Drones will play a big role in U.S. counterterrorism for the foreseeable future. But the frenetic pace of drone strikes that have come to define President Obama's war on terrorism is at an end, Obama declared today.
In the months and years ahead, drone strikes once conducted by the CIA will become more of a U.S. military responsibility. The rules for launching the strikes will become stricter -- there must be a "near certainty" that no civilians will be killed, for instance -- and they'll become less frequent. "To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective," Obama said in a speech at National Defense University in Washington, "is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance."
While Obama would not declare an end to the war on terrorism, Obama offered to work with Congress to constrain some of his own authorities for waging it, reflecting what he and aides described as a discomfort with permanent executive war powers. He said he was "open" to working with Congress to establish some additional mechanism to oversee the proper targeting of terrorists, such as a court modeled on the secretive one that oversees the surveillance of suspected foreign agents. He also expressed a preference to constrain "and ultimately repeal" the broad latitude of warmaking powers granted in the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), the legislative wellspring of the war. "This is the moment to ask ourselves hard questions," Obama said.
The administration has balked in the past at changing the AUMF, out of fear that a bellicose Congress will expand an already broad legal framework. "He's not seeking to broaden presidential authorities," a senior administration official told reporters. "He's seeking to refine this so that we have a more disciplined and sustainable approach to fighting terrorism."
Yet neither Obama nor senior administration officials ruled out the most controversial aspect of Obama's counterterrorism measures: so-called signature strikes, in which the CIA does not know the identities of the people it targets, but infers terrorist affiliation based on their observed patterns of behavior.
Over the past five years, Obama took a relatively limited program of drone strikes and expanded it to western Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. The CIA and the military built or expanded airfields in the Middle East and Africa capable of hosting the flying robots. As the administration became more comfortable with the drone strikes -- which officials said, without providing evidence, killed few civilians -- the CIA and the military began expanding their range of acceptable targets. What was once an effort to kill senior leaders of al-Qaida became a tool to kill low-ranking ones.
The statistics bear it out. The Bush administration carried out 45 drone strikes in tribal Pakistan during its entire tenure; Obama outdid that number in just his first year in office. The next year, he launched 117 strikes there, or about one every three days in an area roughly 40 square miles. The numbers have declined in subsequent years: 64 strikes in 2011; 46 in 2012; and 13 so far this year, according to the Long War Journal.
But as the strikes declined in Pakistan, where al-Qaida's core leadership is believed to have been battered, they rose in Yemen. There were 17 strikes there between 2002 and 2011 -- compared to 42 in 2012 and 10 so far this year. A Yemeni citizen, Farea al-Muslimi, recently testified to Congress that the drones have become a meme indicating "fear and terror" amongst Yemeni citizens, who mention them to scare misbehaving children into obeying their parents. Civilian deaths from drones "will haunt us as long as we live," Obama said.
Yet the administration still considers drone strikes its weapon of choice in counterterrorism. "Even small Special Operations carry enormous risks," Obama contended. "Conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage. And invasions of these territories lead us to be viewed as occupying armies."
Indeed, there is no light at the end of the tunnel for drone strikes, commando raids and other counterterrorism operations after 12 years of a global war on terrorism. Obama's new policy is to make those operations less frequent -- not to stop them. "We believe the core of al-Qaida has been greatly diminished," the official continued, "so therefore, that will reduce the need for unmanned strikes against the core of al-Qaida as well." The official notably did not say that reduced need also applies to al-Qaida's affiliates and associated forces.
Obama has finished codifying an apparatus for lethal counterterrorism strikes within the U.S. military and CIA. Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder disclosed that Obama this week finalized a document outlining the "exacting standards and processes for reviewing and approving operations to capture or use lethal force against terrorist targets outside the United States and areas of active hostilities." Over the course of an unspecified period of time, the military will take more responsibility for operating the drones, although the CIA is expected to retain control over drone strikes in Pakistan, although it's not clear that such a switch will result in increased congressional oversight of the strikes. According to the Daily Beast, Obama will become more personally involved in launching the strikes as they transition to military control.
Obama's new approach to the drones in Year Thirteen of the war on terror should feel familiar. It contains an echo of how he wound down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: not by drawing a hard and fast end to them, but by allowing military commanders to very slowly reduce the size of their forces. If it worked well enough for flesh-and-blood troops, Obama is basically saying it'll work well enough for robots.
