CIA drone program using REALLY loose targeting guidelines

[Thanas]

Guys, please discuss third parties in a seperat thread (feel free to start one).

[The Yosemite Bear]

"Twenty years from now"? PeZook, what you describe has happened for decades, now. It's the reason why the term "IED" became part of our vocabulary. It's the fucking reason why the eleventh day of september has any significance.
Terror attacks against the US and it's citizens will continue for as long as this is the reaction to these kinds of stories:

I meant Pakistan specifically. I am well aware that there are a lot of people outside (and plenty inside, too) of Pakistan who hate the US, dude.

well first we were doing this and getting people in Pakistan Pissed off, than when the floods happened the Government resold the aid supplies from us on the black market, and a bunch of Al-Queda folks played Robin Hood and kept the majority but where seen as being the only ones looking out for the little man.

[thejester]

Brought to you by the CIA, the guys that gave us the Bay of Pigs debacle, terrorists Freedom fighters in China and a whole host of other goodies.

Can't we boycott America or something? Oh wait, that line only works on China. Carry on then.

But in all seriousness, this will in the long term just weaken US influence and will likely feed the Islamist propaganda machine. I query whether the US is getting bang for its buck, er I mean drone strike. But apparently according to the articles, political concerns don't really factor into the CIA decision making. Which is strange. I can understand the military not being able to factor political concerns, but the CIA is supposed to be an intelligence agency is it not?

It's speculation on my part but the CIA's attitude is probably that it has gone past that stage. The issue of winning hearts and minds and collateral damage are very relevant when you're an occupying power and you're trying to convince the population to like you. But that's not the situation in the areas of Pakistan where these drone strikes are happening; radical Islamism is not a new phenomenon in the region and at this stage Pakistan is so broken that worrying about instability is shutting the gate long after the horse had bolted. Now obviously the State Department disagrees, and that argument in no way validates the morality of the action.

[Korvan]

In our last federal election up here in Canada, a lot of people who would normally vote Liberal, choose to vote NDP instead allowing the Conservatives to elect a majority government. This had several effects. First, it caused a party who up to this point was not really considered a contender to suddenly become the official opposition. 2nd, it sent a strong message to the Liberals (who I'm not sure were really listening) to either shape up or become irrelevant. It also sent a message to the Conservatives(who I'm sure were listening) that the popular majority who did not vote for you will be watching your government closely.

In Canadian politics who you don't vote for often says more than who you did vote for. The result is that we usually have a least two parties who pay attention (for a while at least) to the people who voted them in and also to the people who could vote them out next time.

[Artemas]

Also, drones?

The popular majority clearly weren't the ones who voted for the NDP, seeing as the Conservatives won a majority.

Anyway, in regards to jesters post and the guiding theory of the CIA's operations, it seems to me that the CIA isnt really autonomous in this regard, they merely are the ones with jurisdiction over drones operating over foreign soil. It would be interesting to know what the stance of the Military is to the whole thing, and if the military has been offered drone control before, but turned it down, or more likely, if it was merely a jurisdictional division. But it seems obvious that drone use was extended and expanded as the result of higher government, and not due to the local ideas of the CIA. Carrot vs Stick at this level is something that only occurs throughout the whole breadth of government, with the carrot being diplomatic overtures (under a different department) and the stick being one of two other seperate agencies. It's not like the CIA could have done one thing, or the other, they never had that power, and aren't that autonomous.

As per the strategy as a whole, 'winning hearts and minds' is very simplistic. It's not about making someone like you, it's about making some choose. Insurgents can, and often do, force the populace to 'choose' them, due to terror, fear and intimidation. The US cannot force the populace to 'choose' them without extensive Pakistani support (and really, the end goal is actually getting Pakistan to make them choose). Jester's idea that it was decided that events had surpassed the point where 'hearts and minds' works I think is likely, they had decided that direct targeting would achieve more realistic goals, and a decade of barely helping was essentially the same as not helping. So why keep the gloves on?

[Thanas]

So your idea is "let's bomb civilians because we can and they hate us anyways"?

