Former top CIA official critical of Obama drone policy

Many critics have argued that the Obama drone program is counter productive. Although militants may be killed the collateral damage to innocents causes more harm than the good achieved. Especially in a tribal society those who suffer loss of relatives have an obligation of revenge. Hence militants have a fertile climate for recruitment after drone attacks.

Many have argued on moral grounds as well that the attacks are a terrible precedent. The official Pakistani position is that the drone attacks there should cease and that they violate Pakistan's sovereignty. This seems correct but the U.S. does not cease and desist and I have never heard any U.S. official worry about this violation.

Whatever reasons have been given against the attacks they continue. They do no doubt kill militants and militant leaders but it is doubtful they kill more than are created by their actions. Since drone attacks were initiated first in Yemen militancy has grown by leaps and bounds. However the attacks are good domestic propaganda although perhaps the American taxpayer might prefer more jobs than a higher tally of militants killed by drones. But now a top official in the war on terror has also come out as a critic of Obama's drone program.

David Grenier was chief of the CIA's counter terrorism center from 2004 to 2006. Grenier is not opposed to drone attacks per se but he does oppose the Obama program. While the Obama administration defends the attacks as very focused and accurate Grenier actually claims the opposite. Grenier claims that the drone policy is far too indiscriminate in its policy. The result could be political instability and even safe havens for a burgeoning terrorist movement. Something of this sort seems to have happened in Yemen although other factors are involved as well.

Grenier says: "It [the drone program] needs to be targeted much more finely. We have been seduced by them and the unintended consequences of our actions are going to outweigh the intended consequences," Grenier agrees that specific strikes with good intelligence in a feasible strike area may be justified. With the use of signature strikes based on behavior patterns the strikes become much less specific and collateral damage and mistaken attacks much more common. This is what Grenier sees happening in the Obama policy.

Of course Obama manages to reduce collateral damage by definition. Any military age male killed in a strike is simply defined as a suspected militant. This is not likely to impress relatives of a male in this category who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Grenier emphasised that the use of drones was a valuable tool in tackling terrorism but only when used against specific identified targets, who have been tracked and monitored to a place where a strike is feasible. Some tactics used such as the double tap are adopted from terrorist tactics. Terrorists plant a bomb and then when rescuers arrive they explode another.

The CIA over the weekend killed a suspected militant and then attacked his funeral. Even Mafia rules forbid such actions.But then no doubt all those at the funeral will under the signature strike criteria be suspected militants. Who would attend a militant's funeral but militants!

Grenier remarks:"We have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield. We are already there with regards to Pakistan and Afghanistan," Will anyone listen when someone from within the intelligence community speaks out. Do not count on it. For more see this article. I include an interesting video about drone strikes on the Young Turks including Jeremy Scahill.

More drone strikes in Pakistan as tensions between US and Pakistan rise.

It seems that no amount of criticism has any effect on the surge in drone strikes. Quite the opposite the strike numbers are escalating as are civilian casualties. Obama should take note that it is some of his opponents that are among the noisiest cheerleaders for the surge in drone attacks. The antiwar left seems to be remarkably quiet but not doubt many long ago sold out to support the surge tactics.


News From Antiwar.com -

Fifth Drone Strike of the Week as Tensions With Pakistan Rise

Posted By Jason Ditz
At least five people were killed today and three others injured when a US drone fired a pair of missiles at a home in North Waziristan’s Tappi village. Shortly thereafter, another drone hit Data Khel, also in North Waziristan. The casualties were described as “suspected militants” by intelligence officials, though they were all locals to the region.

The attacks were the fourth and fifth of the week, all of them in the area around the North Waziristan town of Miramshah. Previous attacks included a Sunday strike which killed a schoolteacher and a nine year old boy, and a pair of Wednesday hits on a mud hut, the second of which killed several members of the rescue team that arrived after the first.

Pakistani officials have expressed increasing consternation with the growing number of civilian casualties in the strikes, with President Zardari warning that it was undermining support for the war effort that the US has demanded Pakistan start in those regions. Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani added that US policies on this and other issues were threatening bilateral ties.

Despite the growing complaints and increasing questions about the policy’s effectiveness, a delegation of US senators to the region praised the strikes and vowed that they would continue. If the strikes continue at the frenzied pace so far throughout 2010, the issue will likely become a much bigger one.

Reports from Pakistani security officials say that of the 708 people killed in 2009 drone strikes, only a handful were key militant leaders and the vast, vast majority were innocent civilians.

Obama drone policy and Pakistan

This is from the dailytimes(Pakistan)

As can be seen in other posts below the Obama policy is just a continuing of the Bush policy even though Pakistan apparently expected Obama to stop the attacks when he took power.

US strategy on drone attacks soon: Qureshi
LAHORE: US President Barack Obama will soon tell Pakistan about a new American strategy on drone attacks, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said on Friday. According to a private TV channel, the foreign minister told a British radio station that Pakistan had already demanded that the United States stop drone attacks in the Tribal Areas. He said Pakistan had fully cooperated with the US in the war on terror. daily times monitor

This is from the LATimes.

