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Sunday
August 1 2010

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POLITICS

Remote Controlled Future of War

As I write, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan is making his way to Washington. Given the tone of the recent visit from Prime Minster, Gordon Brown, to Pakistan he has much to consider during the course of his 16–hour flight. It takes no imagination to think what the world would have made of President Bush if he had used Mr Brown’s colorful phrases like ‘the chain of terror’ that links Pakistan to Europe, or referring to the border region as a ‘crucible of terror’. Little wonder that President Zardari found other business to conduct when he was supposed to be giving a press conference with the British Prime Minister. But if a week is a long time in politics, it is also a whole world away as President Zardari’s plane crawls over oceans to make his rendezvous with the President.

There is word that the White House has already had a ‘crisis meeting’ to discuss the forthcoming summit which will include both President Zardari and his Afghan counterpart, President Karzai. Mrs Clinton, echoing her friend in Number Ten Downing Street, has been ‘talking tough’, while officials have been scurrying to get a bill through the Senate that would triple US assistance to Pakistan bringing it to $1.5 billion a year for five years. Such a welcome gift clearly beats a collection of ‘film Americana’ or an iPod, but it may not be enough to keep things on an even keel. That is why signals have also been sent out, in appropriately vague diplomatic language, about the beginnings of the possibility to perhaps have an option to discuss ‘dual controls’ on what the Pakistanis regard as the serious issue: US drone assassinations of terror suspects on Pakistani soil.

It is a complicated scenario. Some suggest that President Zardari has secretly approved the use of these new lethal technologies. On the other hand, the Pashtun tribesmen of FATA, still enraged at Pakistan’s invasion and militarization of the autonomous region in 2004, have threatened an uprising. Thousands of people have protested the civilian casualties that inevitably accompany the use of drones, chanting ‘death to America’ at marches across Pakistan including a gathering of over 1,000 people just last week. The overall impact makes Zardari look painfully weak and, ironically, may help to fulfill the fear of the Obama Administration that militants could actually topple him in a kind of ‘Iranian scenario’.

However, the summit is not without potential pitfalls for the Americans. If the Pakistanis succeed in making their case on the use of drones, a new page may be turned on views of the Obama Administration’s approach to what we used to call the war on terror but now, perhaps in keeping with the euphemisms of warfare that drones allow us entertain, must be referred to as ‘overseas contingency operations’. The much–heralded promise to close Guantanamo Bay and the controversial publication of the memos on torture may have cast a bright light on some areas but bright lights also cast deep shadows. It is in these shadows that the drone issue remains largely out of sight.

Three days after President Obama became the 44th American President, five missiles hit compounds in Waziristan, killing an estimated 22 people. Drones and missiles are part and parcel of campaign that started last summer under President Bush to increase the use of unmanned military systems. This approach to combat looks set to continue well into the future. P.W. Singer is the head of Obama's defense policy campaign team, a Brookings Institution fellow, and the author of a campaign paper since adopted by the Administration pledging to increase funding for unmanned drones. Singer has suggested, "Over the last five years we've gone from not using any unmanned systems in our military operations to using them every single day. And I don't see any great change…This is the future of war."

His observation is borne out by recent trends. A relatively new tool in the military tool chest, the Air Force’s fleet has expanded to 195 Predators and 28 Reapers (a new, more heavily armed version) bringing the total number of military drones from 167 in 2001 to the current 5,500.—Today, Predators and Reapers are flying 34 surveillance patrols each day in Iraq and Afghanistan (up from 12 in 2006) and transmitting 16,000 hours of video each month, some of it directly to troops on the ground. That amounts to over 500 hours of video every day and an flying time for every patrol of nearly 16 hours. As the region, slightly larger than Vermont or a bit larger again than Wales, continues to be in Gordon Brown’s well–used phrase, a ‘crucible of terror’, this is valuable information in difficult terrain and often unfriendly territory.

But the shadows are deep.

Drones have evolved from an extra set of eyes helping to monitor activity and protect forces, to high–tech sniper scopes. They are operated (unofficially) by ‘pilots’ based at the CIA, via a computerized ‘joystick’. Their load is a Hellfire II missile — a 500 pound bomb. On the command of a click, enough explosives to take out an armored vehicle arrive at their target at 950 miles an hour — twice the speed of President Zardai’s plane at cruising altitude. The usual cause of death is incineration and a minimum 100 yard radius is charred with debris scattered far and wide. The problem for those on the ground is that they are not aware of the planes until they are nearly overhead and even then they often have no idea which planes are merely watching them and those that may be coming in for a kill. Since the President’s inauguration there has been almost constant surveillance of the population and at least 16 Predator strikes killing over 150 people.

Drones are currently used without prior permission, over sovereign territory, against people who have had no charge brought against them, have not been heard by a judge let alone seen by a lawyer, and yet are assassinated in their homes, their cars, or on the road with their families or any other member of the general public who happens to be nearby. To date, according to Pakistani officials, nearly 700 lives have been lost in 60 separate strikes that killed 14 wanted al–Qaeda suspects.

Perhaps President Zardari will ask President Obama if, as he was flying the 16 hours from Pakistan to Washington DC, how many drones were flying in the other direction with new targets in their sights. Perhaps American journalists will ask President Obama if his argument in relation to the torture memos to ‘uphold one’s values’… ‘even when it’s hard’ doesn’t apply if American hands are only tainted with blood by remote control.

Dr. Alison Holmes is the Pierre Keller Fellow of Transatlantic Studies at Yale University

The William Bray pub and restaurant, Shere, at theamerican.co.uk