by David Milne
Obama’s address also signaled a sharp break with the counterinsurgency doctrine propounded by McChrystal and Petraeus—at least in its Afghan incarnation—making clear that it was time for the Afghan people to step up and take control of their destiny. Addressing the camera directly, Obama said, “We won’t try to make Afghanistan a perfect place. We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely.” He reiterated a theme that he had first introduced, to the vexation of some, during his speech announcing the surge eighteen months previously. “Over the last decade,” Obama said in conclusion, “we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times. Now we must invest in America’s greatest resource—our people … America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home … Let us responsibly end these wars, and reclaim the American Dream that is at the center of our story.”63 In making his decision to wind down the war, Obama directly rebuffed David Petraeus. A year later, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (who replaced Robert Gates) announced that America’s combat mission in Afghanistan would end at the close of 2013. Obama had drawn a line under his predecessor’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had shown himself more than capable of reversing course when events on the ground counsel such a course. He appeared to agree with John Maynard Keynes’s question to a dogmatic critic: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Obama’s critics called him a hypocrite; hawkish Republicans attacked his lack of spine. To his admirers the president was refreshingly flexible.
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Over the course of his presidency, George W. Bush had ordered forty drone strikes: targeted assassinations of high-value targets using unmanned drones carrying Hellfire missiles, operated at a remove of thousands of miles by CIA “pilots” in Langley, Virginia.64 Barack Obama’s presidency witnessed a step change in the number of strikes—more than four hundred at the time of writing—a widening of the program’s geographical remit, and a willingness to kill radicalized American citizens if the need arose and the opportunity presented itself. The CIA-led drone program was extended beyond Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq to include the targeted killing of alleged terrorists (or aspirants) in Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. In September 2011 in Yemen, a Reaper drone, operated by the CIA, killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a firebrand Islamist cleric, al-Qaeda operative, and American citizen—along with three other Americans “not specifically targeted.”65
Obama could not resist the temptation to celebrate a program that diminished and terrorized al-Qaeda without putting American boots on the ground. In one speech he observed, “We have had more success in eliminating al-Qaeda leaders in recent months than in recent years.”66 Drone strikes were the reason Obama shifted from supporting counterinsurgency in 2009 to rejecting it two years later. One foreign-policy adviser to Obama described the appeal of drone strikes succinctly: “precision, economy, and deniability.”67 Drone strikes also took no prisoners. And the last thing America needed was more of those in Guantánamo Bay.
These were advantages, but Obama’s increased propensity to launch drone strikes also posed large ethical questions. This was a policy of high-tech assassination, after all, that flouted the sovereignty of other nations. The Bush administration elevated preventive defense to the status of official policy—invading states on the basis of potential threats. Obama rejected this strategy on the metalevel but was evidently comfortable applying it to the micro. Eliminating individuals on the basis of their prospective threat to a state sounds like a plotline from George Orwell’s 1984 or Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Minority Report.” And because the United States was the first nation in the world to weaponize drones, Obama was setting a precedent that other nations will eventually follow. David Sanger asks the right question in Confront and Conceal: “What is the difference—legally and morally—between a sticky bomb the Israelis place on the side of an Iranian scientist’s car and a Hellfire missile the United States launches at a car in Yemen from thirty thousand feet in the air? How is one an ‘assassination’—condemned by the United States—and the other an ‘insurgent strike’?”68
Even though the drone program officially did not exist—the “deniability” element of its appeal—Obama realized that he needed an intellectually plausible and convincing answer to searching questions such as Sanger’s. The president certainly had a well-credentialed individual in-house to carry out this task. Harold Koh, the State Department’s top lawyer, had clerked for Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe v. Wade, was a former dean of Yale Law School, and was well regarded among liberal Democrats and touted by many as a future appointee to the Supreme Court. Koh had his work cut out for him. It is difficult to conceive of a more challenging or important legal commission.
In a speech delivered in March 2010 at the annual conference of the American Society of International Law, Koh provided a carefully worded defense of the legality of drone strikes (without ever using the word “drone”). At the outset, Koh stated that he viewed his duty as to serve as the “conscience” of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies, to ensure that the nation was “following universal standards, not double standards.” Yet it was clear from his research, Koh stated, that “U.S. targeting practices, including legal operations conducted with unmanned aerial vehicles, comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war.” How did Koh justify this assertion? Primarily through claiming that al-Qaeda had “not abandoned its intent to attack the United States, and indeed continues to attack us.” In those circumstances the targeting of an individual possessed of such desires represents what the Obama administration defines as a “lawful extrajudicial killing”—one that is “consistent with its inherent right to self-defense” under international law. An “unlawful extrajudicial killing” takes place when the United States does not provide sufficient proof that a target is possessed of those same inclinations. Koh’s case is logical in many respects. But it is also entirely predicated on trusting the government to make such determinations thoroughly, transparently, and without prejudice.