It is rather surprising that Feinstein has revealed this. It can only be trouble for the Pakistan govt. You would almost think that the US might want a wider civil war in Pakistan. Perhaps it wants to be invited in to help security but if so that shows that Obama is even more clueless than Bush. Maybe a reinvigorated military Keynesianism that both stimulates the economy and appeals to patriotism and the war against the terror is supposed to deflect anger from Wall street to Islamic terrorism. On the other hand perhaps Feinstein is just a genuine Dumbocrat.



From the Los Angeles Times
Feinstein comment on U.S. drones likely to embarrass Pakistan
The Predator planes that launch missile strikes against militants are based in Pakistan, the senator says. That suggests a much deeper relationship with the U.S. than Islamabad would like to admit.By Greg MillerFebruary 13, 2009Reporting from Washington — A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an air base in that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counter-terrorism collaboration with the United States.The disclosure by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a U.S. official had publicly commented on where the Predator aircraft patrolling Pakistan take off and land.At a hearing, Feinstein expressed surprise over Pakistani opposition to the campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Islamic extremist targets along Pakistan's northwestern border. "As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base," she said.The basing of the pilotless aircraft in Pakistan suggests a much deeper relationship with the United States on counter-terrorism matters than has been publicly acknowledged. Such an arrangement would be at odds with protests lodged by officials in Islamabad, the capital, and could inflame anti-American sentiment in the country.The CIA declined to comment, but former U.S. intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, confirmed that Feinstein's account was accurate. Philip J. LaVelle, a spokesman for Feinstein, said her comment was based solely on previous news reports that Predators were operated from bases near Islamabad."We strongly object to Sen. Feinstein's remarks being characterized as anything other than a reference" to an article that appeared last March in the Washington Post, LaVelle said. Feinstein did not refer to newspaper accounts during the hearing. Many counter-terrorism experts have assumed that the aircraft take off from U.S. military installations in Afghanistan and are remotely piloted from locations in the United States. Experts said the disclosure could create political problems for the government in Islamabad, which is considered relatively weak.The attacks are extremely unpopular in Pakistan, in part because of the high number of civilian casualties inflicted in dozens of strikes.The use of Predators armed with Hellfire antitank missiles has emerged as perhaps the most important tool of the U.S. in its effort to attack Al Qaeda in its sanctuaries along the Pakistani-Afghan border. A New Year's Day strike killed two senior Al Qaeda operatives who were suspected of involvement in the bombing of Islamabad's Marriott Hotel.They were among at least eight senior Al Qaeda figures reportedly killed in Predator strikes over the last seven months as part of a stepped-up missile campaign.Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, said Feinstein's comments put Pakistan's government on the spot."If accurate, what this says is that Pakistani involvement, or at least acquiescence, has been much more extensive than has previously been known," he said. "It puts the Pakistani government in a far more difficult position [in terms of] its credibility with its own people. Unfortunately it also has the potential to threaten Pakistani-American relations."As chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Feinstein is privy to classified details of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts. The CIA does not publicly acknowledge a campaign against Pakistan-based extremists using remotely piloted planes, making Feinstein's comment all the more unusual.Feinstein's disclosure came during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee by U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair on the nation's security threats. Blair did not respond directly to Feinstein's remark, except to say that Pakistan was "sorting out" its cooperation with the United States.Pakistani officials have long denied that they have even granted the U.S. permission to fly the Predator planes over Pakistani territory, let alone to operate the aircraft from within the country. The civilian leadership that took over from an unpopular former general, Pervez Musharraf, last year, has gone to significant lengths to distance itself from the Predator strikes.The Pakistani government regularly lodges diplomatic protests against the strikes as a violation of its sovereignty, and officials said the subject was raised with Richard C. Holbrooke, a newly appointed U.S. envoy to the region, who completed his first visit to the country Thursday.But a former CIA official familiar with the Predator operations said Pakistan's government secretly approves of the flights because of the growing militant threat.Feinstein prefaced her comment about the Predator basing Thursday by noting that Holbrooke "ran into considerable concern about the use of the Predator strikes in the FATA areas," a reference to what Pakistan calls its Federally Administered Tribal Area along the border with Afghanistan. Many Pakistanis believe that the civilian leadership, despite public anger, has continued Musharraf's policy of giving the United States tacit permission to carry out the strikes.The CIA has been working to step up its presence in Pakistan in recent years. It has deployed as many as 200 people to the country, one of its largest overseas operations besides Iraq, current and former agency officials have estimated. That contingent works alongside other U.S. operatives who specialize in electronic communications and spy satellites.In his prepared testimony Thursday, Blair said that Al Qaeda had "lost significant parts of its command structure since 2008."
Copyright 2009 Los Angeles Times

Here comes the official contradiction of Feinstein. However the Pakistani population may believe Feinstein rather than Mukhtar. In any event the attacks continue wherever the drones are based and supposedly against the express wishes of the Pakistana government.

This is from the Daily Times.

Pak bases not being used, says Mukhtar
LAHORE: Defence Minister Ahmad Mukhtar has denied that US drone attacks in the Tribal Areas are being carried out from Pakistani airbases. “We do have the facilities from where they can fly, but they are not being flown from Pakistani territory. They are being flown from Afghanistan,” he told a private TV channel. About comments by the US Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman, Mukhtar said, “I do not know on what she based all this.” daily times monitor