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks.
Obama has truly exploited this capability, as the CIA has killed 4-500 suspected militants since Jan 09. The USG says only 20 civilians were caught in the fire, a number naturally disputed by non-USG observers. Bin Laden declared war on the U.S. in 1996 and has waged that war ever since from foreign locations. We finally returned the favor in 2001, taking the fight to those foreign locations. If international law doesn't provide enough detail on this sort of fight, then it's job of the international community to fill those gaps in--not that of the U.S. to fight with one hand tied behind its back. The good news:
A stepped-up campaign of American drone strikes over the past three months has battered Al Qaeda and its Pakistani and Afghan brethren in the tribal area of North Waziristan, according to a mid-ranking militant and supporters of the government there. The strikes have cast a pall of fear over an area that was once a free zone for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, forcing militants to abandon satellite phones and large gatherings in favor of communicating by courier and moving stealthily in small groups, they said.
The best part:
By all reports, the bombardment of North Waziristan, and to a lesser extent South Waziristan, has become fast and furious since a combined Taliban and Qaeda suicide attack on a C.I.A. base in Khost, in southern Afghanistan, in late December. In the first six weeks of this year, more than a dozen strikes killed up to 90 people suspected of being militants, according to Pakistani and American accounts. There are now multiple strikes on some days, and in some weeks the strikes occur every other day, the people from North Waziristan said. The strikes have become so ferocious, "It seems they really want to kill everyone, not just the leaders," said the militant, who is a mid-ranking fighter associated with the insurgent network headed by Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani. By "everyone" he meant rank-and-file fighters, though civilians are being killed, too. Tactics used just a year ago to avoid the drones could not be relied on, he said. It is, for instance, no longer feasible to sleep under the trees as a way of avoiding the drones. "We can't lead a jungle existence for 24 hours every day," he said. Militants now sneak into villages two at a time to sleep, he said. Some homeowners were refusing to rent space to Arabs, who are associated with Al Qaeda, for fear of their families' being killed by the drones, he said. The militants have abandoned all-terrain vehicles in favor of humdrum public transportation, one of the government supporters said. The Arabs, who have always preferred to keep at a distance from the locals, have now gone further underground, resorting to hide-outs in tunnels dug into the mountainside in the Datta Khel area adjacent to Miram Shah, he said.
Most realistically, the drones give us access and lethality in a zone where the Pakistanis cannot manage or simply refuse to go:
While unpopular among the Pakistani public, the drone strikes have become a weapon of choice for the Obama administration after the Pakistani Army rebuffed pleas to mount a ground offensive in North Waziristan to take on the militants who use the area to strike at American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
The bottom-line conclusion from the local gov-friendlies:
>>> Two of the government supporters said they knew of civilians, including friends, who had been killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, they said, they are prepared to sacrifice the civilians if it means North Waziristan will be rid of the militants, in particular the Arabs. "On balance, the drones may have killed 100, 200, 500 civilians," said one of the men. "If you look at the other guys, the Arabs and the kidnappings and the targeted killings, I would go for the drones."<<<
Our very of the cheap-and-expendable versus theirs--an appropriate symmetricization of the kinetic side of the conflict. thomaspmbarnett.com |
