How to avoid using drones

Greg already highlighted the most important story of the day- the Yemeni beach volleyball team being distracted by bikini girls at the Asian Games.  What he failed to do, however, was point out the vast importance of this story, and its CT implications.  Drones are expensive and carry a lot of risks, but America is full of babes (he said, patriotism swelling).  All we have to do is airlift select Bikini Squadrons into AQAP areas.  It is nearly impossible to wage jihad when you are turned into a Tex Avery wolf.

Jihad: solved.

Drone Reax

It seems I have a prior engagement to go shopping downtown today- which is totally awesome, right?- so I won't be able to get to some more response on the drone thing this morning.  There are some excellent and thoughtful comments which I want to address in a real post, rather than the comment section.

Additionally, Clint has a great response, continuing to look at it from a broader CT perspective, including trying to figure out the line between civilian and combatant- specifically: if you are sheltering AQAP, are you still "innocent collateral"?   It is probably the single most difficult question we've faced over the last decade, and one that needs to be addressed.  He doesn't ask it in the abstract, either, but in the context of Yemeni relationships.  There is a lot more there, too, so read it.

Aaron attacks the drone issue as well, in a must-read post.  One of the more important things he brings up, among others, is the unintended consequences of drone strikes- specifically how it might create allies where there weren't before (e.g. AQAP and the Southern Movement).  There is a lot to unpack here.

Finally, Gareth Porter comes from a different angle, looking at the internal politics and intelligence side of the drone debate.   I'm looking forward to talking about all of these in length- I really enjoy this.  Instead, for now, I'll be trying on shoes or something.  The say every girl is crazy for a sharp-dressed man, but probably not when he is thinking about drones. 

Drones and Yemen ( Really long post)

(The original title of this post was "Send in the Drones", which I liked, until I remembered I was actually riffing off the not-so-classic Simpson's Halloween episode "Send in the Clones", itself a play on "Send in the Clowns".  "Clowns" does not rhyme with "drones".  Damn you, pop culture!)

Over at Selected Wisdom, which has rapidly become one of my favorite blogs, Clint Watts has a series of posts about drones, Yemen, and a Yemen/drone combo.  The first post is an excellent look at how drones have disrupted al Qaeda in the Af/Pak region.  As he states, drones have:

1. Disrupted AQ’s strategic planning by eliminating AQ leaders or isolating them in protective positions.
2. Caused AQ to exhaust additional resources to maintain operational security.
3. Largely eliminated large-scale conventional training venues.  Hanif used to train formally at camps, but now he and his fellow recruits are confined to rooms in shacks.
4. Forced AQ to use less experienced and poorly trained individuals.  These new recruits are less likely to be successful operationally and will also be unlikely to carry out terrorism for future generations.

They have been able to do this while not, in his estimate, racking up many more civilian casualities than a COIN operation would (obviously, this is a bit of counter-factual guesswork, but non-drone operations do kill civilians, regardless of the great care our fighters take).

Then, moving into Yemen, Clint argues against Robert Worth, who criticized the idea of using drones to hunt Anwar al-Awlaki.   For what it is worth, I agree with Worth on this very narrow point: hunting al-Awlaki and going for the kill is probably extra-judicial, most likely needlessly inflammatory, and an absolute waste of resources.  Readers of this blog know that al-Awlaki is a sideshow.  He presents some danger, but he is not the theologian, strategist, mastermind, and certainly not the leader of AQAP. Any time spent hunting him is time not spent hunting down the real threats.  It will give us all the negatives of using drones with very little in return, save for what would be a brief and entirely domestic PR victory. 

So then let's talk about drone use in general, assuming we would be using them against the real baddies.  The question is: should drones be used in Yemen?  I admit that I am kind of on the fence with this; I go back and forth almost hourly, like a whiny metronome.  I think the broader CT perspective provided by Selected Wisdom is very helpful, as a lot of us who write about Yemen tend not to focus on a wider picture.  I know I am cloistered and perhaps over-protective: a petulant teenager (No one understands Yemen!  We're in love!).  So let's look at some of the arguments. 

What drones do best, or rather as a product of what they do best (killing), is disrupting networks and sewing paranoia.  This will become more and more important in Yemen as foreign fighters see it as a profitable place to wage jihad (creating this image is a major short-term goal for AQAP).  Drone strikes, even if they don't end up taking out the leadership, will force it to be on the move and less able to plan operations- though they have shown a remarkable ability to learn and maneuver on the fly.   If drone strikes are reasonably successful- and these arguments have to be taken in a vacuum right now, before I get into the negatives- AQAP operations will slow down, and foreign fighters, battle-hardened jihadis who can augment AQAP's operation prowess, might stay in Af/Pak or Kashmir or Indonesia.  Depriving recruits of a reason to go to Yemen would be a success.

But drone strikes wouldn't just deny a reason, they would make it harder to bring in more pros.  Hooking up with the leadership would become difficult, and in a country as proudly xenophobic as Yemen a bunch of foreign fighters waging jihad all willy-nilly would go a long way toward discrediting AQAP, even without standard hearts-and-minds ops by the US (though obviously those should go on).  The paranoia is a key element here as well.  AQAP has managed to be extremely successful while comprised almost entirely of Yemenis and Saudis.  Foreigners coming in while there are killers in the air could make it more difficult for AQAP to accept their help, to trust them.  The jihadi networks go a long way, so this would probably just be a slight benefit, but any little bit helps. 

