Steve Coll, in the New Yorker, on “the drone war in Pakistan“:
At the Pearl Continental Hotel, in Peshawar, a concrete tower enveloped by flowering gardens, the management has adopted security precautions that have become common in Pakistan’s upscale hospitality industry: razor wire, vehicle barricades, and police crouching in bunkers, fingering machine guns. In June, on a hot weekday morning, Noor Behram arrived at the gate carrying a white plastic shopping bag full of photographs. He had a four-inch black beard and wore a blue shalwar kameez and a flat Chitrali hat. He met me in the lobby. We sat down, and Behram spilled his photos onto a table. Some of the prints were curled and faded. For the past seven years, he said, he has driven around North Waziristan on a small red Honda motorcycle, visiting the sites of American drone missile strikes as soon after an attack as possible.
Behram is a journalist from North Waziristan, in northwestern Pakistan, and also works as a private investigator. He has been documenting the drone attacks for the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, a Pakistani nonprofit that is seeking redress for civilian casualties. In the beginning, he said, he had no training and only a cheap camera. I picked up a photo that showed Behram outdoors, in a mountainous area, holding up a shredded piece of women’s underwear. He said it was taken during his first investigation, in June, 2007, after an aerial attack on a training camp. American and Pakistani newspapers reported at the time that drone missiles had killed Al Qaeda-linked militants. There were women nearby as well. Although he was unable to photograph the victims’ bodies, he said, “I found charred, torn women’s clothing—that was the evidence.”
Since then, he went on, he has photographed about a hundred other sites in North Waziristan, creating a partial record of the dead, the wounded, and their detritus. Many of the faces before us were young. Behram said he learned from conversations with editors and other journalists that if a drone missile killed an innocent adult male civilian, such as a vegetable vender or a fruit seller, the victim’s long hair and beard would be enough to stereotype him as a militant. So he decided to focus on children…
Last year, in a speech at the National Defense University, President Obama acknowledged that American drones had killed civilians. He called these incidents “heartbreaking tragedies,” which would haunt him and those in his chain of command for “as long as we live.” But he went on to defend drones as the most discriminating aerial bombers available in modern warfare—preferable to piloted aircraft or cruise missiles. Jets and missiles cannot linger to identify and avoid noncombatants before striking, and, the President said, they are likely to cause “more civilian casualties and more local outrage.”…
Obama’s advocacy of drones has widespread support in Washington’s foreign-policy and defense establishments. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton wholeheartedly backed the drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen. Republican hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who otherwise criticize the President as effete and indecisive, are also enthusiastic. But do drones actually represent a humanitarian advance in air combat? Or do they create a false impression of exactitude? And do they really serve the best interests of the United States?…
***********
For decades, I.S.I. officers have harbored deep ambivalence about their putative allies at the C.I.A. (According to Pew Research Center opinion polls, a majority of Pakistanis believe that the United States is an enemy of their country.) Beginning in 2009, the Obama Administration, led by the special representative Richard Holbrooke, sought to lessen the mistrust by launching a “strategic dialogue” with Pakistan’s military and intelligence leaders, as well as with Pakistan’s weak elected civilian politicians. By early 2011, however, that effort had failed. In late January of that year, on a street in Lahore, Raymond Davis, a C.I.A. contractor, shot and killed two men who he believed were trying to kill him, touching off a furor. I.S.I. leaders felt that the C.I.A.’s unilateral operations inside Pakistan had got out of control. Now, when civilians died in drone strikes, I.S.I. helped to whip up public protests.“That anti-American narrative was basically sponsored by the Army and I.S.I.,” Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and the author of “Descent Into Chaos” (2008), an investigation of Pakistan’s borderlands after the American invasion of Afghanistan, told me. “We all knew it was being orchestrated. The Americans knew, the public knew, the Pakistani media knew. But nobody said anything. Nobody had the courage to say anything.” In Washington, evidence that I.S.I. was exploiting C.I.A. strikes to stir anti-American sentiment reduced what incentives the Obama Administration might have had to own up to genuine mistakes: to do so would only play into I.S.I.’s hands…
The Obama Administration might have benefitted from describing in public how it was adjusting tactics to spare innocent lives. It might have investigated reported errors and compensated survivors, as the U.S. military has done routinely since 2005 whenever it mistakenly kills civilians in Afghanistan. Instead, the law and the logic of secrecy surrounding the C.I.A. campaign silenced the Administration. Jon Stewart riffed freely about drones on “The Daily Show,” but at the State Department, a former official there recalled, “we didn’t even know if we were allowed to write the word ‘drone’ in an unclassified e-mail.”