On the issue of breaching other nations’ sovereignty, Koh presented a neat formulation. The United States may target individuals only in a country that has permitted them to do so; such as was the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (or at least until May 2011). But the United States also reserved the right to act unilaterally where a nation in question is “unwilling or unable to suppress the threat”—a definition that would include anarchic nations with porous borders like Somalia and Yemen. Koh also made a final point that he believed critics of the drone program would do well to ponder: all war involves making mistakes that kill, but unmanned drones—which can hover above a target for hours on end—make fewer mistakes than even the most advanced bombers. As one operator told Koh, “I used to drop bombs from a flying airplane. I could not see the faces of the people … I am much, much more aware of the human concerns in these situations.”69
Drone strikes have been at the heart of President Obama’s counterterrorism strategy. Their success at eliminating major al-Qaeda figures explains why Defense Secretary Leon Panetta could state boldly in the summer of 2011 that the United States was “within reach” of winning the war against Islamist terrorism. But the policy has also created significant antipathy across the world. Do drone strikes eliminate high-value al-Qaeda targets? Absolutely. But it is impossible to gauge how many others have been radicalized by America’s drone program. These invisible assassins inspire fear and dread. But it is impossible to secure the United States from attack with recourse to these tactics alone. And the Obama administration’s silence did not help. Silence is understandably equated with sin.
In May 2013 at the National Defense University, Obama broke his vow of omertà. He delivered what an admiring New York Times editorial described as “the most important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks, a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America.” The basic message was: mission nearly accomplished. “Our systemic effort to dis
mantle terrorist organizations must continue,” Obama said. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” In the course of a speech of remarkable candor, the president admitted for the first time that he had ordered the killing of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in a strike that also killed three other people, including al-Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son. The president provided strong evidence suggesting Awlaki was organizing terrorist attacks. Obama also stated his intention to transfer the drone program from the CIA to the Department of Defense and indicated his desire to discuss with Congress “options for increased oversight,” which might include a “special court to evaluate and authorize lethal action” or “an independent oversight board in the executive branch.” Crucially, Obama added that the only circumstance in which he would order a drone strike would be where there was a “continuing and imminent threat to Americans”—a tighter definition than existed previously.70
Less than a week after Obama’s speech, Pakistan announced that a U.S. drone strike had killed Wali ur-Rehman, the deputy leader of the Pakistan Taliban. The strike illustrated the merits and demerits of the program in microcosm. It is alleged that Rehman, who had a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head, orchestrated attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan and helped plan a suicide bombing that killed seven CIA agents at Camp Chapman in 2009 (later dramatized in the movie Zero Dark Thirty). As the deputy leader of the Pakistan Taliban, Rehman helped organize multiple suicide attacks in Pakistan that had killed thousands. The Pakistani government certainly did not mourn his passing.71 The U.S. government, of course, was pleased to have eliminated such a high-value target.
Yet the strike also infuriated the Pakistani government, a bystander to events, whose Foreign Ministry condemned the strike and where a consensus is emerging that American drone activity above its territory needs to be halted. The U.S. government refused to confirm that a strike had actually taken place, undermining Obama’s claims regarding transparency. Indeed, the speech was still being cheered as the missile eviscerated its target. From President Obama’s perspective, the tactical advantages far outweighed the reputational damage. It was bold, in many respects, to order a strike so soon after a speech that was hailed as a progressive landmark. But the strike laid bare the ethical quandaries that will face all future presidents in possession of this omniscience-encouraging technology. Imperiled nations that possess lethally effective weapons tend to use them.
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At the beginning of 2009, the CIA briefed Obama on the agency’s efforts to locate Osama bin Laden. Off-the-record observers of that meeting have indicated that the president was underwhelmed. He instructed his incoming CIA director, Leon Panetta, to make locating bin Laden the number-one priority. The additional resources that accompanied the reprioritization reaped dividends in the summer of 2010 when the agency made a significant breakthrough. They had been tracking an al-Qaeda courier named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who had led them to a fortified compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. The compound had some features that struck analysts as suspicious.
