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| U.S. Reaper dron
es in a hangar at Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan. | |
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Forget Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and all the other secret little
warzones. The real center of the U.S. drone campaign is in plain sight —
on the hot and open battlefield of Afghanistan.
The American military has launched 333 drone strikes this year in
Afghanistan. That’s not only the highest total ever, according to U.S.
Air Force statistics. It’s essentially the same number of robotic
attacks in Pakistan
since the CIA-led campaign there began nearly eight years ago.
In the last 30 days, there have been three reported strikes in Yemen.
In Afghanistan, that’s just an average day’s worth of remotely piloted
attacks. And the increased strikes come as the rest of the war in
Afghanistan is slowing down.
The secret drone campaigns have drawn the most scrutiny because of
the legal, geopolitical, and ethical questions they raise. But it’s
worth remembering that the rise of the flying robots is largely
occurring in the open, on an acknowledged battlefield where the targets
are largely unquestioned and the attending issues aren’t nearly as
fraught.
“The difference between the Afghan operation and the ones operations
in Pakistan and elsewhere come down to the fundamental differences
between open military campaigns and covert campaigns run by
the intelligence community. It shapes everything from the level of
transparency to the command and control to the rules of engagements to
the process and consequences if an air strike goes wrong,” e-mails Peter
W. Singer, who runs the Brookings Institution’s 21st Century Defense
Initiative. (Full disclosure: I have a non-resident fellowship there.)
“This is why the military side has been far less controversial, and thus
why many have pushed for it to play a greater role as the strikes
slowly morphed from isolated, covert events into a regularized air war.”
The military has 61 Predator and Reaper “
combat air patrols,”
each with three or four robotic planes. The CIA’s inventory is believed
to be just a fraction of that: 30 to 35 drones total, although there is
thought to be some overlap between the military and intelligence agency
fleets. The
Washington Post reported last month that the CIA is
looking for another 10 drones as the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) become
more and more central to the agency’s worldwide counterterror campaign.
In Pakistan, those drones are flown with a wink and a nod, to avoid
the perception of violating national sovereignty. In Yemen, the robots
go after men just because they
fit a profile
of what the U.S. believes a terrorist to be. In both countries, people
are considered legitimate targets if they happen to be male and young
and in the wrong place at the wrong time. The White House keeps a “
matrix”
on who merits robotic death. Congress (outside of the intelligence
committees) largely learns about the programs through the papers.
None of these statements is true about the drone war in Afghanistan, where strikes are ordered by a local commander,
overseen by military lawyers, conducted with the (
sometimes reluctant)
blessing of the Kabul government, and used almost entirely to help
troops under fire. The UAVs aren’t flown to dodge issues of sovereignty
or to avoid traditional military assets. They’re used because they work
better — staying in the sky longer than traditional aircraft and
employing more advanced sensors to make sure the targets they hit are
legit.
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| Figures on the air war in Afghanistan, supplied by the U.S. military. |
The U.S. military is now launching more drone strikes — an average of
33 per month — than at any moment in the 11 years of the Afghan
conflict. It’s a major escalation from just last year, when the monthly
average was 24.5. And it’s happening while the rest of the American war
effort is winding down: There are 34,000 fewer American troops than
there were in early 2011; U.S. casualties are down 40 percent from
2010′s toll; militant attacks are off by about a quarter; civilian
deaths have declined a bit from their awful peak.
Even the air war is shrinking. Overall surveillance sorties are down,
from an average of 3,183 per month last year to 2,954 in 2012. (Drones
flew 860 of those sorties in 2011, and now fly 761 per month today.)
Missions in which U.S. aircraft fire their weapons have declined, too.
That used to happen 450 times per month on average in 2011. This year,
the monthly total dropped to 360.
In other words, drone strikes in Afghanistan now make up about 9
percent of the overall total of aerial attacks. Last year, it was a
little more than 5 percent. The UAVs are growing in importance while the
rest of the military campaign is receding.
“The numbers are yet another powerful data point illustrating the
fact that unmanned systems are here and they are here to stay. They show
their growing use, even as overall air strikes go down,” e-mails
Singer, who
first noticed the drone strike increase.
When Barack Obama began his first term in the White House, many in
his administration pushed for keeping the number of troops in
Afghanistan relatively small while boosting the number of drone strikes.
At the time, Obama decided to go in a different direction. But now, as
he gets set for the start of his second term, the president appears
ready to embrace his internal critics, and leave Afghanistan to the
robots.
