by Oliver Stone
What was not appreciated until later was the direct, hands-on involvement of the president himself in targeting specific individuals who were put on official “kill lists.” In 2006, former vice president Al Gore expressed outrage over George Bush’s exercise of powers and wondered whether there were any limits to what presidents could do. Gore asked: “If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?”84 Obama’s targeted assassinations provided a chilling answer. Glenn Greenwald warned that “the power to order people executed (including U.S. citizens) is far too extreme and dangerous to vest in one person without any checks, review, oversight or transparency.” After all, he reminded readers, “it was a consensus among Democrats that George Bush should be forced to obtain judicial review before merely spying on or detaining people, let alone ordering them executed by the CIA.”85
The Obama administration kept a tight veil of secrecy around the program, refusing to divulge information about targeting or casualties. The CIA, which conducted the attacks in Pakistan, even refused to acknowledge that such a program existed. But drone warfare had breathed new life into an agency that had been left for dead after 9/11. “You’ve taken an agency that was chugging along and turned it into one hell of a killing machine,” one former official declared. In the decade after 9/11, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center staff had grown sevenfold. Approximately 20 percent of CIA analysts were now “targeters” and 35 percent supported drone operations.86
The overall cost and complexity of the operation was immense. Each combat drone required a team of at least 150 people to maintain it and ready it to strike its target. The Air Force, which ran the drones in Iraq and Afghanistan, was spending $5 billion per year to operate the program and the cost was increasing rapidly. The Pentagon requested an additional $5 billion for 2012. The JSOC carried out additional strikes in Yemen and Somalia. Strikes were being launched in late 2011 from more than sixty widely scattered bases, by “pilots” wearing the same green flight suits as fighter pilots and maneuvering drones with joysticks and video game–like computer screens. Plans were in the works to supplement these land-based drones with aircraft-carrier-based attack planes that could be deployed in the Pacific and strike targets from three times as far away as Navy fighter jets. The United States was working on miniaturizing these remotely operated intelligence gathering and killing machines to the size of birds and even insects and promoting them as the future face of warfare. In 2011, the Pentagon disclosed plans to spend close to $40 billion over the next decade to add more than 700 medium and large drones to a stockpile that in 2012 totaled more than 19,000, including mini-drones. The Air Force already had more pilots learning to fly drones than it had pilots training to fly aircraft. There were also plans to supply soldiers with thousands of hand-launchable mini-drones for surveying areas and dive-bombing enemy forces.87
But U.S. allies and UN officials questioned the legality of such targeted assassinations. Further concerns about legality were aroused when the United States killed U.S. born Al-Qaeda supporter Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, a naturalized American citizen, in Yemen in late September 2011. The following month, another strike killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old U.S.-born son. In July 2012, relatives of the victims joined with the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights to file a wrongful death lawsuit against Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, CIA Director Petraeus, and two senior commanders of the military’s Special Operations forces on the grounds that the “killings violated fundamental rights afforded to all U.S. citizens, including the right not to be deprived of life without due process of law.”88
The Awlakis and Khan were among the many victims of the Yemeni drone campaign. Much like in Pakistan, the drones were creating far more enemies than they were killing. When the U.S. began its Yemeni drone campaign in 2009, Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula had fewer than 300 militants in Yemen. By mid-2012, that number had jumped to over 700. As the Washington Post reported, the stepped-up targeting in southern Yemen was “stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesmen to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States.” The Post quoted one Yemeni businessman who lost two brothers—a teacher and a cellphone repairman—in a U.S. strike as stating, “These attacks are making people say, ‘We believe now that al-Qaeda is on the right side.’ ” Hundreds of tribesman had also joined the fight not out of sympathy for Al-Qaeda but out of hatred toward the United States. “The drones are killing al-Qaeda leaders, but they are also turning them into heroes,” warned a local human rights activist.89
For American policy makers, drones represented an ingenious low-cost, low-risk form of robotic warfare that kills enemies from thousands of miles away, without endangering U.S. forces. Critics, however, deplored this cowardly form of remote, long-distance killing. Thailand’s Nation newspaper wrote acerbically that “drones . . . satisfy our selfish and rather lily-livered need to eavesdrop, kill and destroy without facing the slightest chance of reciprocation in kind.”90 The army was also experimenting with killer robots that could supplement or replace combat troops. One robot design being tested in Fort Benning, Georgia, operated in conjunction with surveillance drones and was equipped with a grenade launcher and a machine gun. Many feared that these new steps in mechanized warfare, by greatly limiting the numbers of Americans coming home in body bags, would lower the threshold for going to war. “Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs,” warned Wendell Wallach, who chaired the technology and ethics study group at Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics.91
For Engelhardt, drones were simply the latest in a long line of “wonder weapons” guaranteed to ensure American military hegemony from atomic bombs to hydrogen bombs to the Vietnam-era electronic battlefield to Reagan’s missile defense shield to the First Gulf War’s “smart bombs.”92 Doubt was cast upon their wonder-weapon status in late 2011 when Iranians displayed an RQ-170 Sentinel that they had brought down intact while it was spying over their territory. More than two dozen others had crashed up to that point but none with so much fanfare or such embarrassing consequences.
