DRONES (Continuación)

“Dear Obama, when a U.S. drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda,” a Yemeni lawyer warned on Twitter last month. President Obama should keep this message in mind before ordering more drone strikes like Wednesday’s, which local officials say killed 27 people, or the May 15 strike that killed at least eight Yemeni civilians.

Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology but rather by a sense of revenge and despair. Robert Grenier, the former head of the C.I.A.’s…  Seguir leyendo »

Drones — more formally armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs — are “in.”

Since a Predator strike in Yemen against Al Qaeda in November 2002 — the first known use of a drone attack outside a theater of war — the United States has made extensive use of drones. There were nearly four times as many drone strikes in Pakistan during the first two years of the Obama administration as there were during the entire Bush administration.

The United States is now conducting drone strikes in Somalia as well, and their use is expected to dramatically increase in Afghanistan over the next five years as NATO troops withdraw from there.…  Seguir leyendo »

In democracies like ours, there have always been deep bonds between the public and its wars. Citizens have historically participated in decisions to take military action, through their elected representatives, helping to ensure broad support for wars and a willingness to share the costs, both human and economic, of enduring them.

In America, our Constitution explicitly divided the president’s role as commander in chief in war from Congress’s role in declaring war. Yet these links and this division of labor are now under siege as a result of a technology that our founding fathers never could have imagined.

Just 10 years ago, the idea of using armed robots in war was the stuff of Hollywood fantasy.…  Seguir leyendo »

Iran’s capture of an American drone compels us to revisit some difficult, unwelcome but fundamental security issues. If Iran downed a sophisticated U.S. drone, as it claims, that would represent a monumental Iranian intelligence coup in learning how to override the drone’s command-and-control system and then guide it safely down to earth. That conclusion, if true, would force a rethinking of the U.S. intelligence campaign against Iran and, quite possibly, in Afghanistan, as it is likely Iran would share the secret with the Taliban, whom it has helped in the past.

If, however, the drone malfunctioned, as the Obama administration maintains and is more likely, Iran probably will learn those secrets with the help of Russian and Chinese technicians.…  Seguir leyendo »

The next president of the United States needs to answer this question: When, and under what conditions, will the U.S. government stop using drones to bomb suspected terrorists around the world?

The drone program — assuming the media and think-tank coverage of it is basically true, and this piece should not be construed as confirming the existence of the program — is a tactical and technological innovation that has been invaluable in the war against al-Qaeda. Cost-effective, increasingly precise and surgical, it is almost the archetype of sterile, risk-free, push-button warfare, which the U.S. military has dreamed of for a generation.…  Seguir leyendo »

Last Friday, I took part in an unusual meeting in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

The meeting had been organized so that Pashtun tribal elders who lived along the Pakistani-Afghan frontier could meet with Westerners for the first time to offer their perspectives on the shadowy drone war being waged by the Central Intelligence Agency in their region. Twenty men came to air their views; some brought their young sons along to experience this rare interaction with Americans. In all, 60 villagers made the journey.

The meeting was organized as a traditional jirga. In Pashtun culture, a jirga acts as both a parliament and a courtroom: it is the time-honored way in which Pashtuns have tried to establish rules and settle differences amicably with those who they feel have wronged them.…  Seguir leyendo »

Over the past two years, America has narrowed its goals in Afghanistan and Pakistan to a single-minded focus on eliminating Al Qaeda. Public support for a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan has waned. American officials dealing with Pakistan now spend most of their time haggling over our military and intelligence activities, when they should instead be pursuing the sort of comprehensive social, diplomatic and economic reforms that Pakistan desperately needs and that would advance America’s long-term interests.

In Pakistan, no issue is more controversial than American drone attacks in Pakistani territory along the Afghan border. The Obama administration contends that using drones to kill 10 or 20 more Qaeda leaders would eliminate the organization.…  Seguir leyendo »

The highly classified C.I.A. program to kill militants in the tribal regions of Pakistan with missiles fired from drones is the world’s worst-kept secret.

The United States has long tried to maintain plausible deniability that it is behind drone warfare in Pakistan, a country that pollsters consistently find is one of the most anti-American in the world. For reasons of its own, the Pakistani government has also sought to hide the fact that it secretly agreed to allow the United States to fly some drones out of a base in Pakistan and attack militants on its territory.

But there are good reasons for the United States, which conducted 53 such strikes in 2009 alone, and Pakistan to finally acknowledge the existence of the drone program.…  Seguir leyendo »

Recently, during an off-the-record briefing for reporters, a sen- ior Obama administration official declared: "If there are Predator operations in Pakistan, I would argue that the collateral damage is negligible at most, and that reports of intensified damage are a myth."

After a half-decade and some 125 unmanned U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, it is remarkable that the Obama administration maintains the false notion that such operations remain secret and are therefore beyond public debate. It is past time for the White House to provide some transparency over what CIA Director Leon E. Panetta (without acknowledging their existence) describes as "the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership."…  Seguir leyendo »