The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  It would be wise to consider how bloody such operations can be. When President Obama chose the riskiest available option for getting Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad—a special-ops raid—he did so not out of a desire to conform to international law but because that option allowed the possibility of taking bin Laden alive and, probably more important, because if he was killed in a ground assault, his death could be proved. The raid went well. But what if the SEAL raiding party had tripped Pakistan’s air defenses, or if it had been confronted by police or army units on the ground? American troops and planes stood ready in Afghanistan to respond if that happened. Such a clash would have been likely to kill many Pakistanis and Americans, and to leave the countries at loggerheads, if not literally at war.

  There’s another example of a law enforcement–style raid conforming to the model that O’Connell and other critics of drones prefer: the October 1993 Delta Force raid in Mogadishu, which I wrote about in the book Black Hawk Down. The objective, which was achieved, was to swoop in and arrest Omar Salad and Mohamed Hassan Awale, two top lieutenants of the outlaw clan leader Mohammed Farrah Aidid. As the arrests were being made, the raiding party of Delta Force operators and U.S. Army Rangers came under heavy fire from local supporters of the clan leader. Two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and crashed into the city. We were not officially at war with Somalia, but the ensuing firefight left eighteen Americans dead and killed an estimated five hundred to one thousand Somalis—numbers comparable to the total civilian deaths from all drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 through the first half of 2013, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalists.

  Somalia is an extreme example. But the battle that erupted in Mogadishu strikes me as a fair reminder of what can happen to even a very skillful raiding party. Few of the terrorists we target will go quietly. Knowing they are targets, they will surely seek out terrain hostile to an American or a UN force. Choosing police action over drone strikes may feel like taking the moral high ground. But if a raid is likely to provoke a firefight, then choosing a drone shot not only might pass muster as legal (UN rules allow lethal force “when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life”) but also might be the more moral choice.

  The White House knows this, but it is unlikely to announce a formal end to the war against Al Qaeda anytime soon. Obama’s evolving model for counterterrorism will surely include both raids and drone strikes—and the legality of using such strikes outside the context of war remains murky.

  Ben Rhodes and others on Obama’s national security team have been thinking hard about these questions. Rhodes told me that the “threat picture” the administration is mainly concerned with has increasingly shifted from global terrorism, with Al Qaeda at its center, to “more traditional terrorism, which is localized groups with their own agendas.” Such groups “may be Islamic extremists, but they are not necessarily signing on to global jihad. A local agenda may raise the threat to embassies and diplomatic facilities and things like [the BP facility that was attacked in Algeria early this year], but it diminishes the likelihood of a complex 9/11-style attack on the homeland.”

  If terrorism becomes more localized, Rhodes continued, “we have to have a legal basis and a counterterrorism policy that fits that model, rather than this massive post-9/11 edifice that we built.” This means, he said, that post-2014 counterterrorism will “take a more traditional form, with a law enforcement lead. But this will be amplified by a U.S. capability to take direct action as necessary in a very narrowly defined set of circumstances.” What U.S. policy will be aiming for, Rhodes said, is “traditional [law enforcement–style] counterterrorism plus a limited deployment of our drone and special-forces capabilities when it is absolutely necessary.”

  To accommodate the long-term need for drone strikes, Obama is weighing a formal process for external review of the target list. This might mean appointing a military-justice panel, or a civilian review court modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees requests to monitor suspected foreign spies and terrorists in the United States. But this raises thorny constitutional questions about the separation of powers—and presidents are reluctant to surrender their authority to make the final call.

  How should we feel about drones? Like any wartime innovation, going back to the sling, drones can be used badly or well. They are remarkable tools, an exceedingly clever combination of existing technologies that has vastly improved our ability to observe and to fight. They represent how America has responded to the challenge of organized, high-level, stateless terrorism—not timidly, as Osama bin Laden famously predicted, but with courage, tenacity, and ruthless ingenuity. Improving technologies are making drones capable not just of broader and more persistent surveillance, but of greater strike precision. Mary Ellen O’Connell says, half jokingly, that there is a “sunset” on her objection to them, because drones may eventually offer more options. She said she can imagine one capable of delivering a warning—“Come out with your hands up!”—and then landing to make an arrest using handcuffs.