[Simon_Jester]

I think Artemas is saying it's their idea, not his.

The problem I see is that the CIA's actions are supposed to fit into a coherent, overall strategy, one which does not involve us in an endless, costly quasi-war that we can't win because Pakistanis who hate us breed faster than we blow them up with hundred thousand dollar drone attacks.

What, exactly, is the end they're hoping to achieve with random drone attacks? If the plan was just "kill all our enemies," then while that would imply a truly evil attitude toward collateral damage it would at least make sense. But that can't be the plan. They can't kill all the militant anti-Americans in Pakistan at this rate; there are too many and the very policies they're applying will make more. And by constantly provoking and enraging the Pakistanis with this endless stream of poorly aimed killing, we guarantee that there will always be a base of support for the militant movement. We make sure that our enemies can't possibly lose.

So "it was decided" doesn't satisfy me. It's not enough to "decide" that it's impractical to win the hearts and minds of the Pakistani people- you have to have a realistic plan for dealing with the situation, and your actions have to be carried out in aid of the plan.

[Thanas]

I think Artemas is saying it's their idea, not his.

True. Apologies, Artemas, I misread that.

[Artemas]

hey, no problem.

The thing with having a "realistic plan", is that the diplomatic approach was the one used from 2001 to around 2007-2008. The US was desperately trying to get Pakistan to engage, and bring the tribal areas under control, and patrol the border, etc, but it just wasnt happening. So at some point someone (or more likely, a lot of people just got sick and tired of endless Pakistani stalling and two-faced support) just decided to "fix things ourselves". Actually invading and doing COIN was out of the question, so in their minds the next best thing was targeting leadership and inderdicting lines of communication.

[Block]

hey, no problem.

The thing with having a "realistic plan", is that the diplomatic approach was the one used from 2001 to around 2007-2008. The US was desperately trying to get Pakistan to engage, and bring the tribal areas under control, and patrol the border, etc, but it just wasnt happening. So at some point someone (or more likely, a lot of people just got sick and tired of endless Pakistani stalling and two-faced support) just decided to "fix things ourselves". Actually invading and doing COIN was out of the question, so in their minds the next best thing was targeting leadership and inderdicting lines of communication.

From what I've read, sorry no sources it was in Time though I think, there were a couple of specific incidents that led to the shift you're talking about Artemas, and they involved Pakistani border forces actually firing on US and Afghani troops to cover fleeing Taliban fighters at border crossings. Whether that justifies it or not, I have mixed feelings on.

[Artemas]

yeah, afghanistan and pakistan have been involved in what could be described as a border war for the last year or two. ANA mortar pakistani frontier forces, the pakistanis rocket them back. Gunmen are allowed to cross from pakistan into afghanistan unhindered, and vice versa. And yeah, on a couple of occasions ISAF troops were in hot pursuit of insurgents, but were fired upon by Pakistani soldiers at the border, allowing insurgents to escape. I imagine that'd be pretty frustrating. i think there were an incident or two whereing pakistani or afghan forces would occupy outposts in the other's territory, and sometimes it came to blows. It's also more difficult when where the border lies is a tad unclear.

The actual shift was a more drawn out affair, presaged by the huge uptick in drone attacks in 2007-2009 and the stalled offensives by pakistan into the tribal areas. The recent spat over military aid and the rough talk from the americans over pakistan and the isi aiding the enemy and such is really just the most recent development.

[Simon_Jester]

The real problem I see is that I'm not sure the drone attacks fix anything, really, not when they're targeted against vague crowds of maybe-"militants." All that does is create what I've heard described as 'accidental guerillas:' people who are fighting us over some local grievance but have no real attachment to the global ideology we're trying to fight... but who can serve as foot soldiers for that ideology anyway.

This is why it's a bad idea to subordinate strategy to tactics, to worry more about "how can we continue to launch attacks against this problem?" than "should we be attacking this enemy in this way at all?"

