How unpiloted aircraft expand the war on terror.
They are like the camel’s nose, lifting a corner of the tent. Don’t
be fooled, though. It won’t take long until the whole animal is sitting
inside, sipping your tea and eating your sweets. In countries around the
world -- in the
Middle East,
Asia Minor,
Central Asia,
Africa, even the
Philippines
-- the appearance of U.S. drones in the sky (and on the ground) is
often Washington’s equivalent of the camel’s nose entering a new theater
of operations in this country’s
forever war against “terror.” Sometimes, however, the drones are more like the camel's tail,
arriving after less visible U.S. military forces have been in an area for a while.
Scrambling for Africa
AFRICOM, the Pentagon’s Africa Command, is
building
Air Base 201 in Agadez, a town in the nation of Niger. The $110 million
installation, which officially opens later this year, will be able to
house both C-17 transport planes and MQ-9 Reaper armed drones. It will
soon become the new centerpiece in an undeclared U.S. war in West
Africa. Even before the base opens, armed U.S. drones are already flying
from Niger’s capital, Niamey,
having received permission from the Nigerien government to do so last November.
Despite crucial
reporting by
Nick Turse and others, most people in this country only learned of U.S.
military activities in Niger in 2017 (and had no idea that about
800 U.S. military personnel were already stationed in the country) when news broke that four U.S. soldiers
had died in
an October ambush there. It turns out, however, that they weren't the
only U.S soldiers involved in firefights in Niger. This March, the
Pentagon
acknowledged
that another clash took place last December between Green Berets and a
previously unknown group identified as ISIS-West Africa. For those
keeping score at home on the ever-expanding enemies list in Washington’s
war on terror, this is a different group from the
Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), responsible for the October ambush. Across Africa, there have been at least
eight other incidents, most of them in Somalia.
What are U.S. forces doing in Niger? Ostensibly, they are training
Nigerien soldiers to fight the insurgent groups rapidly multiplying in
and around their country. Apart from the uranium that accounts for over
70% of Niger’s exports, there’s little of economic interest to the
United States there.
The real appeal is location, location, location.
Landlocked Niger sits in the middle of Africa’s Sahel region, bordered
by Mali and Burkina Faso on the west, Chad on the east, Algeria and
Libya to the north, and Benin and Nigeria to the south. In other words,
Niger has the misfortune to straddle a part of Africa of increasing
strategic interest to the United States.
In addition to ISIS-West Africa and ISGS, actual or potential U.S.
targets there include Boko Haram (born in Nigeria and now spread to Mali
and Chad),
ISIS and al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in Libya, and
Al Mourabitoun, based primarily in Mali.
At the moment, for instance, U.S. drone strikes on Libya, which have
increasedunder the Trump administration, are generally launched from a
base in Sicily. However, drones at the new air base in Agadez will be able to strike targets in all these countries.
Suppose a missile happens to kill some Nigerien civilians
by mistake(not
exactly uncommon for U.S. drone strikes elsewhere)? Not to worry:
AFRICOM is covered. A U.S.-Niger Status of Forces Agreement
guarantees that
there won’t be any repercussions. In fact, according to the agreement,
“The Parties waive any and all claims... against each other for damage
to, loss, or destruction of the other’s property or injury or death to
personnel of either Party’s armed forces or their civilian personnel.”
In other words, the United States will not be held responsible for any
“collateral damage” from Niger drone strikes
. Another clause in the
agreement shields U.S. soldiers and civilian contractors from any charges under Nigerien law.
The introduction of armed drones to target insurgent groups is part
of AFRICOM’s expansion of the U.S. footprint on a continent of
increasing strategic interest to Washington. In the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, European nations engaged in the “
scramble for Africa,"
a period of intense and destructive competition for colonial
possessions on the continent. In the post-colonial 1960s and 1970s, the
United States and the Soviet Union vied for influence in African
countries as diverse as
Egypt and what is now the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Today, despite AFRICOM’s focus on the war on terror, the real
jockeying for influence and power on the continent is undoubtedly
between this country and the People’s Republic of China.