The real mistake, according to Ahmed Rashid, was that the C.I.A. went along with Pakistan’s hypocrisy in denying that it knew anything about the drone program. To cover up Pakistan’s official lies, the United States undermined its own credibility. “Somewhere along the way, the Americans should have drawn a line,” Rashid said…
Corner Stone
Meh. It ain’t nothing but a thang. DROOOOONNNEEEZZ!
Corner Stone
Military aged males. That shit has been giving me the jollies for some number of years now.
But I guess it’s just a white people’s problem, eh?
moderateindy
I know people freak out about the drone strikes, but if we are going to use military force, and we are, drone strikes seem to be the best alternative. Don’t argue that we shouldn’t be bombing at all, it’s a ridiculous argument, even if it is true. The fact is, that our policy is that we are attacking this area. Since this has been decided by our government, then the question becomes, what is the most effective way to employ this policy. We’re not going to put boots on the ground. The other alternatives are bombing from regular planes, or helicopters, or to use cruise missiles. Out of the current alternatives drones, potentially, are going to cause the least collateral damage. What exactly are we supposed to do? Again don’t say, we shouldn’t be bombing anyone. It is a stupid argument, even if I agree with the premise, because it ignores reality. Our policy is what it is, so we must apply it in the best possible way. If youre concern is to limit civilian casualties, the using drones seems to be the best way to achieve that.
Omnes Omnibus
@moderateindy: A policy that seems to create at least as many enemies as it eliminates is not a productive one.
Corner Stone
@moderateindy:
Do you even bother to read the ignorant shit you post before you hit Submit?
Mike in NC
Spent a few weeks in Karachi during a 1984 deployment to the Middle East. Pakistan is easily one of the most ghastly places on the planet. No wonder it’s filled with religious fanatics with nothing to lose.
horatius
@moderateindy: why the funk are you attacking the area? How clueless can you be?
Cervantes
@moderateindy:
You’re exceedingly moderate — and very indy, too.
Elizabelle
I am bored shitless with hearing about drones. Will not read.
Could we have another open thread?
@moderateindy: What indy said.
Anne Laurie
@moderateindy: If you read the article — seriously! — you will find that it discusses many of the topics you raise.
Corner Stone
@Elizabelle: What did indy say that you agree with?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Omnes Omnibus:
There is no nice way to wage war. The only question about war is any options to avoid it, the rest is shit fest and the sooner it is over the better.
Cervantes
@Elizabelle:
Sounds reasonable. So long as you don’t attend any weddings in Yemen, you should be OK.
Omnes Omnibus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: As I said, a method of making war that creates more enemies than it eliminates is not one that ends things sooner.
kc
@Corner Stone:
All of it, Katie!
Corner Stone
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
What is it about killing people attending weddings, and terrorizing people who go to the local bakery that makes you think something will be over “sooner”?
They don’t step out of the house without looking up. Even though they can’t possibly spot anything.
It’s just bullshit. Don’t tell me we have to kill all these people because reasons.
Corner Stone
@kc: I’m like, so totally bored, and uh you know, like bored with all this death from above boredom and uh, like, you know? Right?
GregB
“The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.”
-Hunter S. Thompson 9/12/2001
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Is there any method short of a nuclear device that fits those parameters?
Howard Beale IV
@efgoldman: Quite frankly, I don’t even know why we keep dealing with the Saudi’s, since the Whahabi’s are pretty much as anti-Western and anti-Christian as they come. And if it wasn’t for the Shah’s SAVAK shit, Iran might not have their revolution which have put some serious whackjobs in power.
Howard Beale IV
@Mnemosyne:
No. Unfortunately, Our largest nuclear ordinance is the B83, and compared to what was fielded in the past, is pretty punk.
Little Boots
do we seriously not get this? do we not get that war for its own sake is the norm? this is the progressive movement. what are we missing?
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Of course there are. Drones make a very good recruiting tool. Drone a wedding party to kill a couple of terrorists, and you just killed a bunch of innocent people as well. Have someone with a sniper rifle shoot the terrorists someplace that isn’t a celebration, there are far fewer innocent people who get to be collateral damage. Guess which result creates more angry, scared people who might be susceptible to recruitment.