[thejester]

The real problem I see is that I'm not sure the drone attacks fix anything, really, not when they're targeted against vague crowds of maybe-"militants." All that does is create what I've heard described as 'accidental guerillas:' people who are fighting us over some local grievance but have no real attachment to the global ideology we're trying to fight... but who can serve as foot soldiers for that ideology anyway.

We're talking about tribal Pakistan. The original meeting point for international jihad in the 1980s. The location of almost all of al-Qaeda's senior leadership including both Osama bin Laden and al-Zawhiri. The de facto rear area for the Taliban and the war in southern Afghanistan.

I think the 'accidental guerrilla' boat sailed a long, long time ago.

[Lord of the Abyss]

The real problem I see is that I'm not sure the drone attacks fix anything, really, not when they're targeted against vague crowds of maybe-"militants." All that does is create what I've heard described as 'accidental guerillas:' people who are fighting us over some local grievance but have no real attachment to the global ideology we're trying to fight... but who can serve as foot soldiers for that ideology anyway.

We're talking about tribal Pakistan. The original meeting point for international jihad in the 1980s. The location of almost all of al-Qaeda's senior leadership including both Osama bin Laden and al-Zawhiri. The de facto rear area for the Taliban and the war in southern Afghanistan.

I think the 'accidental guerrilla' boat sailed a long, long time ago.

Unless every single person there is already an anti-American militant that's not so. Every time we kill people who aren't our enemy, we make more enemies. We're also underlining the fact that they might as well be anti-American, since we kill so indiscriminately that not being anti-American is no protection. In other words, what's the percentage in it for them to refrain from attacking American interests, given that we are about as likely to kill them regardless?

[thejester]

Ignoring the logistical problems with that contention, I was more referring to the international nature of the Islamic radicals in the area - local problems are already thoroughly intertwined with global networks in the area.

Also found this, which has a different perspective:

The teams handed out 650 structured questionnaires to people in the areas. The questionnaires were in Pashto, English and Urdu. The 550 respondents (100 declined to answer) were from professions related to business, education, health and transport. Following are the questions and the responses of the people of FATA.

...

Over two-thirds of the people viewed Al-Qaeda and the Taliban as enemy number one, and wanted the Pakistani army to clear the area of the militants. A little under two-thirds want the Americans to continue the drone attack because the Pakistani army is unable or unwilling to retake the territory from the Taliban.

The people I asked about civilian causalities in the drone attacks said most of the attacks had hit their targets, which include Arab, Chechen, Uzbek and Tajik terrorists of Al-Qaeda, Pakistani Taliban (Pakhtun and Punjabis) and training camps of the terrorists. There has been some collateral damage.

The drones hit hujras or houses which the Taliban forced people to rent out to them. There is collateral damage when the family forced to rent out the property is living in an adjacent house or a portion of the property rented out.

The Taliban and Al Qaeda have unleashed a reign of terror on the people of FATA. People are afraid that the Taliban will suspect their loyalty and behead them. Thus, in order to prove their loyalty to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, they offer them to rent their houses and hujras for residential purposes.

It's two years old and you'd suspect that the people approached generally had something of a middle-class bent. But interesting nonetheless.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Ignoring the logistical problems with that contention,<snip>

Which are? I'm talking about human nature here; people tend to get angry when you try to kill them, or kill their friends and relatives. If you mean "they can't reach us", well that's why I used the term "American interests"; even if they can't reach us, as long as we are involved in the region there will be something or someone involved with us that's within their reach.

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, there are always acceptable losses and expendable assets. American interests? You mean people? It's not like America has put thousands of its interests like that in the line of fire in a lot of interesting places. It seems like this doesn't really concern... or interest those in charge by much, and so they carry on doing the things that they're interested in, or rather doing in the people they're interested in.

[MKSheppard]

faster than we blow them up with hundred thousand dollar drone attacks.

...was going to nitpick this, but you're in the ballpark; FY2010 costs for Predator Hellfires is $73,720 a missile.

[MKSheppard]

...and twenty years from now, when Pakistan inevitably radicalizes and moves away from the American spehere of influence, people will be flabbergasted why there are so many people there who fucking hate the west.