According to the
Council on Foreign Relations, “China surpassed the United States as
Africa’s largest trade partner in 2009” and has never looked back.
“Beijing has steadily diversified its business interests in Africa,” the
Council’s 2017 backgrounder continues, noting that from Angola to
Kenya,
“China has participated
in energy, mining, and telecommunications industries and financed the
construction of roads, railways, ports, airports, hospitals, schools,
and stadiums. Investment from a mixture of state and private funds has
also set up tobacco, rubber, sugar, and sisal plantations... Chinese
investment in Africa also fits into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s
development framework, ‘One Belt, One Road.’”
For example, in a bid to corner the DRC’s cobalt and copper reserves (part of an estimated
$24 trillion in
mineral wealth there), two Chinese companies have formed Sicomines, a
partnership with the Congolese government’s national mining company. The
Pulitzer Center
reports that
Sicomines is expected “to extract 6.8 million tons of copper and
427,000 tons of cobalt over the next 25 years.” Cobalt is essential in
the manufacture of today’s electronic devices -- from cell phones to
drones -- and more than half of the world’s supply lies underground in
the DRC.
Even before breaking ground on Air Base 201 in Niger, the United
States already had a major drone base in Africa, in the tiny country of
Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen. From
there, the Pentagon has been directing strikes against targets in
Yemen and Somalia. As AFRICOM commander Gen. Thomas Waldhauser
told Congress
in March, "Djibouti is a very strategic location for us." Camp
Lemonnier, as the base is known, occupies almost 500 acres near the
Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport. U.S. Central Command, Special
Operations Command, European Command, and Transportation Command all use
the base. At present, however, it appears that U.S. drones stationed in
Djibouti and bound for Yemen and Somalia
take off from nearby Chabelley Airfield, as Bard College's Center for the Study of the Drone
reports.
To the discomfort of the U.S. military, the Chinese have recently established
their first base in
Africa, also in Djibouti, quite close to Camp Lemonnier. That country
is also horning in on potential U.S. sales of drones to other countries.
Indonesia,
Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab emirates are among U.S. allies known to have
purchased advanced Chinese drones.
The Means Justify the End?
From the beginning, the CIA’s armed drones have been used primarily to kill specific individuals. The Bush administration
launched its global drone assassination program in October 2001 in
Afghanistan, expanded it in 2002 to
Yemen,
and later to other countries. Under President Barack Obama, White House
oversight of such assassinations only gained momentum (with an official
“
kill list”
and regular “terror Tuesday” meetings to pick targets). The use of
drones expanded 10-fold, with growing numbers of attacks in Pakistan,
Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, as well as in the Afghan, Iraqi, and
Syrian war
zones. Early on, targets were generally people identified as al-Qaeda
leaders or “lieutenants.” In later years, the kill lists grew to include
supposed leaders or members of a variety of other terror organizations,
and eventually even unidentified people engaged in activities that were
to bear the “
signature” of terrorist activity.
But those CIA drones, destructive as they were (leaving civilians dead,
including children,
in their wake) were just the camel’s nose -- a way to smuggle in a
major change in U.S. policy. We’ve grown so used to murder by drone in
the last 17 years that we’ve lost sight of an important fact: such
assassinations represented a fundamental (and
unlawful)
change in U.S. military strategy. Because unpiloted airplanes eliminate
the physical risk to American personnel, the United States has embraced
a strategy of global extrajudicial executions: presidential
assassinations on foreign soil.
It’s a case of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well
at so little cost (to us) that it must be all right to kill people with
them.
Successive administrations have implemented this strategic change
with little public discussion. Critiques of the drone program tend to
focus -- not unreasonably -- on the
many additional people (like family members) who are injured or die along with the intended targets, and on
civilians who should
never have been targets
in the first place. But few critics point out that executing foreign
nationals without trial in other countries is itself wrong and illegal
under
U.S. law, as well as that of other countries where some of the attacks have taken place, and of course, international law.
