Afghan Journal

Drone strikes are police work, not an act of war?

Launching an air strike in another nation would normally be considered an act of aggression. But advocates of America’s rapidly expanding unmanned drone programme don’t see it that way.

They are arguing, as Tom Ricks writes on his blog The Best Defense over at Foreign Policy, that the campaign to kill militants with missile strikes from these unmanned aircraft, is more like police action in a tough neighbourhood than a military conflict.

These raids conducted by sinister-looking Predator or Reaper aircraft in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen – and since last month in Somalia - should not be seen as a challenge to states and their authority. Instead they are meant to supplement the power of governments that are either unable to or unwilling to fight the militants operating from their territories.

They are precise, limited, strikes aimed at taking down specific individuals, and in that sense are more like the police going after criminals, rather than a full-on military assault. Ricks writes: 

“Police work involves small arms used precisely. Drones aren’t pistols, but firing one Hellfire at a Land Rover is more like a police action than it is like a large-scale military offensive with artillery barrages, armored columns, and infantry assaults.”

It is a bit of a stretch, though, to compare a police action in a rough part of town with the kind of devastation that the laser-guided Hellfire missile can rain down when fired from unmanned aircraft as scores of Pakistani civilians in the troubled northwest region  discovered in the initial days of the programme launched by the Bush administration.

Pakistan’s Shamsi base : a mystery wrapped in a riddle

Pakistan Defence Minister Mukhtar Ahmad’s comments this week that the government had ended U.S. drone flights out of Shamsi air base deep in southwest Baluchistan province has injected new controversy in their troubled relationship. U.S. officials appeared to scoff at Mukhtar’s remarks, saying they had no plans to vacate the base from where they have in the past launched unmanned Predator aircraft targeting militant havens in the northwest region.

Washington’s dismissal of the Pakistan government’s stand is quite extraordinary. Can a country, even if it is the world’s strongest power, continue to use an air base despite the refusal of the host country ?  The United States is effectively encamped in Pakistan using its air strip to run a not-so-secret assassination campaign  against militant leaders including Pakistanis while Islamabad fumes.

One possible reason Washington can get away with it is that the base may not belong to Pakistan. Ahmed said that Shamsi had been leased to the United Arab Emirates in 1992 and they had handed over operational control to the United States when it launched the war against terrorism in Afghanistan and eventually Pakistan.  Pakistan’s air force made the same disclosure during an in-camera hearing for parliament following the secret raid to kill Osama bin Laden in May, the Pakistani press reported at the time and again this week as controversy swirled over Mukhtar’s comment.

It raises troubling issues of sovereignty for Pakistanis as an editorial in The Daily Times noted :

The questions are many. What is the agreement regarding Shamsi air base? If the Pakistanis are in control of it, what need is there to `ask` the Americans to leave? If the Americans control it, under what laws and agreement have they been permitted to and who on the Pakistani side has signed off on it?

It is not the first time the issue of control of Shamsi has erupted in public. A 2005 U.S. diplomatic cable published by Dawn records the UAE government’s displeasure at leak of reports about its military cooperation with the United States inside Pakistan.  The cable from the U.S. embassy in Abu Dhabi says that the UAE government had complained about  General Tommy Franks, former Commander of U.S. Central Command, writing  in his book, “”American Soldier”” that U.S. forces had made use of Sheikh Zayed’s private airstrip in Baluchistan, Pakistan.  The cable said :

Killing more efficiently: America’s violin-sized missiles

The CIA is using smaller, advanced missiles – some of them no longer than a violin-case – to target militants in Pakistan’s tribal belt, according to the Washington Post.

The idea is to limit civilian casualties, the newspaper said quoting defence officials, after months of deadly missile strikes by unmanned Predator aircraft that has so burned Pakistan both in terms of the actual collateral damage and its sense of loss of sovereignty.

With the new missiles you are talking of precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare, U.S.  officials say. Last month, a small CIA missile, weighing about 35 pounds, tore through the second floor of a house in Miram Shah, a town in South Waziristan.

The projectile exploded, killing a top al-Qaeda official and about nine other suspected terrorists, the newspaper said. The mud-brick house collapsed and the roof of a neighbouring house was damaged, but no one else in the town of 5,000 was hurt, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed after-action reports.

Besides the obvious gains from such “clean killings”, you are also getting more bang for your buck. The drones were earlier mounted with Hellfire missiles with a 100-pound warhead designed to destroy a main battle tank. To fire such a missile at a car or a compound in the Pakistani northwest is surely overkill, as the military-focused Danger Room blog notes.