The three-story main building was custom built with large canopies to protect its inhabitants from satellite photography. High walls crowned with razor wire surrounded the compound. No phone lines were connected to the property. Many in the agency were convinced that the main building was home to Osama bin Laden. A false vaccination program was established in an attempt to secure DNA evidence from the compound’s inhabitants, but to no avail. It ultimately fell to President Obama to choose one of three options: launch an air strike, dispatch ground forces, or wait longer to find corroborating evidence. A final complicating issue was whether to consult with Pakistan or decline to share this information, since their intelligence agency (ISI) leaked like a sieve.72
Obama’s advisers were far from unanimous on how to proceed. Vice President Biden recalled that Obama “went around the table with all the senior people, including the chiefs of staff, and he said, ‘I have to make a decision. What is your opinion?’” Few wanted to make a clear recommendation, fearing the consequences—far graver, hypothetically, than those stemming from the 1993 Black Hawk Down debacle in Somalia—if the decision turned bad. “Every single person in that room hedged their bet except Leon Panetta,” Biden said. “Leon said go. Everyone else said, forty-nine, fifty-one.”73 As a salutary parallel, Robert Gates reminded them of Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated decision to send U.S. helicopters to Iran to rescue American hostages. The term “shit show” began doing the rounds as a catchall descriptor of the potential consequences of a botched U.S. attempt to kill or capture bin Laden in Pakistan.74
Weighing these issues, Obama ultimately made a decision that was both bold and stemmed logically from previous remarks on the issue of bin Laden and Pakistani sovereignty. The president rejected his cabinet’s caution and ordered implementation of the riskiest option. On the evening of May 1, 2011, two Black Hawk helicopters departed Jalalabad airfield in eastern Afghanistan and set out for Abbottobad. In addition to the pilots, the helicopters carried twenty-three Navy SEALs, an Urdu-English translator, and a Belgian Malinois dog to track anyone leaving or arriving on the scene. The SEALs penetrated the compound, killed bin Laden, stripped the property of hard drives and papers, and transported their bounty back to Afghanistan. In addition to bin Laden, the SEALs killed three men and one woman within the compound, including one of bin Laden’s sons. All the Americans were unharmed. Bin Laden’s body was identified and transported to the USS Carl Vinson, where his corpse was cleaned and wrapped, which was in accordance with Muslim custom, then dropped into the North Arabian Sea, which wasn’t. At 3:00 a.m. on May 2, two hours after the architect of 9/11 was shot and killed, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen informed his Pakistani counterpart that a military operation had been carried out in his country and that bin Laden was now dead. Relations between the two nations have never fully recovered. Islamabad viewed the raid as a flagrant betrayal of trust.
The dilemma that confronted Obama over how to react to bin Laden’s apparent discovery did not lend itself to triangulation. The president quickly surmised that the choice was between going all in with ground forces—eliminating the uncertainty that would accompany a missile strike—or not going in at all. Keeping Pakistan out of the loop evidently caused Obama little angst. He was simply acting in accordance with what he had said during the campaign, and for which he had received significant flak from both Hillary Clinton and John McCain. It was an incisive decision that stemmed logically from previous remarks.
Paul Wolfowitz was impressed by Obama’s decision. He hailed it as a “gutsy call” and implied that it ran against the grain of the president’s default leadership style: “Obama has just made the toughest decision of his presidency, arguably. It wasn’t a simple decision … He was in a position where he’d have to take responsibility for it if it went badly. It’s gone well. I hope he’s learned some of the virtues of boldness.”75
The praise and the underhanded criticism were both genuine. But Wolfowitz rather misreads his subject. Barack Obama is utterly ruthless and decisive when it comes to eliminating enemies when it does not require the deployment of significant military resources and where an exit plan is obvious. The president applies the Powell Doctrine to individual human enemies, who are dispatched with overwhelming force. It is on the larger matters of war and peace among nation-states that he practices caution.
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In December 2010, a twenty-six-year-old vegetable vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi doused himself in gasoline and set himself alight in front of the governor’s office in Sidi Bouzid, a rural town in Tunisia scarred by endemic corruption. Bouazizi couldn’t afford to pay the bribes required to get a permit to sell his vegetables. He died a month later from his burns and became a martyr and a catalyst to the cause of democratic reform across the Middle East. No one could have anticipated the consequences that stemmed from his desperate act.
Just the month previous
, more than two hundred classified U.S. diplomatic cables had been published on the WikiLeaks website. Many were reprinted in high-circulation international newspapers such as The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and The Washington Post. Over time, some 250,000 leaked State Department documents were released into the public domain. Bouazizi’s self-immolation had followed a series of embarrassing disclosures about the regime led by Tunisia’s president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. It was Robert Godec, the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia, who unwittingly revealed details of the Ben Ali family’s opulent lifestyle that firmly suggested they were detached from reality. Godec wrote that “it is the excesses of President Ben Ali’s family that inspire outrage among Tunisians,” noting that these included Pasha, a pet tiger owned by Ben Ali’s daughter, and the family’s insistence on flying in yogurt and ice cream from the French Riviera. These WikiLeaks revelations were repackaged by Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian activist for social justice, and placed on the website TuniLeaks, which experienced high traffic. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton observed, “I’m not sure the vegetable vendor killing himself all by itself would have been enough. I think the openness of the social media, I think WikiLeaks, in great detail, describing the lavishness of the Ben Ali family and cronies was a big douse of gasoline on the smoldering fire.”76 It is a fire that burns to this day. And the Obama administration remains undecided about whether to fan or ignore it.
On January 14, Tunisian demonstrations acquired sufficient intensity to force Ben Ali and his indulged wife and progeny to flee for Saudi Arabia, a safe haven for oppressors. He became the first Arab leader in the modern era to be bounced from office by street-level popular antipathy. President Obama welcomed his departure, calling for elections that “reflect the true will and aspirations” of the long-suffering Tunisian people. It was a remarkable moment. The combination of WikiLeaks, Twitter, Facebook, and cable television had unleashed a protest of remarkable force and intensity that resonated throughout the region. Moments after Ben Ali stepped down, one tweet would prove particularly farsighted: “Today, Ben Ali. Tomorrow Hosni Mubarak.”77