How have the Bush, Obama, and now Trump administrations justified
such killings? The same way they justified the expansion of the war on
terror itself to new battle zones around the world -- through Congress’s
September 2001
Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). That law permitted the president
“to use all necessary
and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons
he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist
attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such
organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of
international terrorism against the United States by such nations,
organizations or persons.”
Given that many of the organizations the United States is targeting
with drones today didn’t even exist when that AUMF was enacted and so
could hardly have "authorized" or "aided" in the 9/11 attacks, it
offers, at best, the thinnest of coverage indeed for such a worldwide
program.
Droning On and On
George W. Bush launched the CIA’s drone assassination program and
that was just the beginning. Even as Barack Obama attempted to reduce
the number of U.S. ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, he
ramped up the use of drones, famously taking
personal responsibility for targeting decisions. By some estimates, he approved
10 times as many drone attacks as Bush.
In 2013, the Obama administration introduced
new guidelines for
drone strikes, supposedly designed to guarantee with “near certainty”
the safety of civilians. Administration officials also attempted to
transfer most of the operational responsibility for drone attacks from
the CIA to the military’s only-slightly-less-secretive Joint Special
Operations Command (JSOC). Although the number of CIA strikes did drop,
the Agency remained in a position to rev up its program at any time, as
the
Washington Post reported in 2016:
“U.S. officials
emphasized that the CIA has not been ordered to disarm its fleet of
drones, and that its aircraft remain deeply involved in counterterrorism
surveillance missions in Yemen and Syria even when they are not
unleashing munitions.”
It’s indicative of how easily drone killings have become standard
operating procedure that, in all the coverage of the confirmation
hearings for the CIA’s new director, Gina Haspel, there was copious
discussion of the Agency’s torture program, but not a public mention of,
let alone a serious question about, its drone assassination campaign.
It’s possible the Senate Intelligence Committee discussed it in their
classified hearing, but the general public has no way of knowing
Haspel’s views on the subject.
However, it shouldn’t be too hard to guess. It’s clear, for instance,
that President Trump has no qualms about the CIA’s involvement in drone
killings. When he visited the Agency’s headquarters in Langley,
Virginia, the day after his inauguration, says the
Post, “Trump
urged the CIA to start arming its drones in Syria. ‘If you can do it in
10 days, get it done,’ he said.” At that same meeting, CIA officials
played a tape of a drone strike for him, showing how they’d held off
until the target had stepped far enough away from the house that the
missile would miss it (and so its occupants). His only question: “Why
did you wait?”
You may recall that, while campaigning, the president told Fox News
that the U.S. should actually be targeting certain civilians. “The other
thing with the terrorists,” he
said,
“is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists,
you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't
kid yourself. When they say they don't care about their lives, you have
to take out their families.” In other words, he seemed eager to make
himself a future murderer-in-chief.
How, then, has U.S. drone policy fared under Trump? The
New York Times has
reported major
changes to Obama-era policies. Both the CIA’s and the military’s “kill
lists” will no longer be limited to key insurgent leaders, but expanded
to include “foot-soldier jihadists with no special skills or leadership
roles.” The
Times points out that this “new approach would
appear to remove some obstacles for possible strikes in countries where
Qaeda- or Islamic State-linked militants are operating, from Nigeria to
the Philippines.” And no longer will attack decisions only be made at
the highest levels of government. The requirement for having a “near
certainty” of avoiding civilian casualties -- always something of a
fiction -- officially remains in place for now, but we know how
seriously Trump takes such constraints.
He’s already overseen the expansion of the drone wars in other ways.
In general, that “near certainty” constraint doesn’t apply to officially
designated war zones (“areas of active hostility”), where the lower
standard of merely avoiding unnecessary civilian casualties prevails. In
March 2017, Trump
approved a
Pentagon request to identify large parts of Yemen and Somalia as areas
of “active hostility,” allowing leeway for far less carefully targeted
strikes in both places. At the time, however, AFRICOM head General
Thomas D. Waldhauser
said he would maintain the “near certainty” standard in Somalia for now (which, as it happens, hasn’t stopped Somali civilians from
dying by drone strike).