A whole range of small missiles are being developed to be launched from the Predator, such as Lockheed Martin’s Scorpion weiging 35 pounds and with a diameter of a coffee cup. It causes far less destruction than a Hellfire, and it can be fitted with four different guidance systems that allow it to home in on targets as small as a single person, in complete darkness.

Very clinical, very precise. There is almost  a seductive element to it and it goes back to the whole debate about trying to make war as cost-free as possible. A painless war ?  But what about the people on  the ground where this great advance in warfare is being played out.

America seeking revenge in Pakistan for CIA raid ?

The United States has carried out the most intensive series of  unmanned  ”Predator” drone attacks inside Pakistan’s tribal areas since the covert war began, following December’s deadly raid on a CIA base just over the border in Afghanistan. Pakistani newspapers citing interior ministry data, say there were 12 missile strikes in January fired by the unmanned Predator and Reaper planes, the highest for any single month. The highest number of attacks in a month stood at six previously, which was in December 2009. There were just  two strikes in January 2009, reflecting the surge in the drone campaign to fight al Qaeda and the Taliban since the Obama administration took over last year.

The strikes began a day after the attack on the CIA base in Khost in eastern Afghanistan in which seven Americans were killed when a Jordanian suicide bomber linked to both al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban detonated his explosives inside the base. Since then the drones have been in South and North Waziristan targeting the head of the Pakistani Taliban  (Tehrik-e-Taliban) Hakimullah Mehsud, who according to some reports may have been killed in a Jan.14 strike.

“The consequent increase in US strikes, first in North Waziristan and then South Waziristan, specifically targeting the fugitive TTP chief Hakimullah Mehsud clearly shows that revenge is the major motive for these attacks. The US intelligence sleuths stationed in Afghanistan are convinced the Khost suicide attack was planned in Waziristan with the help of the TTP. Therefore, it is believed Afghanistan-based American drones will continue to hunt the most wanted al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, especially Hakimullah, with a view to avenge the loss of the seven CIA agents and to raise morale of its forces in Afghanistan,” Pakistan’s The News, which has compiled details of each strike, writes.

The Khost attack  cost the CIA dearly, taking the lives of the most experienced analysts of Al Qaeda whose intelligence helped guide the drone attacks inside Pakistan  since the campaign began in earnest in the summer of 2008. “For the C.I.A., there is certainly an element of wanting to show that they can hit back,” said Bill Roggio, editor of The Long War Journal which tracks the drone campaign in Pakistan, told the New York Times.   The agency, which took its second biggest lost in history in Khost, has responded with a furious burst of strikes.

According to that same Times report, soon after the Khost raid, a senior U.S. intelligence official said there would be a price to pay. “Some very bad people will eventually have  a very bad day,”  he was quoted as saying.

But according to The News an overwhelming number of people killed in the attacks last month were civilians. Others such as Geo TV have said the attacks killed militants. What is interesting is that there are no longer mass protests against these attacks. Is it because people have reconciled to them ? Or is it that Pakistan’s political-security establishment is more favourably inclined to them, now that the United States is targeting the Pakistani Taliban with as much fury ?

Sharing information with the enemy in Iraq, Afghanistan

U.S. military commanders on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan are not the only ones watching live video feeds of the battle zone from unmanned Predator surveillance planes. The militants too have been looking at the same images thanks to an off-the-shelf software that allowed them to hack into the data feed from the drones.

“Skygrabber”, originally designed to allow customers to download songs and movies off the Internet, costs barely $26 . It allowed insurgents to tap into the overhead video feeds from the million-dollar surveillance planes, the Wall Street Journal reported recently.

U.S. forces became aware of it only after they captured a Shiite militia member in Iraq, whose laptop had files of the pirated footage saved on it.

While most of the breach seems to have taken place in Iraq, adversaries have also intercepted drone video feeds in Afghanistan, the newspaper said, citing unnamed officials. These intercept techniques could be employed in other locations where the U.S. is using pilotless planes, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, they said. One more example of how America’s enemies have found simple ways to counter its sophisticated military technology.

The Pentagon has since closed the breach, defence officials said, but the question experts are asking is how come it was so easy to penetrate the communications systems. Brookings’ P.W. Singer who has written a book “Wired for War: the Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century” says one reason is the rapid proliferation of the unmanned systems in U.S. warfare.  Back in 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq there were only a handful of these ‘eyes in the skies” and zero on the ground in the invasion force.

Today, there are more than 7,000 in the air, ranging from Predator to the tiny ones that can fit in a soldier’s backpack.  Most of these systems were not encrypted as pressure increased to push them out as fast as possible. “There was a war on, and these unmanned systems were proving to be far more useful to our troops than what the regular Pentagon acquisitions process had been providing,” he says.