That horse has left the barn long ago.

Pakistan began to radicalize from the moment Zia became dictator in 1977; and the US embassy was burned to the ground in 1979 over vague rumors that the US had attacked Mecca. Link to Wiki

Zia started his program of Islamization of Pakistan, and it was under his watch that the ISI became a state-within-a-state doing whatever the fuck it wanted.

Because this campaign of murder with such loose ROE will never bite the US in the ass. Never.

What the do you suggest instead? Anyone? Bueller?

Because invading Iraq to bring Freedom [tm] to them turned out so great...

The drone program is our only feasible way of striking at the leaders of Islamist groups and decimating them to prevent another 9/11 via keeping them constantly on the run.

It's not like other nation-states have practiced assassination programs before *cough* Putinist Russia and Chechens being found dead around the world *cough* it's only MURCA that has turned it into a soulless technocratic killing machine campaign.

[MKSheppard]

Link to Atlantic Article

This is the atlantic, so take with LARGE GRAIN OF SALT some of the claims...

The Ally From Hell

...

In their post-Abbottabad discussion, General Kayani wanted to know what additional steps General Kidwai was taking to protect his nation’s nuclear weapons from the threat of an American raid. General Kidwai made the same assurances he has made many times to Pakistan’s leaders: Pakistan’s program was sufficiently hardened, and dispersed, so that the U.S. would have to mount a sizable invasion of the country in order to neutralize its weapons; a raid on the scale of the Abbottabad incursion would simply not suffice.

Still, General Kidwai promised that he would redouble the SPD’s efforts to keep his country’s weapons far from the prying eyes, and long arms, of the Americans, and so he did: according to multiple sources in Pakistan, he ordered an increase in the tempo of the dispersal of nuclear-weapons components and other sensitive materials. One method the SPD uses to ensure the safety of its nuclear weapons is to move them among the 15 or more facilities that handle them. Nuclear weapons must go to the shop for occasional maintenance, and so they must be moved to suitably equipped facilities, but Pakistan is also said to move them about the country in an attempt to keep American and Indian intelligence agencies guessing about their locations.

Nuclear-weapons components are sometimes moved by helicopter and sometimes moved over roads. And instead of moving nuclear material in armored, well-defended convoys, the SPD prefers to move material by subterfuge, in civilian-style vehicles without noticeable defenses, in the regular flow of traffic. According to both Pakistani and American sources, vans with a modest security profile are sometimes the preferred conveyance. And according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, the Pakistanis have begun using this low-security method to transfer not merely the “de-mated” component nuclear parts but “mated” nuclear weapons. Western nuclear experts have feared that Pakistan is building small, “tactical” nuclear weapons for quick deployment on the battlefield. In fact, not only is Pakistan building these devices, it is also now moving them over roads.

What this means, in essence, is this: In a country that is home to the harshest variants of Muslim fundamentalism, and to the headquarters of the organizations that espouse these extremist ideologies, including al-Qaeda, the Haqqani network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba (which conducted the devastating terror attacks on Mumbai three years ago that killed nearly 200 civilians), nuclear bombs capable of destroying entire cities are transported in delivery vans on congested and dangerous roads. And Pakistani and American sources say that since the raid on Abbottabad, the Pakistanis have provoked anxiety inside the Pentagon by increasing the pace of these movements. In other words, the Pakistani government is willing to make its nuclear weapons more vulnerable to theft by jihadists simply to hide them from the United States, the country that funds much of its military budget.

....

Public pronouncements to the contrary, very few figures in the highest ranks of the American and Pakistani governments suffer from the illusion that their countries are anything but adversaries, whose national-security interests clash radically and, it seems, permanently. Pakistani leaders obsess about what they view as the existential threat posed by nuclear-armed India, a country that is now a strategic ally of the United States. Pakistani policy makers The Atlantic interviewed in Islamabad and Rawalpindi this summer uniformly believe that India is bent on drawing Afghanistan into an alliance against Pakistan. (Pervez Musharraf said the same thing during an interview in Washington.) Many of Pakistan’s leaders have long believed that the Taliban, and Taliban-like groups, are the most potent defenders of their interests in Afghanistan.