Obviously there are benefits beyond what it will do to the foreign fighter networks, but I think those are going to be a huge deal as AQAP continues to evolve.  Domestically, if the leadership were to be incapacitated it wouldn't destroy the group, but would hamper them, and perhaps provide us with some breathing room to deal with other structural issues.  And Clint makes a good point that drones, while terrifying, leave considerably less of a military footprint than do soldiers.  But that brings us to the negatives.

What is frequently lost in discussing Yemen is that future drone strikes wouldn't be new in the country- in 2002 the US took out AQ's leader in one of the first successful drone attacks.  This was an operation agreed to by both Yemen and the US, with the understanding that it would be presented as an accident, that al-Hirithi and those in the car with him at the time of death were transporting a bomb that went off.  This was supposed to be a fingerprint-free operation.  But the US was understandably excited by their success, and publicized it.  This was dumb.  Pesident Salih felt burned, as that opened up a vulnerable flank to charges of lapdogism.  Right now, Salih is facing a massive crisis of legitimacy- drone strikes are a painful reminder of a recent past, and will allow not just al-Qaeda but other domestic enemies to charge him with being a puppet who lets Americans kill Yemenis.  While Salih is far from an ideal ally, he is currently our best bet, and it is probable that even a successful drone attack will undercut another plank of our policy.

Hurting Salih isn't the only plank that will be undercut.  Even if you take out morality, even if you take out standard propaganda/recruitment arguments, collateral damage isn't just a matter of numbers.  Even if the terrorist-to-civilian kill ratio is 40-1, that one person could turn a potential tribal ally into a certain enemy.  Our best hope in Yemen, to me, is to maintain Salih's power while devolving it and working with the tribes, both for security and structural reasons- working directly with them not only helps us keep contact with real power brokers, it also closes off avenues of corruption.  Clint argues that using soft power will " will slowly win over some of the Yemeni people and will cost the U.S. billions.  Around 2020, we might actually get one AQAP member turned over to security forces thanks to our niceness.  Ohh, that’s right, Yemen has already run out of water at this point, and most likely AQAP has conducted a thousand additional attacks and grown considerably due to the ripe recruiting conditions created by water resource shortage."   He makes a good point that soft power will be a slow process, but I think he underestimates what creating personal relationship will do.  Having tribal allies will speed up the process of apprehending AQAP and denying them tribal havens- it won't be absolute, but it will be better than what we have now.  Killing with drones hurts our chances to establish these crucial relationships, and these relationships are the best way to get things done in Yemen.  Salih depends on them, AQAP needs them, we shouldn't ignore them.

Now, all that said (is this post still going on?), any operations we enact will involve the hideous death of innocent people, unless we only rely on soft power- and I don't think that is an option.  One of the reasons it isn't an option is because AQAP wants to destroy the center, and they aren't going to step up and dig irrigation channels.  While AQAP is around, there is a vanishingly small chance of providing any relief.  I think an important argument is that even if we merely train Yemeni soldiers and arm the government, and even if the government doesn't use our arms against other foes, like the southern movement (which is: not a realistic hope), Salih will still be painted as a puppet of the US, and anger at his tactics will redound upon us as well. 

Which is why I am very reluctantly, and surprisingly to me, signing off on drone use.  The Yemeni army is not known for restraint, and while most operations need to be run through them, if we can have successful strikes without local sloppiness and aggression we can minimize PR losses.  If the US is going to take the heat anyway, it is better to have a few deaths than to have a village razed in our name.  But these drone strikes have to come with excellent local intelligence collected through a cultivation of tribal relationships- these will both help the chances of a successful strike and partially mitigate the chances of a blood feud.  We have to be smart so we aren't used by one tribe to take revenge against another.  And we have to make sure that these are necessary and important, and not just an attack on a charismatic nobody who happens to speak English, or, god forbid, some tiny foot soldier doing it to put food on his families plate.  I understand this distinction can't often be made, but trying to destroy the entire group rather than just its leadership will have severely negative consequences. 

Obviously, this has to be combined with aggressive soft-power remedies.  A civilian's death can overwhelm the news of one good deed, or ten or 100, but these good deeds have to be so prominent they cannot be ignored.  We also have to have an anti-AQAP PR blitz, in Arabic.  Without these things, drone strikes are nothing more than a militant sop.  These last strident point aren't meant to be arguing against Clint, who didn't argue them.  But they are a must.

OK- that seems long enough.  I reserve the right to change my mind after breakfast or something, or when Greg argues differently.  I welcome all comments and arguments.  This is really important, and I want to know what all of you, who know a lot more than I do, think about this. 

Killing Americans Abroad

As has been reported elsewhere, Anwar al-Awlaqi, the Yemeni-American cleric who was supposedly the inspiration for the Ft. Hood massacre, has been placed on a CIA assassination list, making him the first citizen to have that mark. 

I am not a legal scholar, so I am unsure as to the legality of this.  I know that I would be horrified to find out that the CIA was killing citizens inside America, but for someone overseas who is obviously a part of designated enemy...well, that seems to be within their field of operation.

What I do want to say, though, is that we have to be careful not to let al-Awlaqi become bigger then he is.  As Greg argued a few times in Waq al-Waq, this is not someone who is extremely important to AQAP.  I think it is safe to say that his importance has grown as his notoriety has increased, and this is something that will increase it further.  His role in the traumatizing murder of soldiers is something that sticks heavily in our psyche, and it would provide an immediate gratification to see him taken him out.  But there are people in Yemen who threaten us far more than a man whose importance only comes by dint of his language skills and heritage.   An emotionally-satisfying kill is great in the movies, but not if it comes at the expense of much more important targets.