Little Boots
we will not get actual progressivism for a very long time. okay, maybe we don’t want that. I plan to vote for Hillary, who is a long way from left, but better than the inevitable other.
mai naem mobile
We need to get completely energy independent, help the rest of the world be energy independent, tell the Israelis to go fuck themselves and get the fuck out of the ME. They can shove their theocratic ways up their asses and twiddle their thumbs making $20/barrel. See if they can send money to fucking mongolia pushing wahabism when they’re only making $20/barrel.
srv
I derive from John Cole a new phrase: Humanitarian Courtesy Bombing
I’ll never visit Obama’s library, but if he’s serious about that, I suggest a room with a neverending slide show of Behram’s pics.
Little Boots
@mai naem mobile:
we are energy independent. I think there are other reasons at this point for our stupid entanglements.
Ruckus
I’d bet one advantage to the users of drones is that there are no pictures or embedded reporters to show what the results look like. Sure there is the media in the affected countries and maybe a few foreign reporters, but no one from the attacker country. With no home reporting and no loss of life, there is relatively little home opposition to the use of drones. Yes some of us think it is wrong but look up thread and see how many are, “As long as we are going to be there this is the best way” Very few are asking should we be there at all. That’s the kind of pressure that can be pushed back easily.
So, Should we be there at all? I see nothing to gain and long term much to lose. I think it pushes our foreign policy to be – “We don’t care if we piss off the entire world, we are going to do whatever the fuck we feel like. It doesn’t even have to work to bring peace in the end as long as everyone else fears us. For inciting fear is our foreign policy.”
ETA We are the world’s bullies, like it or not.
Little Boots
@srv:
we are never, ever going to stop killing people in my lifetime. can we kill fewer? that is the only question.
kdaug
@moderateindy: Crap, didn’t you see Real Genius? Orbital lasers, duh.
Corner Stone
@kdaug: The bigger the mirror, the bigger the beam.
agorabum
@Mike in NC: don’t drone me, bro!
Also, Pakistan was born in the blood of sectarianism; 500,000 in the partition and another Million in the bengladeshi war. And was born of the principles that non-Muslims should not rule. Near and Congress proposed a secular nation state, Jinnah wanted a Muslim state. This was a fatal flaw in the creation of the state and has hurt it ever since.
Little Boots
@agorabum:
so what’s a few more?
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
How does the sniper get within 1 mile of the terrorist camp with no additional ground or air support? How does that ground or air support get him there without coming in contact with anyone else?
Little Boots
well this place is awfully slow moving tonight.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Very carefully.
Howard Beale IV
@Ruckus: Ahyup. And when the blowback occurs, the military industrial complex is there to extract their pound of flesh to stock up on hardware that will probably fail in 40% of the required use cases.
Little Boots
@Howard Beale IV:
and pretty much everyone will vote mechanically for the assholes who ensure it will all keep happening.
dance around in your bones
I’ve been listening to music and waiting for hookup dude to come home, and then I refreshed BJ ( that sounds kinda salacious, doesn’t it?!) and I read the top post and realized I MET Steve Coll in Pesh way back in the day!
I came in on an airplane with a bunch of journalists from several different networks in the USA and Britain (they had TONS of gear!) and I kinda lied to them and said I was a free-style journalist, too!
Since the girl to guy ratio was about 10 to 1, I got a lot of attention. My bestest buddy was Peter Jouvenal, who you can look up on the Internet if you want to…..He married an Afghan woman, had a couple of kids, and still runs a kind of B&B for journalists in Kabul.
I wish I had hung out with him longer, but I was already married and had a kid, so it didn’t seem to …..um, responsible. He was an SAS enthusiast and actually made me read a book about them, as well as teaching me every nasty English phrase on the planet, which I dutifully noted down in a notebook.
Little Boots
@dance around in your bones:
good lord, guy, do what you need to do, but do not kid yourself, okay?
catclub
@Howard Beale IV: This is relevant to that.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/A_Witness_Wants_To_Talk
Little Boots
where is steeplejack?
I need somebody who likes me.
dance around in your bones
@Little Boots: WTF you talking about?
He was a guy, I’m a girl,we hooked up and had a fucking (literally) great time! I actually liked reading about the SAS.. I almost went with him to AFG from Peshawar because he was covering the war there and he kept getting propositioned by the ‘freedom fighters’ he was traveling with (they’d offer to join him in his sleeping bag at night). But he said we’d have to pretend we were married or they might kill us or some bloody thing, so I gave him a really nice book about Afghanistan by Roland and Sabrina Michaud and said I hoped he’d get to experience AFG like I did back in the late 60’s 70’s when it was pretty cool. He was quite a fervent lover…
I hope he and his wife and kids are ok right now,
Eta: I’m not a guy, and I do what I want to do.
Little Boots
@dance around in your bones:
well okay then. impressive.
