Ken Anderson covers a number of sources in the on-going policy debate underlying US use of drones, at Opinio Juris, Tactically Precise, Strategically Incontinent ? (by Kenneth Anderson, 25 Sep 2011).
The principal sources cited are the following:
Wash. Post, The price of becoming addicted to drones (by David Ignatius, 21 Sep 2011).
Report of the Special Rapporteur (Philip Alston) on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions - Addendum: Study on targeted killings (28 May 2010).
Remarks of John O. Brennan, at the Harvard Law School (16 Sep 2011) [John Brennan, WH counterterrorism adviser, argued that U.S. legal authority to use force against al-Qaeda wasn’t “restricted solely to ‘hot’ battlefields like Afghanistan” but could be expanded to other theaters “without doing a separate self-defense analysis each time.”]
Three Quick Comments on David Ignatius’ Critique of Drones in Today’s Washington Post (by Kenneth Anderson, 22 Sep 2011) - making it clear that we have experienced and are experiencing something of a "counterterrorism" vice "counterinsurgency" dichotomy:
Wash. Post - Editorial Board Opinion: It takes more than drones (24 Sep 2011), "CT" + "COIN":Second, the primary theorists of blowback in the Afghanistan war are theorists of counterinsurgency, and the specific application of the blowback thesis is that even if the counterterrorism drone policy works on its own CT terms, it undermines the counterinsurgency war because it damages the ability to win over populations. The extent to which the campaign actually has those effects can be debated. That has to include that asking populations if they’re resentful is not a purely neutral measurement of social science; it tends to signal to them that they get advantages out of being resentful. An awful lot of blowback has to do with the expectations of the population. Telling the local population (as the US did, for example, early on in the Iraq war) that if our war has not made them happy, then it is our fault, is very much a mechanism for foolishly raising the bar of expectations. But David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, in their writings, for example, are talking about counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism’s effects on that. The Obama administration’s whole effort, however, is to get out of counterinsurgency, and quite rightly is worried far less about blowback arising from a switch in strategy to transnational CI.
Ignatius keeps talking, in column after column, about our “addiction” to drones. Why, instead, doesn’t he talk (as the Obama administration implicitly does) about our “addiction” to counterinsurgency, and see drones as the “cure” for that? It’s not as if counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan doesn’t have plenty of downsides and its own forms of blowback and bad unanticipated consequences, as the Obama administration and, for that matter, most of the American people, see it. Downsides starting with no end in sight and no clear avenue to a victory that allows an exit. The Obama administration sees counterterrorism as a realistic and, to date, functioning strategy against our actual long term adversary, and an exit for our addiction to the cul-de-sac of counterinsurgency, and why isn’t it right about that?
Targeted Killing and Drone Warfare: How We Came to Debate Whether There is a ‘Legal Geography of War’ (Kenneth Anderson, 27 Apr 2011):In our view the legal situation is straightforward. It’s been clear for more than a decade that al-Qaeda is a transnational organization that seeks to wage war against the United States from multiple foreign bases; especially in areas where national sovereignty has broken down, a U.S. military response is justified. It would be helpful if Congress would clarify this by passing legislation that renews the authorization of military force and stipulates that it can be used against al-Shabab and other al-Qaeda branches.
The harder question is whether the administration’s increasing reliance on drones is weakening what should be a much broader strategy. While militants can and should be picked off by targeted strikes in Yemen and Somalia, neither country will cease to be a source of terrorism until it can be stabilized under a responsible government. The United States has been trying to encourage a political settlement in Yemen that would end months of near-anarchy, and has been helping to fund and train Somalia’s transitional government and security forces. But the efforts have been underfunded and underambitious.
Efficiency in Bello and ad Bellum: Targeted Killing Through Drone Warfare (Kenneth Anderson, 23 Sep 2011):Abstract:
This brief policy essay examines the evolution of the argument around the proposition that there is a “legal geography of war.” By that term is meant whether the law of war applies only within certain geographically defined areas. It does so in the context of the war on terror and counterterrorism, and specifically in the debates over targeted killing and armed drone warfare.
The essay is a non-technical policy essay that is part of an online volume on current national security issues published by the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law. The essay's purpose is not to offer a formal legal argument on the proposition of a “legal geography of war,” but instead to reflect more discursively on how the communities of international law, policy, diplomatic, laws of war, military, intelligence, nongovernmental organizations, and international advocacy have debated this since 9/11. It argues that the Bush administration’s assertion of a global war on terror and its claims of the legal incidents of war on a worldwide basis caused a backlash among its critics, toward geographical constraints on war as formal legal criteria. This was a shift away from the traditional legal standard that war takes place, and the law of war governs, where(ever) there is “conduct of hostilities.”
Drones and targeted killing, insofar as they are asserted within the law of war, particularly strain the legal framework. However, as the Obama administration has moved away from the global war on terror as a means to widen the application of the law of war beyond the conduct of hostilities, legal views appear to be converging once again on the traditional “conduct of hostilities” standard. The essay concludes with a brief, speculative post-script on the meaning of the deployment of armed drones to the Libyan conflict, and how that deployment seems peculiarly to have shifted the perceived acceptability of drone warfare in a way that was not quite so evident when the issue was not humanitarian war in Libya, but the US’s wars of national security in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
RegardsAbstract:
A peculiar feature of the targeted killing using drone technology debate is that it appears to set up a tension between the two traditional categories of the law and ethics of war, jus in bello and jus ad bellum. The more targeted killing technologies allow more precise targeting and reducing collateral casualties and harm (jus in bello), and that moreover at less personal risk to the drone user’s forces, perhaps the less inhibition that party has in resorting to force (jus ad bellum).
Mike
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