...

The ISI provides the U.S. with targeting information about certain jihadists—but only about those jihadists perceived to threaten the Pakistani state, such as members of the so-called Pakistani Taliban (the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) and al-Qaeda. At one time, the ISI was on friendlier terms with al-Qaeda’s leaders. According to the report of the 9/11 Commission, the ISI reportedly played matchmaker in the 1990s by bringing together the Taliban and al-Qaeda, hoping to create an umbrella group that would train fighters for anti-India operations in the disputed territory of Kashmir. The 9/11 plot was developed at the training camps jointly maintained by al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

...

The leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba (the “Army of the Pure”), which has launched attacks against India, including the ferocious Mumbai attacks of November 2008, live openly in Pakistan—the organization maintains a 200-acre compound outside Lahore, and has offices in many major cities—and evidence gathered by the U.S. and India strongly suggests a direct ISI hand in the Mumbai attacks, among others. The would-be Times Square bomber, the Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, was trained in a militant camp in Pakistan’s tribal area. The past two U.S. National Intelligence Estimates on Pakistan—which represent the consensus views of America’s 16 spy agencies—concluded with a high degree of certainty that Pakistani support for jihadist groups has increased over the past several years.

...

The American lies about this tormented relationship are of a different sort. The U.S. government has lied to itself, and to its citizens, about the nature and actions of successive Pakistani governments. Pakistani behavior over the past 20 years has rendered the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism effectively meaningless. The U.S. currently names four countries as state sponsors of terror: Sudan, Iran, Syria, and Cuba. American civilian and military officials have for years made the case, publicly and privately, that Pakistan is a state sponsor of terrorism—yet it has never been listed as such. In the last 12 months of the presidency of George H. W. Bush, for example, Secretary of State James Baker wrote a letter to the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, accusing Pakistan of supporting Muslim terrorists in Indian-administered Kashmir, as well as Sikh terrorists operating inside India. “We have information indicating that [the ISI] and others intend to continue to provide material support to groups that have engaged in terrorism,” the letter read. At this same time, a talking-points memo read to Pakistani leaders by Nicholas Platt, who was then the American ambassador to Pakistan, asserted, “Our information is certain.” The memo went on: “Please consider the serious consequences [to] our relationship if this support continues. If this situation persists, the Secretary of State may find himself required by law to place Pakistan on the state sponsors of terrorism list.”

The Baker threat caused a crisis inside the Pakistani government. In his book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, Husain Haqqani, the current Pakistani ambassador to Washington, writes that Javed Nasir, who was the ISI chief during this episode, told Prime Minister Sharif, “We have been covering our tracks so far and will cover them even better in the future.” The crisis was resolved, temporarily, when Nasir was removed as ISI chief the following year.

Similar crises have erupted with depressing frequency. In 1998, when the Clinton administration decided, in response to attacks by al-Qaeda on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, to launch submarine-based missiles at al-Qaeda camps in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in the hope of killing bin Laden, it faced a quandary: the missiles would have to fly over either Iran or Pakistan. Iran was not an option; it would label such a missile launch an aggressive act, and perhaps respond accordingly. But the administration, according to General Hugh Shelton, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not want to let Pakistan know in advance, for fear that the ISI would warn its allies in Afghanistan. A surprised Pakistan, however, might also misinterpret the missile launch as the beginning of an Indian attack. So Shelton dispatched his deputy to Islamabad to dine with the Pakistan army’s chief of staff on the night of the attack, to let him know, as the missiles were flying, that they were not launched from India. (Bin Laden was not at the al-Qaeda camp when the cruise missiles hit—but, tellingly, five ISI agents were. They were killed, as were a group of Kashmiri militants.)

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush gave Pakistan’s then-president, Musharraf, an option: join the war on terror, or become one of its targets. Musharraf chose the first option. Over the next several years, the ISI cooperated with the U.S. in an intermittently sincere way, but the relationship soon returned to its dysfunctional state.

