by Scott Shane
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By early December 2009, the intelligence net was picking up dire signs of impending attacks. The targets were uncertain, but American officials believed that Western embassies and hotels favored by foreigners were likely to be on the list. For months, some American military analysts had argued for strikes against AQAP. Now the CIA reported that bombers in Abyan province in Yemen’s south were preparing to don suicide vests and to head for Sanaa, almost certainly intending to attack the US embassy. General Petraeus pushed hard for what he said was a rare opportunity to take out a large number of militants. The situation seemed to meet Obama’s criterion for action: a direct threat to American lives. But General James Jones, then Obama’s national security adviser, said officials knew intelligence on targets in Yemen was still a work in progress, especially compared with Pakistan. “It was case by case and trying to get some assurances that in fact that target was where we thought he was, who we thought he was, would be there when we thought he was,” Jones said in an interview. “It was more difficult because it was kind of an embryonic theater that we weren’t really familiar with.” The president nonetheless approved a strike, proposed by the Pentagon, on a suspected AQAP training camp near the village of Al Majala in Abyan.
For Obama, it was a momentous step. He had come into office with the hope of remaking relations with the Muslim world, in part by reducing the American military presence there. Now, with the military and intelligence agencies declaring an emergency, he felt he had no choice but to go in the opposite direction, expanding the American war on Al Qaeda into a new and volatile Arab country. On the night of December 17, 2009, Petraeus oversaw the strike from his Tampa headquarters, with Obama’s senior security aides in touch by video link from the Situation Room. Djibouti, twenty miles from Yemen across the slender Bab el Mandeb Strait, still would allow only surveillance Predators to be flown from its territory. Under pressure to move fast, military commanders used the only weapon available—volleys of cruise missiles from a US Navy vessel in the Arabian Sea.
Yemeni ground forces struck in several locations in coordination with the American missile assault. In the cubicle warrens of American intelligence agencies, at the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the NSA, and beyond, there was excitement. “We’d been wanting to do strikes forever at that point,” recalled one counterterrorism analyst who had spent 2009 watching AQAP organize, recruit, and plot attacks.
Yemen’s embassy in Washington put out a statement claiming that the dawn attack on what it called “Al Qaeda’s hideout” had been carried out by “Yemeni counterterrorism units backed by the air force.” Within hours of the strikes, Yemen announced that Obama had called to congratulate Saleh on Yemen’s “successful terror raids.” The clumsy misdirection did not hold up for long. Within a day, American officials, speaking anonymously, began to hint to reporters in Washington that the air strike at Al Majala had not been a strictly Yemeni affair. The New York Times wrote that “American firepower” had been involved. ABC News broke the news that US cruise missiles had been used.
Two weeks later, on January 2, 2010, after the underwear bomb episode on Christmas, Petraeus returned to Sanaa, “congratulated President Saleh on recent successful operations against AQAP,” and informed him that American security aid would be increased sharply to $150 million in 2010. In one of the more cynical moments in recent diplomatic history, Saleh cheerfully assured Petraeus in a ninety-minute discussion that he would keep up the charade. “ ‘We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,’ Saleh said, prompting Deputy Prime Minister Alimi to joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG,” the Republic of Yemen Government, the cable said.
On closer examination, the upbeat cable actually revealed astonishing ignorance of what the United States had done. When Saleh told Petraeus that “mistakes were made” in the December 17 strike, resulting in excessive civilian casualties in Abyan, the American general denied it. “The General responded that the only civilians killed were the wife and two children of an AQAP operative at the site, prompting Saleh to plunge into a lengthy and confusing aside with Deputy Prime Minister Alimi and Minister of Defense Ali regarding the number of terrorists versus civilians killed in the strike.” The cable said that “Saleh’s conversation on the civilian casualties suggests he has not been well briefed by his advisors on the strike in Abyan.” The self-satisfied tone of the cable was misplaced. In fact, according to multiple Yemeni and international investigations, Saleh was right and Petraeus was shockingly misinformed. He, not the Yemeni president, was the one who had “not been well briefed by his advisors.”
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The most careful and thorough study of the Al Majala attack, by Human Rights Watch, would conclude that the strike had killed the main target, an Al Qaeda operative named Saleh Muhammad Ali al-Anbouri, better known as Muhammad al-Kazami, and possibly as many as thirteen other militants, though evidence for the precise number is sketchy. With the idiosyncratic logic of military planners, the Pentagon’s JSOC called the names on its secret kill list “objectives,” and it had decided to name targets in Yemen after towns in Ohio. So Kazami was dubbed “Objective Akron” in targeting documents. But the strike that killed Objective Akron also hit the tents of two extended Bedouin families, killing at least forty-one civilians, including nine women, five of them pregnant, and twenty-one children.