  Obama’s efforts to mitigate the use of drones have already made a big difference in reducing the number of strikes—though critics like O’Connell say the reduction has come only grudgingly, in response to “a rising level of worldwide condemnation.” Still, Obama certainly deserves credit: it is good that drones are being used more judiciously. I told Ben Rhodes that if the president succeeds in establishing clear and careful guidelines for their use, he will make a lot of people happy, but a lot of other people mad.

  “Well, no,” Rhodes said. “It’s worse than that. We will make a lot of people mad and we will not quite make people happy.”

  No American president will ever pay a political price for choosing national security over world opinion, but the only right way to proceed is to make targeting decisions and strike outcomes fully public, even if only after the fact. In the long run, careful adherence to the law matters more than eliminating another bad actor. Greater prudence and transparency are not only morally and legally essential; they are in our long-term interest, because the strikes themselves feed the anti-drone narrative, and inspire the kind of random, small-scale terror attacks that are Osama bin Laden’s despicable legacy.

  “Weak laws … favor the states of terror,” wrote Philip Bobbitt in his seminal study of twenty-first-century wars, “Terror and Consent.” He defines the modern struggle as one between “states of consent,” democratic nations where the rule of law is paramount; and “states of terror,” which are ruled by fear and by force alone. Because rule by law and by consent is inherently more attractive to most people, terrorists seek to frighten lawful states into forsaking their principles. The contest is reduced then simply to force versus force. Bobbitt wrote, “Rendering persons too frightened to act lawfully on their basic values is both a means and an end, for such a situation of terror, of terrified people in a terrified society too fearful to freely choose their actions (and thus manifest their values) is an end roughly equivalent to the total destruction of western values.”

  In our struggle against terrorist networks like Al Qaeda, the distinction between armed conflict and law enforcement matters a great deal. Terrorism embraces lawlessness. It seeks to disrupt. It targets civilians deliberately. So why restrain our response? Why subject ourselves to the rule of law? Because abiding by the law is the point—especially with a weapon like the drone. No act is more final than killing. Drones distill war to its essence. Abiding carefully by the law—man’s law, not God’s—making judgments carefully, making them transparent and subject to review, is the only way to invest them with moral authority, and the only way to clearly define the terrorist as an enemy of civilization.

  Jihadists in Paradise

  Atlantic, March 2007

  1. The Ringleader

  The Sulu Sea is a dazzling and distinct maritime domain, a roughly rectangular patch of Pacific Ocean defined by two chains of small islands—the peaks of volcanic ridges—that parallel each other at a
distance of about three hundred miles, reaching northeast from the coastline of Borneo to the main body of the Philippine Islands. Tracing a line along the northwestern end is a long, thin island called Palawan. The southeastern boundary is more punctuated, a chain of nearly a thousand small islands called the Sulu Archipelago. The enclosure creates a kind of oceanic lake, sheltered on all sides from strong currents. Its waters are generally calm and stunningly clear. The conditions are ideal for the formation of reefs, which attract scuba divers from all over the world.

  But long before there were such things as recreational diving and vacations in paradise, the Sulu Sea was outlaw territory, a haven for pirates variously called Malay, Sulu, or Moro—pirates so fierce that for centuries even western warships gave the area a wide berth. The most infamous of these pirates came from the Sulu Archipelago, which is home to the Sama people, notable for seagoing and for their embrace, centuries ago, of Islam. Officially part of the Philippines, the provinces in this region have long been at odds with the nation’s larger, primarily Christian collection of islands to the northeast, and for generations guerrilla forces have roamed the triple-canopied jungles of its island interiors. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the guerrilla movement was dominated by the Moro National Liberation Front, a group with a socialist flavor. In 1996 this group reached an accommodation with the Philippine government and became politically legitimate. But the instinct for rebellion runs deep in these islands, and insurrectionists remain; some style themselves not socialists or communists but jihadists.