According to a secret 2006 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan, “Available evidence strongly suggests that [the ISI] maintains an active and ongoing relationship with certain elements of the Taliban.” A 2008 National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the ISI was providing “intelligence and financial support to insurgent groups—especially the Jalaluddin Haqqani network out of Miram Shah, North Waziristan—to conduct attacks against Afghan government, [International Security Assistance Force], and Indian targets.” By late 2006, according to the intelligence historian Matthew Aid, who documents the dysfunctional relationship between the ISI and the CIA in his forthcoming book, Intel Wars, the U.S. had reliable intelligence indicating that Jalaluddin Haqqani and another pro-Taliban Afghan warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, were being given financial assistance by the ISI (which of course receives substantial financial assistance from the United States).

During nearly every meeting over the years between Pakistani military and intelligence chiefs and their American counterparts, the Pakistanis were “read the riot act”—a phrase that recurs with striking frequency in descriptions of these meetings. Each time, the Pakistanis denied everything. In one meeting several years ago, American intelligence officials asked Pakistani leaders to shut down the so-called Quetta Shura, the ruling council of those Taliban members associated with the former Afghan leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. Quetta is the capital of the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, and the Quetta Shura, according to numerous accounts, had its headquarters not far from a Pakistani army division headquarters there. But General Kayani, who was then the head of the ISI, looked puzzled, and “acted like he’d never heard of the Quetta Shura,” according to a source who was briefed on the meeting.

In 2008 Mike McConnell, who was then President Bush’s director of national intelligence, confronted the ISI chief, General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, with evidence that the ISI was tipping off jihadists so that they could escape in advance of American attacks against them. According to sources familiar with the conversation, McConnell accused Pakistan of not doing everything it could to rein in the Pakistani Taliban; he asserted that American intelligence had concluded that most Pakistani assets were still deployed against India. “How dare you tell me how our forces are deployed?,” Pasha said to McConnell. McConnell then provided Pasha with evidence to back up his assertion.

Meanwhile American generals, briefing Congress and officials of the Bush and Obama administrations, gave repeated assurances that they had developed the sort of personal relationships with Pakistani military leaders that would lead to a more productive alliance. Admiral Michael Mullen, who stepped down as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in late September, invested a great deal of time in his relationship with General Kayani. But eventually Mullen’s patience was exhausted; days before his retirement, Mullen finally broke with Kayani, publicly accusing the Pakistani army of supporting America’s enemies in Afghanistan. In his final appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, on September 22, Mullen said that ISI-supported operatives of the Haqqani network had conducted a recent attack on the American Embassy in Kabul. “The Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency,” he said.

After Mullen’s explosive testimony, the Obama administration made only a desultory attempt to walk back his statement, and there are indications that the administration had already been recalibrating the way it deals with Pakistani dissembling. In April, General Pasha, the head of the ISI, visited Leon Panetta, who was then the director of the CIA, at the agency’s headquarters outside Washington. According to a source who was briefed on the meeting, Panetta upheld an American tradition: he “read Pasha the riot act.” The message conveyed by Panetta to Pasha and the ISI was: “If you don’t stop your relations with the Haqqani network in particular, but also other groups, the U.S. will be forced to rethink its entire relationship with the Pakistani military.”

Several factors may have contributed to Mullen’s decisive break. The September 13 raid on the American Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul—in which Haqqani insurgents besieged the compound with guns and rocket-propelled grenades, killing at least 16 people—had shocked the Joint Chiefs. Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, “had to spend 18 hours in a bunker to keep himself alive,” this source said. “Imagine what would have happened had he been killed.”