One of the first outsiders to reach the grisly scene, hours after the strike on December 17, was Anwar al-Awlaki’s uncle, Saleh bin Fareed al-Awlaki. Bin Fareed was a leader of the Awaliq tribe (also transliterated Awlak and several other ways) from which the family got its surname. When a catastrophe befell his people, they naturally summoned him. He made the three-hour drive from his seaside villa in Aden and found a horrifying landscape of missile craters and burned tents, with blood and body parts everywhere. The local Bedouin families had been paid to provide food, laundry, and other services to the Al Qaeda camp, but there was no evidence and no likelihood that they shared the militants’ ideology or posed any direct threat to Americans. The families’ herds, some 1,500 goats, sheep, cows, and donkeys, had been slaughtered along with the families.
“Old women,” Bin Fareed said in an interview, growing emotional as he remembered the massacre. “Children. I mean, we collect the remains—we don’t know if it belongs to dogs, goats, or human beings. So we buried it all together.” Yemeni officials had ordered Yemeni Air Force MIG fighters to fly over the site shortly after the missiles hit to try to cover American involvement, but Bin Fareed said the deception was obvious even the day of the strike. Officials later claimed that the Al Qaeda camp was an inaccessible mountain hideout, comparing it to Tora Bora in Afghanistan, but Bin Fareed reached it with no difficulty in his SUV. “It was about ten minutes from the main road in a small car,” he said.
Nor did the killing stop with the strike. One or more of the American Tomahawk missiles that hit the site were armed with cluster munitions—a warhead stuffed with 166 yellow cylinders the size of soda cans, designed to shatter into some three hundred metal fragments. The international Convention on Cluster Munitions, banning their use, was proposed at an international conference in Dublin in 2008, came into force in 2010, and has been signed by 113 countries. But the signatories do not include Russia, China, or the United States. One motivation for the ban was the danger from unexploded bomblets, and indeed in Al Majala at least four curious children and adults who picked up the yellow cans in the days after December 17 were killed and another dozen or more injured.
Bin Fareed was outraged, and after helping bury corpses and body parts he drove to his house in Shabwah province and spread word that tribesmen should mount a protest at the site. He also took steps to launch an inquiry by Yemen’s parliament, in which he served, to document the results of the strike. Tens of thousands of angry local people rallied two days later on the hills surrounding the craters. But tel
evision cameras focused most of their attention on a handful of Al Qaeda members atop a hill, lifting their Kalashnikovs in the air and denouncing the United States and the Yemeni government. Bin Fareed said he grabbed his rifle and wanted to confront the Al Qaeda gunmen for trying to hijack the protest but was restrained by his friends. For him, the presence of a handful of Al Qaeda militants and the media coverage of a brief speech by one of them were a disaster, threatening to distort the sincere outrage of the tribes into an expression of support for Al Qaeda.
One White House aide recalled that it took weeks before an after-action report on the Al Majala strike confirmed the damage. “The president wasn’t happy with it, and so we went through a very long process led by Brennan to tighten up how we take lethal action in Yemen,” the aide said. “We were aware of the blowback on the ground and how off things had gotten.”
The full impact of the December 17, 2009, strike would not be evident for months. But the debut of American military action in Yemen would turn out to be a resonant catastrophe for the United States. Anyone who studied the asymmetric battle against terrorism recognized the crucial role played by perceptions of fairness and injustice, good intentions and bad, competent allies and blunderers. But the campaign had begun with clumsy cover-ups of American involvement, cruise missiles and cluster bombs utterly unsuited for precise strikes, and collateral damage so extreme that it would permanently poison public opinion. With a single strike, the United States had yielded the moral high ground in Yemen.
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By the time of the Al Majala strike, Obama was presiding over a jury-rigged bureaucracy constructed to handle targeted killing. Its work in Pakistan had become all but routine, and the White House signed off on strikes there in advance only if they posed unusual risks. About twice a week, CIA drones flying over Pakistan’s tribal area fired a volley of missiles at suspects on the ground, killing scores of people each month. Obama had approved one strike in Somalia in September 2009 and the first Yemen strike in December, and he had decided to personally approve all strikes in those countries in advance. The message of the expansion seemed clear: What the United States was doing in Pakistan was not just an emergency measure or an adjunct to the conventional war next door in Afghanistan. Wherever the United States discovered someone it considered to be a dangerous enemy, it would strike.
Each Tuesday, Obama would descend from the Oval Office to the Situation Room, the basement command center whose sleek mahogany-and-electronics look resulted from a major update during Bush’s second term, for the weekly terrorism meeting. With John Brennan at his side, the president would run through the agenda: the rogues’ gallery of Al Qaeda suspects, reports on plots afoot and plots foiled, questions about how best to meet the threat. Sometimes there would be a show-and-tell from the agencies—the CIA for Pakistan, JSOC for Yemen and Somalia, including before-and-after shots of a strike. Or the agencies would present a brief biography of a suspected terrorist who had been named to the kill list. When Yemen was the main topic, as it often was in the months after the Christmas Day bombing attempt, the ambassador to Yemen, Stephen Seche, or the CIA station chief in Sanaa would join the discussion by video link.
