BY_ ROBERT GRENIER
FROM_ ALJAZEERA
JUN 4 2012
Washington,
DC - "Don't believe what you read in the papers," my father used to
say. And as with most of the sage advice I ignored in my youth, experience
would later prove him to be right. It eventually occurred to me when in
government that if on topics I knew as an insider the press was at least half
wrong, it was unlikely that they could be right on everything else.
And so it is
with some scepticism that one should greet the latest journalistic sensation
which has set tongues wagging and the blogosphere ablaze in Washington: Last
Tuesday's blockbuster article in the New York Times concerning drone operations
and US President Barak Obama's counterterrorism "kill list". The
piece is putatively based on interviews with some three dozen current or former
Obama administration advisers. As at least one wag has pointed out, an article
featuring that degree of willing cooperation from the administration might more
accurately be labelled a press release. Indeed, as one might expect given the
context, the take-away is highly complimentary of the President and,
presumably, highly advantageous to him politically, save perhaps among the sort
of left-leaning hand-wringers with whom Obama's Republican political opponents
would love to see him identified.
Here in the
pages of the New York Times we see the stern, steely-eyed American president,
prepared to do what is necessary to defend the nation against its terrorist
enemies, dealing death from the air at a pace which would put George W Bush to
shame, first in Pakistan and now in Yemen, as well. But here also we see a
model of benign, humanitarian restraint, determined to limit civilian
casualties to the maximum extent possible by imposing his personal discipline
on an otherwise rampant national security structure. And finally we see the lawyerly
paragon of justice who, as advised by his warrior-priest counterterrorism
advisor, insists upon taking personal moral responsibility for the targeted
assassinations through which the US war on terror is, in important part, being
waged. Not content to delegate to others the ultimate decisions of life and
death, this president insists upon personal approval of every addition to the
death roster after an elaborate bureaucratic process through which, putatively,
only those targets which pose an imminent threat and who are not otherwise
susceptible of capture are winnowed out. And when judgments must be made as to
whether a target poses a sufficient threat to justify the collateral killing of
innocents, it is the president himself who weighs the scales.
Creating an
image
In US
political terms, the broad outline of this profile as traced by the president's
minions past and present could hardly be more laudatory, appealing to as broad
a spectrum of domestic opinion as any highly political chief executive could
hope. This should make us wary - wary enough to look at the details. And given
the impossibility of controlling an aggregate message to which dozens have
contributed, there are details indeed, many of which do not accord with the
broad themes the White House is promoting.
One can
start with the White House's insistent profession that it employs this brand of
violence with such limited firepower, such precision and such restraint as to
have avoided "collateral" killing to an almost preternatural extent.
Honestly, what are we to make of this? This narrative hardly accords with the
oft-reported fact of "signature strikes" in Pakistan, in which the
identities of the intended targets are simply not known. The fact is that in
Pakistan the US has gone far beyond a limited campaign against international
terrorists, and appears instead to have embraced the drone strike as a
counter-insurgency tool, employed regularly against militant gatherings which
appear to represent a threat to allied troops in Afghanistan. And as for the
supposedly carefully drawn distinction between combatants and non-combatants,
the New York Times reports that this has simply become a matter of
definitition: Now, any male of fighting age in the militant-influenced tribal
areas of Pakistan is deemed an enemy - which, given prevailing popular
sentiments in those areas, may not be far from the truth. We have come to a
place where the distinctions among terrorists, militants, and mere sympathisers
have largely lost their meaning, and where the differences between intended and
unintended consequences of US actions have simply ceased to matter.
Slippery
slopes
Unsurprisingly,
then, this week has also brought us yet more press evidence that the US has put
itself on a similarly slippery slope in Yemen. Strikes against individuals who
pose a clear and present danger of international terrorism have inflamed local
sympathisers of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to join them, which in turn
has led to many more, and more broadly-targeted strikes. Now we see
journalists, perhaps reflecting a similar inability in the US national security
establishment to make important practical distinctions, referring to the
domestic militants of the heretofore parochial Yemeni organisation Ansar
al-Sharia as a wing of al-Qaeda. More significantly, popular anger over
innocent casualties is rapidly eroding the willingness of anti-militant tribal
forces to take actions against al-Qaeda-supporting local militants which they
would otherwise be motivated to take. Just as we have seen elsewhere, American
short-term counterterrorism goals are working against, and permanently
undermining, the far more important goal of denying safe haven to the
terrorist.
To describe
the problem is not at all the same as prescribing the solution. But as last
Tuesday's New York Times article also makes clear, political considerations in
the US will continue to make it impossible for US policymakers to take the
risks which a wiser and more discriminating approach to counterterrorism would
demand, in Pakistan, in Yemen, and elsewhere. The nearly successful effort to
bring down a US airliner landing in Detroit on Christmas Day of 2009, we are
told, had a visceral effect on President Obama. Under circumstances where that
sort of risk is not an option, a slide down a slippery slope instead becomes a
race to the bottom of lowest-common-denominator counterterrorism policy.
It has been
said that the Roman Empire was forced to conquer the known world in
self-defence. America's counterterrorism policy has placed it on an analogous
path. In the face of such domestic political fear, there is simply no
countervailing power to stop it.
Robert
Grenier is a retired, 27-year veteran of the CIA's Clandestine Service. He was
Director of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center from 2004 to 2006.
GALLO/GETTY