The Obama administration’s use of weaponized drones to target foreign militants has long drawn criticism from the international community and national civil liberties groups over issues of legality and civilian casualties. The administration has remained steadfast by maintaining its drone program is legal and that the program’s standards ensure civilian casualties are kept to a minimum.
Yesterday’s announcement by the White House that two Western hostages (American development expert Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto) were killed in a January drone strike in Pakistan has cast doubt over the drone program’s standards and procedures.
President Obama delivered a speech Thursday addressing the issue:
…based on the intelligence that we had obtained at the time, including hundreds of hours of surveillance, we believed that this was an al Qaeda compound; that no civilians were present; and that capturing these terrorists was not possible. And we do believe that the operation did take out dangerous members of al Qaeda. What we did not know, tragically, is that al Qaeda was hiding the presence of Warren and Giovanni in this same compound.
Obama said the operation that killed the hostages was “fully consistent” with counter-terrorism guidelines for the region.
Areas of Active Hostilities
The current guidelines set out clear preconditions for use of lethal force “outside areas of active hostilities”. In certain parts of countries considered areas of active hostilities — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — these guidelines are less clearly defined.
“Lethal force will be used only to prevent or stop attacks against U.S. persons, and even then, only when capture is not feasible and no other reasonable alternatives exist to address the threat effectively,” the fact-sheet on procedures and guidelines reads.
In this particular operation, no specific individual was targeted. Instead, months of surveillance identified a compound where senior al-Qaeda members were monitored coming and going.
“Afghanistan/Pakistan is an area of hostility…so the stringent criteria doesn’t apply in this case,” said Ken Gude, a National Security expert at the Center for American Progress (CAP). “This incident should cause a reconsideration of the distinction between the higher standards for targeting applied in areas outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan and those allowed in drone strikes there.”
Call for Reform
While national security experts interviewed for this article believe that the drone program has effectively combated foreign militants with aims of targeting the U.S., there is still a call for further reformation and more transparency.
“The Administration has refused to make its accounting of civilian deaths during these violent years available for any sort of scrutiny or redress,” Steve Coll wrote in the New Yorker.
Brian Katulis, a Senior Fellow at CAP focusing on National Security and Southeast Asia, said current intelligence gathering technique like aerial surveillance and the monitoring of cellular phones and internet are not enough to prevent civilian deaths. Human intelligence would help, he said, though it is a “dicey game paying for information.”
Risk Vs. Reward
One of the major criticisms over using drones for targeted killings is the high count of civilian casualties. An analysis of publicly available data from last November shows that in various U.S. operations to target 41 men, 1,147 people were killed by drones. In fact, the Washington Post reports that eight Americans have been killed by drones since 2002 while only one was intentionally targeted. Three of those — Weinstein and al-Qaeda members Adam Gadahn and Ahmed Farouq — were unknowingly killed in January of this year.
The administration maintains that the drone program has effectively countered terrorism. “Since 9/11, our counter-terrorism efforts have prevented terrorist attacks and saved innocent lives both here in America, and around the world,” Obama told reporters yesterday.
But this claim is hard to definitively prove. On the one hand, experts argue that targeted killings by drone is the best of all available technology but there is no surefire method of telling the amount of potential harm resulting from each operation.
“There is no good analytical study one way or the other,” said Katulis. “It’s open to conjecture. Fourteen years after 9/11, no discernible metric tells us whether we’re winning or losing against these guys.”
Katulis said taking out valuable targets and thwarting potential threats is only one side of a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy. “The light foot approach with local forces and drones has not helped the building of institutions that will lead to the marginalization of terrorists.”