Two Very Interesting Responses to a Flip Comment

Semantics can obscure the issue here. But I'd submit that there's a difference between media coverage of the drone war, accompanied by the occassional thoughtful essay or think-tank panel, and a "significant debate." I spend probably about as much time covering the drone war as anyone in the press, and I'd submit Danger Room is the best news outlet for exploring the implications of the rise of flying robot assassins. And I would consider none of that a proxy for the country deciding that they ought to be the centerpiece of counterterrorism, hovering in places from Pakistan to the Sahel. That is what we talk about when we talk about drones. We're not talking about the sensor packages on the Reaper, or how many more missiles it carries than does its older brother the Predator. The debate is about expanding a war on al-Qaeda to the far-flung corners of the globe in a sustained, stealthy manner, targeting individuals and networks defined, without rigor or available evidence, as "affiliated" with al-Qaeda. Ben is correct to note that such a strategy is "technology neutral." But that observation overlooks the fact that that in this case, the technology drives the strategy. The vast improvement in drone-derived intelligence (with some human intelligence, doubtfully doubtlessly [oops]) and weapons capability enabled a huge expansion in the ability to wage war while negating or reducing the constraining public costs to it, like troop deployments, financial drain, or conspicuous logistics trails. (You should see the command boxes that Army enlisted men and contractors sit in to operate these things from Bagram -- the essence of modularity.) With that comes a lack of public accounting about the efficacy of the program and the criteria for targeting someone with a drone -- and no objections from pesky congressmen. That's what I would argue needs to change. There's an elite debate in your papers and think tanks about what smart people can glean about the drone war. It suffers from a dearth of information -- not about how someone is targeted, which is properly classified, but who can be targeted; the specific authority for targeting; and the normative question of where the drone war ought to be waged. That, as Marcy points out, is a deliberate government choice. Factor out any ethical concerns: we can't even say with confidence that the drone war is succeeding, in any rigorous strategic sense of the term, just that it's killing a lot of people and unleashing a lot of missiles. July 4 seems as apt a day as any to point out that the public, through its elected representatives, is supposed to determine America's wars.

One thing I think is stunning about our drone war is the degree to which it impacts issues of sovereignty almost everywhere we use it. The one exception is the latest member of our target club, Somalia, given that it is already a failed state (not that that justifies drones strikes.) Consider: Afghanistan: Of all of our drone wars, Afghanistan is the only one that started with traditional legitimacy (and like Somalia, its state was weak to begin with). Yet we’re at the stage now where drones are a key weapon to defend Hamid Karzai–the “Mayor of Kabul”–in the absence of having a fully functional national army. Increasingly, though, we remain in Afghanistan to protect it as a launching pad for attacks on Pakistan, where the bulk of our real enemies are. Iraq: While plenty of America’s wars have been dubiously legitimate, Iraq certainly is at the top of that list. We trumped up a case against a sovereign nation-state (one with manufactured legitimacy internally, but no less than many of our allies in the region). In what may be the last traditional nation-state war we fight, we managed to (at least thus far and only barely) avoid breaking the country up into three or more parts and establish another leader with questionable legitimacy. In most of that, drones weren’t key. But I’m betting that they will be going forward as a threat to Nuri al-Maliki that if he doesn’t invite our troops to stay longer, we will feel free to use drones in his country. That’s just a guess, mind you, but the evolution of our drone power (and the influence Iran has in Iraq) surely has a bearing on whether and how Iraq fully reasserts is sovereignty by kicking our troops out. Pakistan and Yemen: Here’s where the secrecy I discussed yesterday becomes so key. In both Pakistan and Yemen, we are using drones as a way to cooperate with a country’s leadership to make war on–rather than employ police powers on–that country’s own people. Obviously, police power was both untenable in those countries (because there isn’t any in the areas of concern) and strategically unworkable (because both these countries have an ambivalent relationship with the terrorists in their own countries). But the key to this process is secrecy: the utterly laughable fiction that drones were dropping down on these countries but no one had to explain the cooperation behind it. Now, in Pakistan, the example of the Osama bin Laden raid proves this doesn’t have to do exclusively with drone technology. But up until the moment when you launch a raid on a figure like OBL, the drones serve as the most visible–and therefore dangerous, from a legitimacy standpoint–reminder of the lie of the country’s sovereignty. To some degree the drone strikes are just a change in degree from the kind of secret big-footing the US and other neocolonial powers have used for decades, but they are more visible, and they allow the US to exercise a much greater degree of autonomy with regards to the partners in question. And for that reason, I believe, they will take fragile states and exacerbate the legitimacy concerns, making them much more likely to turn into even more dangerous (nuclear-armed, in Pakistan’s case) failed states. Libya: Libya is the most interesting of all these examples. That’s true, first of all, because it demonstrates Spencer’s point: that the US will use these weapons in defiance of any public costs to doing so (both literally–we’re dumping billions into this campaign at the exact same time we’re cutting trillions in domestic spending, but also figuratively, with Obama’s defiance of the WPR). But one particular potential use of drones (or multinational air strikes, as we tried in our first attempt to decapitate Qaddafi) is to assassinate the leader we still recognize as the legitimate leader of Libya. Now I know we’ve assassinated the legally legitimate leaders of countries in the past. But doing so with such audacity, with so little plausible deniability, seems to mark a new step in our approach to rule of law. And if Qaddafi, in response, sets off a series of terrorist attacks in Europe and the US, we’ll have a lot harder time appealing to the principles of sovereignty we did when al Qaeda attacked us, because we broke those laws first. In all of these cases, it seems, we risk trading a failed state in pursuit of what the Executive Branch, often in secret, defines as our national interest. It not only risks exacerbating the risk failed states represent around the world–and the further proliferation of terrorism–but as Spencer lays out, the fact that the Executive can do so without balancing the political cost of doing so changes our relationship with our government. (It is no accident, I think, that these changes in strategy are occurring at precisely the same moment both parties are cooperating to dismantle the social safety network.)