Morzer
I wish I could find any enthusiasm for chasing the drones issue round the same old mulberry bush one more time, but I can’t. I think we’ve exhausted the arguments on all sides and are left with the same denunciations of the impure/insufficiently martial. The only thing that changes is the terms of abuse deployed by individuals on either side. Even worse, none of our squabbling on here is going to make so much as a dime’s worth of difference. The national security consensus artists have spoken in the Beltway and our supposed representatives will trot after them like a particularly stupid dog that’s been promised a treat, even though no treat has ever materialized in the past.
Ruckus
@Morzer:
This.
As long as the MIC(which for sure includes the Pentagon) exists and we continue to elect twits who can’t manage to think for themselves any more or any farther ahead than, do they need to go the the bathroom, we will be stuck in forever war. And until we get money out of elections, there will always be someone who will pay to elect those who will find ways to pay them back tenfold.
Morzer
@Ruckus:
I think that, while reading and debating the news is valuable, we need to spend more time figuring out how to get the Democratic party into better shape for the future at local level and learning what it takes to win consistently. I wish the BJ crew would spend more time writing and thinking about that, because it really might get us somewhere. A hundred collective hours or so of cyber-warfare denouncing people for being too droney or not droney enough isn’t going to get us anywhere. Just think what we might achieve if we could take those hours and put them to use make a good plan and figuring out how to strengthen the Democratic party in, say, Georgia, Arizona or Texas.
Yatsuno
@dance around in your bones: You really really REALLY need to write that damn book. Like now. Get a ghost writer if necessary.
PIGL
@Yatsuno: I would sure love to read it.
dance around in your bones
@Yatsuno: Thanks, Yutsy….I think I can write it myself if I just get to that place…..Omnes has promised to slap me in the face if don’t start writing…..well, figuratively :)
I might be almost there, since I’m having a total hip replacement next month, and I left that crazy Pagoda House, and I really like the place I’m living in now? One the owner’s college age daughter goes back to college I might be able to move in aback in and keep rolling.
Plus, I got the hookup guy right here :) I like his style…..
Deecarda
@dance around in your bones: http://www.gandamacklodge.co.uk/peter.htm
Intrigued by your story, found this link to Peter Jouvenal
Ruckus
@Morzer:
Yes.
But. You knew there would be a but didn’t you.
After 4 yrs of running a retail store during the last minor little financial fiasco we are barely recovering from now, I found myself without anything to do. I volunteered to OFA to do whatever was needed, I had plenty of free time. Never even got an answer back. Not a form email, not a fuck off, nothing. Dead fucking silence. Now I realize that I’m an old but when I worked for the 2008 campaign I really wasn’t far off the average age of volunteers in my area so I figured that probably wasn’t the issue. So I have mixed emotions about working for democratic politics. By far the lesser of two evils but not likely to get much better than that. So how do we find and get younger people to run? There is a certain amount of machine politics in any party, which means a much better chance of mostly old fogies running, and they become the ones with a chance of national support. And speaking of national party support, how do we get better leadership in that? The democrats have been floundering for what 30-40 yrs? Can’t seem to find their values with both hands and their pants down. The party has little unity. The rethugs have no real issues and so it must be easier to coalesce around shouting at the moon. OK they have one issue, take us back to some imagined better time. They can’t define it but they’ll know it when it smacks them upside the head. OK back to the subject at hand. I think one of the problems for dems is because we don’t really have a party, with a platform, with issues, we can’t really draw out people for midterms. And over the years that has hurt us badly. We are always playing catch up when we manage to win a presidential, then losing ground again when we lose a midterm. It’s disheartening to a party faithful, think what it’s like to someone who has little interest. How do we change that?
dance around in your bones
@Deecarda: Yes. I know about his lodge….I didn’t want to violate his privacy too much so I suggested people could look him up themselves if they wanted to.
He’s an impressive guy.. I’d contact him again if I didn’t think it would fuck up his marriage and family.He used to write me these letters from AFG and Pak that stressed his military experience (he was a sapper? The guy who computes the range of the guns? Perhaps I have the term wrong…) and told me he could find me really easily,
I wrote back and gave him exact directions to my farm,every highway and exit and street….. LOL.
I met Rory Peck and John Simpson that trip too…. I could go on, I won’t go on :)
dance around in your bones
@Deecarda: Also, the picture of him and his wife and father-in-law grilling a goat on a stick is exactly what we used to do back in the day before the fucking Soviets came in and wrecked the place.