  It was from one of the area’s rebel bastions, the island of Basilan, that twenty-one gunmen in military fatigues and long-sleeved black shirts boarded a flat wooden speedboat and embarked on a daring overnight run across three hundred miles of the Sulu Sea. The date was May 27, 2001. With three huge outboard motors, the thirty-foot craft was built for velocity, not comfort, bounding at high speed from crest to crest, its flat bottom occasionally slapping down hard in the troughs. The men were all members of a relatively new Islamist faction called Abu Sayyaf, which roughly translates as “Bearer of the Sword.” They carried machine guns and bolos—the traditional long, single-edged machetes. The larger world was as yet ignorant of their cause—Mohammed Atta was still polishing his flight skills in Florida, three months before 9/11—but these Filipino guerrillas were already veteran jihadists.

  Historically, the dispute in Sulu was local, but among the men on this hurtling boat was one with a larger vision. He was Aldam Tilao, a stocky and gregarious man with a round face, smooth brown skin, and a receding hairline that he disguised somewhat by shaving his head and topping it with a beret or wrapping it in a black do-rag like an American hip-hop artist. With his single hoop earring and Oakley sunglasses, he affected the look of a Hollywood pirate.

  He was not the group’s official leader—that was Khadaffy Janjalani, a younger brother of the group’s founder (who had been killed by local police in a firefight in 1998). But the younger brother had been eclipsed by Tilao, the group’s most flamboyant recruit. Tilao was a criminal, and to him Islam was just the latest cover for a lifetime of increasingly violent thuggery. Years earlier he had been linked by local police to Moro guerrillas, and he was thrown out of Zamboanga College, in Mindanao, where he had studied criminology. If one of his fellow insurrectionists is to be believed, he was even tossed out of an Al Qaeda training camp during the years he spent in the Middle East, in the 1990s. It was during those years in Saudi Arabia and Libya that he began to worship jihadist superstars like Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who both had briefly set up shop in Manila after Yousef’s failed first attempt, in 1993, to destroy the World Trade Center.

  Tilao returned to his home islands a middle-aged man. Taking the name Abu Sabaya (“Bearer of Captives”), he began a campaign of kidnapping, rape, and murder, and emerged as the spokesman and most visible face of the Abu Sayyaf movement. Tilao became a frequent voice on the radio in Mindanao, and he apparently so enjoyed this public persona that he nicknamed himself “DJ,” embroidering the initials on his backpack. His brazen insouciance and sense of style tapped a universal juvenile vein of rebellion, which gave the group, despite its shocking cruelty, a hip, antiestablishment feel. Tilao’s ambition was nothing less than to become the premier southern franchise of global jihad.

  His target that spring morning was Amanpulo, the most expensive diving resort on the southern coast of Palawan, where he and the others hoped to harvest a crop of wealthy foreign hostages. They would extort large ransom payments from the victims’ families and employers, and shatter the friendly calm vital to the Philippine tourism industry. Palawan was considered completely safe. The trouble in recent years had been confined for the most part to the southern islands. This thrust across the Sulu Sea was a bold move by Abu Sayyaf, and something of a stretch. Indeed, when Tilao and his men arrived in the unfamiliar waters off Palawan, in the predawn darkness, they got lost. The plan called for them to strike before sunrise and set off on the long return trip while it was still dark. But with dawn rapidly approaching, they grabbed several local night fishermen off their boats and pressed them into service as guides. Abandoning their primary goal, the raiders settled for a resort called Dos Palmas. It was built on a tiny island just off the coast, where visitors could stay in the bay area in little white cottages on stilts above the water.