Sometimes Obama would draw out his security cabinet on how the contest was going, or grow contemplative and remind everyone in the room of the fateful nature of their task. When a debate about civilian casualties in drone attacks began to heat up in 2010, Obama would sometimes point out, somewhat defensively, that there might well be civilian casualties from a decision not to proceed with a proposed strike: like the three thousand civilians who had died on 9/11, they would be the victims of an Al Qaeda plot that a drone strike might have disrupted. Whether a strike was approved or rejected, the president often remarked, civilian lives were at stake.
At one Tuesday meeting a few weeks after the underwear bomb episode, the president took a moment to peruse a chart from the intelligence agencies: fifteen Al Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties, some with connections to Awlaki. The country faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishable from the civilians around them. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a layout from a high school yearbook. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her seventeen years. “How old are these people?” asked Obama, the father of two daughters, according to two officials present. “If they are starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we are moving into a whole different phase.”
The suspects on the chart were not yet being proposed as drone targets, but Obama knew that some of them soon could be. He was the ultimate arbiter of a “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, and there were virtually no captures by American agencies, though allied governments sometimes imprisoned militants on the basis of US intelligence. Before names were added to the “kill list,” a term the media used but the White House didn’t like, Obama and his aides often pored over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what some officials wryly called “baseball cards.” When the CIA sent word that there was a rare opportunity for a drone strike on a top terrorist—but that his family was with him—it was the president who had reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
Since his time in the Senate, Obama had seen the drone as a possible answer to both the technical and moral challenges of counterterrorism. The terrorists were few, and the Bush years had proven that a big conventional fighting force was no way to take them on. The most highly praised counterterrorism strike in Iraq, in 2006, used five-hundred-pound bombs to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the ruthless Jordanian-born militant who declared himself “emir” of the Islamic State of Iraq. But it was a paradoxical victory: Zarqawi headed a jihadi insurgency that had not existed before the American invasion (and one that would survive his death, spread to Syria, and become a much bigger menace in the years to come). Bush’s war, in other words, had created the militants that commanders were then congratulated for killing.
By that measure, a program consisting solely of targeted strikes with no ground troops seemed eminently sensible. Obama, said Ben Rhodes, his deputy national security adviser, considered targeted strikes “a way of minimizing the chance of getting drawn into a bigger conflict by successful terrorist attacks that create a groundswell of opinion for more aggressive action.” A little killing, in other words, might prevent a lot of killing. The drone, CIA and JSOC operators claimed, offered unequaled precision because it allowed the analysts and the drone pilots to loiter for hours or days and study what they called the “pattern of life” on the ground. When the strike came, a Hellfire missile could take out a car or part of a house, leaving neighboring buildings unscathed. At Obama’s urging, after a 2010 strike killed several women and children in Pakistan, the CIA actually reduced the size of the explosive munition on the Hellfire missile. Let’s kill the people who are trying to kill us, was the president’s regular refrain.
It all seemed logical and reasonable, and drones seemed to be one of the few government programs that both Republicans and Democrats liked. The political consensus in Washington was such, in fact, that it was easy to miss the profound shift that targeted killing represented. The single-minded pursuit of enemies had changed America and its leaders. Like Bush and his advisers—indeed, like the American people—Obama and his aides had themselves been radicalized by the threat posed by Islamic radicals. Before 9/11, anyone proposing to use missiles in a country where we were not at war to kill suspected terrorists week after week would have been met with strong opposition. The Bush administration, in fact, had repeatedly and explicitly condemned Israel’s practice of killing Hamas leaders and other militants with missiles and other weapons. On July 5, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell reiterated the American stance: “We continue to express our distress and opposition to these kinds of targeted killings.” The following month, just two weeks before the Al Qaeda attacks, the State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, declared that “Israel needs to understand that targeted
killings of Palestinians don’t end the violence, but are only inflaming an already volatile situation and making it much harder to restore calm.” At that time, an American official who recommended that an American citizen overseas suspected of terrorism should be killed with a missile would surely have been met with incredulity and scorn. But 9/11 had changed the definition of what was preposterous, what was merely prudent, what was un-American, and what was unthinkable.
Even the Norwegian Nobel Committee, it seemed, was not bothered by Obama’s approval of drone strikes, since it had stunned the White House and the country in October 2009 by awarding him the peace prize. The choice seemed a strained effort by Europeans to underscore their disgust with George W. Bush, and it only fed conservatives’ belief that the American president was some kind of Euro-socialist interloper driven by an alien ideology. For Obama, the prize was an untimely embarrassment—an Onion story come to life. The president later said that he and his political adviser David Axelrod had expected many political challenges, but “the one thing we didn’t anticipate was having to apologize for having won the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Preparing for his December 2009 acceptance speech in Oslo, Obama asked his speechwriters to dig up readings from Thomas Aquinas and others—not on peace but on the concept of just war. When he spoke, he did not flinch from the paradoxical position he was in, as commander in chief overseeing two grinding wars and a covert drone campaign. He cited such previous laureates as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but only to distinguish his own position from theirs. As the head of a state at war, Obama said, “I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”