Admiral Mullen had been even more shocked by the murder last May of Saleem Shahzad, a Pakistani journalist. Shahzad, who maintained close contact with various jihadist leaders, had angered ISI leaders with his reporting, according to The New Yorker. Not long after the killing, Admiral Mullen took the unprecedented step of stating publicly that Shahzad’s death had been “sanctioned by the government” of Pakistan. “I have not seen anything to disabuse the report that the government knew about this,” he said. In fact, he had seen reliable intelligence proving that the top leaders of the Pakistani army and ISI had ordered the murder. The New Yorker reported that the order to kill Shahzad came from an officer on General Kayani’s staff. Sources we spoke with say the order was passed directly to General Pasha, the head of the ISI. According to one of the sources, an official with knowledge of the intelligence, Pasha was told to “deal with it” and “take care of the problem.” According to this source, Mullen was horrified that his Pakistani interlocutors of many years had been involved in orchestrating the killing of a journalist. “It struck a visceral chord with him,” the source told The Atlantic, recalling that Mullen had slammed his desk and said, “This is old school.”

The ISI has strenuously denied any involvement in the Shahzad murder. “There will be no statements on these unsubstantiated matters,” Commodore Zafar Iqbal, an ISI spokesman, said when asked for comment. Another high-ranking official of the ISI said during an extended conversation in Islamabad: “That is an absolutely false allegation. The government of Pakistan had nothing to do with the unfortunate death.” Talking at length with this senior ISI official provided a reporter with a sense of what life must be like for American officials who work regularly with that organization. When asked about the allegation that Lashkar-e-Taiba operates under the protection of the ISI, he said, “We don’t have anything to do with that, not at all.” What about the Mumbai attacks? “We had nothing to do with that. To say that the ISI was involved in Mumbai is really unfair.” What about the Haqqani network and its attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan? “The Haqqani network is something completely separate from us.” When asked if the country’s various security services were equal to the task of protecting civilians from Pakistan’s large assortment of jihadist groups, he gave an enthusiastic yes.

[Alkaloid]

What the do you suggest instead? Anyone? Bueller?

Maybe ensure that the people you assassinate are actually the leaders or members of anti American terrorist groups, instead of just 'well we're pretty sure a few people in this group are terrorists, so we'll kill them.'

[Simon_Jester]

faster than we blow them up with hundred thousand dollar drone attacks.

...was going to nitpick this, but you're in the ballpark; FY2010 costs for Predator Hellfires is $73,720 a missile.

I figured the rest of the costs associated with the sortie would more than make up the balance.

...and twenty years from now, when Pakistan inevitably radicalizes and moves away from the American spehere of influence, people will be flabbergasted why there are so many people there who fucking hate the west.

That horse has left the barn long ago.

Pakistan began to radicalize from the moment Zia became dictator in 1977; and the US embassy was burned to the ground in 1979 over vague rumors that the US had attacked Mecca. Link to Wiki

Zia started his program of Islamization of Pakistan, and it was under his watch that the ISI became a state-within-a-state doing whatever the fuck it wanted.

Because this campaign of murder with such loose ROE will never bite the US in the ass. Never.

What the do you suggest instead? Anyone? Bueller?

Because invading Iraq to bring Freedom [tm] to them turned out so great...

The drone program is our only feasible way of striking at the leaders of Islamist groups and decimating them to prevent another 9/11 via keeping them constantly on the run.

It's not like other nation-states have practiced assassination programs before *cough* Putinist Russia and Chechens being found dead around the world *cough* it's only MURCA that has turned it into a soulless technocratic killing machine campaign.

The problem is: the US isn't just assassinating specific people with these drone attacks, like Russian KGBskis going around killing people with icepicks and poisonous umbrellas and chunks of polonium. It is also assassinating groups of people, without knowing or caring who is in those groups, because they 'look dangerous.' That's what it comes down to, and that's the part which is far more likely to bite us in the ass by creating martyrs and perpetuating a hatred of America which might otherwise calm the fuck down.

It's as if the Russians, when they decided to assassinate people, decided to use big car bombs that kill a dozen people on the street each time, instead of icepicks and poison umbrellas and polonium. That will cause a lot more blowback for the Russians.

[Shroom Man 777]

Didn't the Israelis routinely do assassinations by having Cobra gunships launch Hellfire missiles into crowded market places?

[Simon_Jester]

If they did, I doubt it made their terrorism problem go away.

[Skgoa]

They did and it didn't.