Some expressed concern that the Iranians would reverse engineer the drone and learn its secrets. Dick Cheney demanded that Obama send planes to destroy the downed aircraft while it lay grounded. But it was too late. The cat was already out of the bag. More than fifty countries, some friendly and some hostile to the United States, had already purchased drones, and several had their own sophisticated drone programs in place. Most of those purchased were of the surveillance variety, but the United States had sold attack drones to close allies. In 2009, the United States punished Israel, which was second only to the United States in drone manufacture, for selling an attack drone to China. WikiLeaks revealed that Israel had angered U.S. authorities by selling advanced model drones to Russia. Among the other countries that claimed to have mastered manufacturing drones with lethal capabilities were Russia, India, and even Iran. In summer 2010, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad displayed a model he called the “ambassador of death.”
But the main challenge to U.S. ambitions and pretensions appeared to come from China, which had the most dynamic program outside the United States. By 2011, five years after publicly displaying its first drone, China boasted over two dozen varieties, with more on the way. And, most troubling, China appeared to have no compunctions about selling armed drones to other nations. China’s Aviation Industry Corp. offered customers a model comparable to the U.S. Predator called the Yilong (“pterodactyl” in English) that combined combat and surveillance capabilities. Among the countries lining up to buy combat models from China was sometime U.S. ally Pakistan.
Leading U.S. defense contractors like General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, whose advanced Predators and MQ9 Reapers sold for over $10 million each, clamored to get in on this market and pressured the U.S. government to ease export co
ntrols. Vice Admiral William Landay III, director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which oversaw such sales, instructed his subordinates to determine in advance which countries could purchase drones with which capabilities,93 so U.S. manufacturers would be ready to hit the ground running when they got the green light.
By using the rationale that it was engaged in a battle against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban that was not restricted to “hot battlefields” as a justification for targeted assassinations in multiple countries, the United States was establishing a dangerous precedent. As Human Rights Watch pointed out, what was to stop China from targeting Uighur activists living in New York City or Russia from killing Chechen militants in London?
Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair, who had tried to curb drone attacks and other CIA covert activities, believing them a blot on America’s reputation, was replaced in 2010 by retired Lieutenant General James Clapper, the former head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, who defended such actions. Blair complained that the White House’s obsession with drone strikes had replaced serious strategizing about how to defeat Al-Qaeda. “The steady refrain in the White House was, ‘This is the only game in town’—reminded me of body counts in Vietnam,” Blair observed.94
In Afghanistan, U.S. officials touted drone attacks as an improvement over the aerial bombardment that marked the earlier stages of the war. In March 2010, the New York Times reported that “civilian deaths caused by American troops and American bombs have outraged the local population and made the case for the insurgency.”95 U.S. bombs had killed thousands of Afghan civilians. Many others were shot at checkpoints. Command Sergeant Major Michael Hall, the senior NATO enlisted man in Afghanistan, said that many of those imprisoned at the Bagram Air Base had joined the insurgency after the deaths of people they knew. “There are stories after stories about how these people are turned into insurgents,” he told his troops. “Every time there is an escalation of force we are finding that innocents are being killed.”96
Obama and his advisors had been reading Lessons in Disaster, Gordon Goldstein’s cautionary study of the deepening U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Goldstein shows how foreign policy makers’ failure to question basic assumptions about a monolithic Communist threat and the domino theory had led the U.S. astray. Obama determined not to make the same mistakes in dealing with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Obama understood that getting bogged down in Afghanistan would doom his presidency, much as Vietnam had destroyed Johnson’s. Having already increased the U.S. troop commitment and declared that winning the war was vital to America’s national interests, he now sought options that would limit U.S. involvement and offer an exit strategy. But, as Washington Post staff writer Bob Woodward has skillfully shown, he was boxed in and outflanked by his top military advisors—Mike Mullen, Petraeus, McChrystal—who, with the aid of Secretaries Gates and Clinton, pushed for 40,000 additional troops, an expanded mission, including full-scale counterinsurgency organized around military-led nation building, and an open-ended commitment. Obama demanded they provide additional options. But at a September 30 meeting he eliminated the one option that made sense, telling his national security advisors, “I want to take off the table that we’re leaving Afghanistan.”97 Still, he made clear he didn’t want a commitment that would last ten years and cost $1 trillion. The military leaders, he charged angrily at the November 11, 2009, strategy review session, had presented only the one foolhardy option. To make matters worse, all three had publicly stated that anything less than their desired troop buildup would result in a humiliating defeat, a view that was immediately trumpeted by the leading neocons and their allies in the media.