Afghan food is really tasty!! We once went to an Afghan restaurant in SoCal, and in the money we paid for the food we buried a few Afghanis (bills) that we still had from there.
The WHOLE kitchen came out and just exploded in ecstasy!!! “Where did you get these”??!!” They hadn’t seen andy Afghanis for years.And they were the lucky ones who got out of the country before the fucking Taliban took over.
Deecarda
@dance around in your bones
Curious minds want to know, what were you doing in AFG in the 70’s?
dance around in your bones
@Deecarda: Traveling on the hippie trail and smoking a lot of great hashish :)
Plus we started buying cool stuff – jewelry, clothing, rugs, ikats, etc – and found out that people in Amsterdam would pay big bucks for them! Started a whole new business for us which we kept up for many years.
Deecarda
Ah, sounds like high times & great memories. I seem to remember smoking a reddish Afghan hash back then, yes, high times indeed.
Morzer
@Ruckus:
I think it starts by getting better Dems elected locally and changing the party from the bottom up. If we want progressive candidates, we have to start by building a bench, winning the local races and shaping the party’s values on the ground. No more neglecting the silly little school board races – every political office matters. No more blithe assumptions that judges will follow the law. Make sure that we fight for good, qualified, honest judges. No more letting corrupt Democrats run the show by default in, say, Rhode Island or, for that matter, on Beacon Hill. We need to clean up our act and show that government can be clean and effective – if people vote for Democrats. There’s no way to change the Beltway mindset as a whole overnight, we can only start by getting the right people in place locally – and building up to a point where Beltway Dems understand that they have to follow us or be primaried – a threat which depends on controlling the local apparatus. It works for the teabaggers and they are demented. Surely we can do better. I don’t think it’s going to be a matter of instant miracles, but I do believe it can be done because I’ve seen the other side do it.
dance around in your bones
@Deecarda: It’s actually a more interesting story than my brief reply……my (future) husband and I met when I was 15 and he was 19…..he went with a bunch of college friends to Europe and they bought a new VW van in Germany and started driving all over the countries and eventually ending up in Morrocco….
Meanwhile, 15 yr old me and my older sister drove up to Quebec with 3 other girls in a VW bug nand all the way across Canada and eventually down back across the border to the US (BIG story there that I don’t have time to relate ATM) and when we finally got back to ABQ there was an aerogramme from my boyfrirend (future husband) saying he wanted to go to Afghanistan, and he was sending my some dinero and I had to get a passport and a cheap Icelandic ticket to Brussels….which I did, almost got deported (another story for another day) and finally met up with my beloved in the train station in Amsterdam,
From there we took the “Orient Express” train across to Turkey (which was not advisable at the time because there was a huge cholera epidemic going on, but hey – we were teenagers and invulnerable, right?) Anyway, we never got sick, and that was the start of our journey.
tybee
@dance around in your bones:
to echo a sentiment from up thread: write the book.
C.V. Danes
That right there is all you need to know about the effectiveness of our drone program.
Steve in the ATL
@dance around in your bones: Good lord. And I was feeling wild for playing golf on Sunday and NOT using Pings for the first time ever.
dance around in your bones
@Steve in the ATL: Uh…..what are Pings?
I played golf exactly once in Peshawar with my friend Nancy – the golf pro (who was sorely underutilized and followed us around the whole course……he told me I had real talent ( I think he said that to all the girls) and Nancy and I sent the chai kid for vodka-laced lemon Squeezes every couple of holes or so.
It was pretty fun and involved no Pings, whatever they are :)
moderateindy
@Morzer:
This is exactly my point. We are bombing these areas, and will continue to bomb them. That’s why the argument that we shouldn’t be bombing at all is moronic. Like the old saying goes……..and if my aunt had nuts she’d be my uncle.
I agree the bombing is unproductive, but some of us choose to live in reality. It is going to happen, so what is the best way to implement policy? Drones have the advantage of lessening our troops exposure to danger, and is a bit more discriminate than the alternatives like cruise missiles or dropping bombs from a plane.
Yet instead addressing the point, all you get is morons crying about how stupid the policy is. In the current political environment the policy of bombing is not going to change, and it is simply ignorant to beat that dead horse. So the the question becomes what is the best way to execute the policy we are pursuing? All I get in response are idiots ignoring the question at hand, and bloviating about how blowing up people is wrong. A point which, if they were paying attention I agree with, but which also is not at all germane to the debate as to whether or not drones are the best available option to achieve our current policy’s goals.
Cervantes
@moderateindy:
Who makes “the current political environment”? Do you have any thoughts about who should define it?