  Among the nearly twenty guests asleep in the bay cottages that morning were three Americans: Guillermo Sobero, a naturalized citizen from Peru who ran a waterproofing business in Corona, California; and a Baptist missionary couple, Martin and Gracia Burnham, who worked for the New Tribes Mission, a global evangelical group. Martin Burnham was a pilot, and his wife worked as his ground support. They were celebrating their eighteenth wedding anniversary, having left their three children with friends in Manila. Sobero’s wife (whom he was divorcing) and his four children were in the United States. He had told them he was celebrating his fortieth birthday with relatives at a resort in Arizona. Instead, he was halfway around the world, sharing a cottage with his young Filipino girlfriend, Fe.

  The guerrillas raided the resort before dawn, first capturing the two guards and then moving from cottage to cottage, banging on doors and kicking them in if they were not answered quickly enough. Martin Burnham put on a pair of khaki cargo shorts and opened the door to his room. Gunmen seized him and took him away. Gracia managed to pull on shorts and a T-shirt and grab flip-flops for herself and her husband before being dragged out behind him, as other gunmen raided the minibar for food. All told, the kidnappers took away twenty people, including the guards and a cook. The vacationers turned out to be mostly Chinese Filipinos, and when the raiders learned that two of their three American hostages were missionaries, they were deeply disappointed. The missions were generally poor, savvy, and fatalistic, notoriously unwilling to pay ransom. With their captives huddled on the boat under a tarp against the blazing midday sun, the kidnappers headed southeast toward Basilan.

  They would need five days and four nights to complete the return voyage. They miscalculated their fuel, and when they ran low on gasoline they hijacked a fishing vessel and set their flat wooden boat adrift; the Philippine marines eventually recovered it. As Gracia Burnham recounts in her memoir, In the Presence of My Enemies, the hostages sang Disney tunes and Beatles songs to maintain morale, in between their captors’ harangues about Islam. Despite their frightening situation, they marveled at the beauty of the sea around them. Dolphins raced alongside the boat, dodging under its outriggers and occasionally leaping high out of the clear blue water. A tarp-enclosed platform was erected off one side of the boat for the women to use as a bathroom. Martin Burnham, handy with tools, made himself useful to his captors, even showing them how to strap together D batteries to recharge their satellite phone, which seemed particularly important to Tilao. He had the captives use it to call family and friends and implore them to pay ransom, and he used it himself to call a radio station in Mindanao and proudly anno
unce his crime.

  “The government only listens when we take people,” he said. “Well, I’ll admit we took those hostages. If [the government] wants to negotiate, it’s up to them.” He also warned the station, “Now that we have three Americans, you should not take us for granted.” He then put Martin Burnham on the line:

  “Hi, my name is Mr. Martin Burnham. I am a United States citizen. I am a missionary…. I along with my wife, Gracia, are in the custody of the Abu Sayyaf, Khadaffy Janjalani’s group. We are safe; we are unharmed. Our needs are being met…. We are appealing for a safe negotiation. They are treating us well.”

  Tilao had wanted Burnham to also identify his kidnappers as “the Osama bin Laden Group,” but Burnham was unfamiliar with that name and stuck with the more familiar local appellation.

  The president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who had been in office for only a few months, quickly dashed any hopes that she would adopt a conciliatory approach toward Abu Sayyaf. “I will finish what you started,” she pledged. “Force against force. Arms against arms. This is what the challenge you hurled against me calls for. I will oblige you.”

  On the fifth night, the kidnappers and their captives slipped off the boat into the warm, chest-high water off Basilan and walked ashore through the lazy lapping of the tide. Behind them, the spotlights of fishing vessels dotted the horizon. Islanders lived along the shore, but like these guerrillas, they knew how to move inland along narrow trails that pushed uphill into the black jungle. By straying just ten feet, a person could vanish into the dense vegetation.