New York Times and Washington Post editors did all they could to back the hawks. The media watch group Fairness & Accuracy in Media and Reporting (FAIR) surveyed all Times and Post op-eds during the first ten months of 2009 that addressed the direction of U.S. policy in Afghanistan. The Times, despite having been scandalized by Judith Miller’s role in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, ran thirty-six columns supporting the war and only seven opposing it. The ratio was more than ten to one in the Post, whose editors were very explicit about where they stood. Breaking with McChrystal’s war policy, the Post editorialized in September 2009, “would both dishonor and endanger this country.”98
Biden and Marine General James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, proposed a scaled-back approach that would still increase troops by 20,000 but reject nation building and population protection, thereby promising a much quicker exit. They wanted to focus on weakening and dividing the Taliban in hopes of reconciliation and on training Afghan forces. Gates and Mullen later punished Cartwright for his dissent by blocking his elevation to chairman of the Joint Chiefs, even after Obama had informed him that he had the job.99
What Afghanistan actually needed was economic aid and social reform, not more U.S. troops. The depths of Afghan poverty were staggering. As of 2009, even with U.S. dollars flooding the country, Afghanistan was still the world’s fifth poorest nation with one of the widest gaps between rich and poor. Per capita income stood at $426. Sixty-eighty percent of the population lived on less than a dollar per day. Only 23 percent had access to sanitary drinking water. Average life expectancy was 43 years. Twenty-four percent of adults could read and write, but only 14 percent of women. Even in 2011, a decade into the war, only 30 percent of girls attended school.100 Despite such enormous need, the United States was spending over $100 billion annually on military efforts and only $2 billion on sustainable development. The Center for American Progress reported that “even the Soviet Union spent more on reconstruction” than the United States had.101 But even that paltry sum was in shocking excess of what the Afghan government could generate. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who was part of McChrystal’s civilian advisory team in 2009, wrote that “outside aid is some 14 times higher than the Kabul government’s revenue-generating capability.”102
MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones fly combat missions above Afghanistan. U.S. officials touted these unmanned weapons as precise instruments for the targeted killing of enemy combatants, but their use led to numerous civilian deaths and helped usher in an era of drone proliferation across the globe.
The condition of Afghan women was particularly deplorable. They had been suffering terribly ever since the United States and its allies overthrew the Soviet-backed regime, whose unpopularity was partly due to its egalitarian impulses toward women. Liberating women from Taliban repression had been one of the U.S. justifications for invading in the first place. But, as Atiq Sarwari and Robert Crews reminded readers, “within a twenty-five year period Afghan women became the object of emancipation at the hands of four separate regimes: the communists, the mujahideen, the Taliban, and the American-led coalition all presented the amelioration of the plight of women as an obligation that made their rule legitimate.”103 And in the rural areas, where the overwhelming majority of Afghans live, little had changed and infant and maternal mortality rates remained among the highest in the world, although they, like life expectancy, had recently shown signs of improving.104 In some Taliban-controlled southern provinces, fewer than 1 percent of girls attended middle school. David Wildman and Phyllis Bennis wrote, “arming one group of men with a terrible record on rights so they could overthrow another group of men with a terrible record on women’s rights has done little to improve the situation for women. Afghan women remain unequal in law, in health, and in life.” In 2009, Afghanistan still ranked second worst on the UN’s Gender-Related Development Index measuring, among other things, female literacy, access to education, and life expectancy.105 And that was after eight years of U.S. occupation and reform.
Under the circumstances, more U.S. troops was the last thing Afghanistan needed, and many people tried to save Obama from making a colossal blunder. In early November, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry wrote two secret memos to Hillary Clint
on warning that the counterinsurgency policy was failing and troop increases would backfire. Eikenberry, who had been the commander of U.S. troops in the country for 18 months in 2006 and 2007, cautioned: “The last time we sent substantial additional forces—a deployment totaling 33,000 in 2008–2009—overall violence and instability in Afghanistan intensified.” And, he made clear, “More troops won’t end the insurgency as long as the Pakistan sanctuaries remain.” The corruption of Afghan president Hamid Karzai and the incompetence of the Afghan army and police only made the situation more hopeless.106
Others with knowledge of the region concurred. In September 2009, four former top intelligence officials warned the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof that “the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem” and a buildup would only “prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct. The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome.”107 One of the four, Howard Hart, former CIA station chief in Pakistan, campaigned for rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces. He told students at the University of Virginia that the United States could send hundreds of thousands of troops and spend “umpteen billion” dollars and it would still do no good: “They will never stop fighting us,” Hart said. “They never stopped fighting the Soviets. They’ve never stopped fighting each other.”108
Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai converse during a March 2010 dinner at the Presidential Palace in Kabul. A shaky U.S. ally at best, Karzai has led a government that has proven both brutal and corrupt.
Not only did Afghans hate the presence of invading forces, they hated their tactics, especially in the heightened counterinsurgency phase of the war. Afghans resented night raids in which U.S. and Afghan troops forced their way into people’s homes, kicking in doors, and breaking Afghan taboos about invading the privacy of women. The night raids, which increased exponentially once Obama took office, targeted Taliban leaders and suspected insurgents in an attempt to destroy the Taliban “shadow governments” that functioned throughout the country. What the Israeli geographer Eyal Weizman said about such tactics in Palestine and Iraq applies equally, if not more so, in Afghanistan: “unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home has been experienced by civilians in Palestine, just like in Iraq, as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation.”109