Another change affects the use of drones in Pakistan and potentially
elsewhere. Past drone strikes in Pakistan officially targeted people
believed to be “high value” al-Qaeda figures, on the grounds that they
(like all al-Qaeda leaders) represented an “imminent threat” to the
United States. However, as a 2011 Justice Department paper
explained,
imminence is in the eye of the beholder: “With respect to al-Qaeda
leaders who are continually planning attacks, the United States is
likely to have only a limited window of opportunity within which to
defend Americans.” In other words, once identified as an al-Qaeda leader
or the leader of an allied group, you are by definition “continually
planning attacks” and always represent an imminent danger, making you a
permanentlegitimate target.
Under Trump, however, U.S. drones are not only going after those al-Qaeda targets permitted under the 2001 AUMF, but also
targeting
Afghan Taliban across the border in Pakistan. In other words, these
drone strikes are not a continuation of counterterrorism as envisioned
under the AUMF, but rather an extension of a revitalized U.S. war in
Afghanistan. In general, the law of war allows attacks on a neutral
country’s territory only if soldiers chase an enemy across the border in
“hot pursuit.” So the use of drones to attack insurgent groups inside
Pakistan represents an unacknowledged escalation of the U.S. Afghan War.
Another corner of the tent lifted by the camel’s nose?
Transparency about U.S. wars in general, and airstrikes in
particular, has also suffered under Trump. The administration, for
instance, announced in March that it had used a drone to kill “Musa Abu
Dawud, a high-ranking official in al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” as
the
New York Times reported. However, the
Times
continued, “questions about whether the American military, under the
Trump administration, is blurring the scope of operations in Africa were
raised... when it was revealed that the U.S. had carried out four
airstrikes in Libya from September to January that the Africa Command
did not disclose at the time.”
Similarly, the administration has been less than forthcoming about its activities in Yemen. As the
Business Insider reports (in a story
updated from the
Long War Journal),
the U.S. has attacked al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) there
repeatedly, but “of the more than 114 strikes against AQAP in Yemen,
CENTCOM has only
provided details
on four, all of which involved high value targets.” Because Trump has
loosened the targeting restrictions for Yemen, it’s likely that the
other strikes involved low-level targets, whose identity we won’t know.
Just Security, an online roundtable based at New York University,
reports the
total number of airstrikes there in 2017 as 120. They investigated
eight of these and “found that U.S. operations were responsible for the
deaths of at least 32 civilians -- including 16 children and six women
-- and injured 10 others, including five children.” Yemeni civilians had
a suggestion for how the United States could help them avoid becoming
collateral damage: give them “a list of wanted individuals. A list that
is clear and available to the public so that they can avoid targeted
individuals, protect their children, and not allow U.S. targets to have a
presence in their areas.”
A 2016 executive order
requires that
the federal director of national intelligence issue an annual report by
May 1st on the previous year’s civilian deaths caused by U.S.
airstrikes outside designated “active hostility” zones. As yet, the
Trump administration
has not filed the 2017 report.
Bigger and Better Camels Coming Soon to a Tent Near You
This March, a jubilant Fox News
reported that
the Marine Corps is planning to build a fancy new drone, called the
MUX, for Marine Air Ground Task Force Unmanned Aircraft
System-Expeditionary. This baby will sport quite a set of bells and
whistles, as Fox marveled:
“The MUX will terrify
enemies of the United States, and with good reason. The aircraft won't
be just big and powerful: it will also be ultra-smart. This could be a
heavily armed drone that takes off, flies, avoids obstacles, adapts and
lands by itself -- all without a human piloting it.”
In other words, “the MUX will be a drone that can truly run vital missions all by itself.”
Between pulling out of the Iran agreement and moving the U.S. embassy
in Israel to Jerusalem, Trump has made it clear that -- despite his
base’s chants
of “Nobel! Nobel!” -- he has no interest whatsoever in peace. It looks
like the future of the still spreading war on terror under Trump is as
clear as MUX.
© 2018 TomDispatch.com
