Then in the latter half of last year detailed studies of the drones began to appear. Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann first looked at the growth in the number of drone strikes in Pakistan. Then they analyzed the casualties from drone attacks in an effort to determine how many civilians were being killed in the strikes. They concluded that of the 750 to 1050 killed by drones between 2006 and October 2009, one third were civilians. Chiming in the same month was journalist Jane Mayer who in a lengthy and thoughtful piece in The New Yorker examined the expansion of drone attacks by the Obama administration, including their effectiveness, and legality.
The statistics related to the drones are startling. Since Barack Obama took office, there have been 58 drone strikes in Pakistan. This is 32 more strikes than occurred in the entire second term of the Bush Administration and represents nearly 70 percent of all drone attacks that have occurred in Pakistan since 2004. Below are statistics drawn from an effort to map out the location of the strikes using Google Earth.
It’s not just the Christmas shopping season that has begun. The undeclared political campaign is well underway as the clock ticks inexorably towards a general election in the spring of 2010. Seemingly, that would now make Afghanistan a key political issue in the battle between the Conservatives and Labour for power. The conflict certainly is in the news but not as a pivotal determinant of the election outcome for the simple reason that there is no real difference between the position of the two main political parties and neither really has an answer regarding how to emerge from the mess. The Liberal Democrats do offer an alternative approach, but, according to the polls, they are not in position to form a government. Thus, Afghanistan has become like the weather: everyone complains about it but no one does anything about it.
One reason for the current stalemate over Afghanistan policy is an external factor. There is a sense of suspended animation across Whitehall as “America’s Gurkha,” as apparently some in the government now describe Washington’s faithful servant, waits for the Obama administration to decide what strategic path to follow. The options under discussion include dramatically increasing the troop commitment, with a consensus apparently building around 30,000 more soldiers, or downscale, largely giving up on notions of nation building, and take a different approach with an emphasis on counter-terrorism as the defining factor of the mission.
Not waiting to make a decision about Afghanistan is a majority of the British public. According to a recent poll, almost two-thirds believe that the war is unwinnable and almost an identical number want British troops withdrawn. In their view, this now eight-year-old conflict is no longer worth additional British lives. Hence, the need for Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s reselling of the cause of Afghanistan in his speech of 6 November, points he reiterated in his monthly press conference. Nation-building and the dream of a new democratic Afghanistan are not doing well after the corruption that surrounded President Hamid Karzai’s recent re-election. The goal of achieving a stable Afghanistan has been damaged by the election. It is further weakened by the fact that even with a surge in U.S. troops the number would simply not be sufficient according to the US’s own counterinsurgency manual to have a chance at success. And that point applies simply to numbers of troops and not to the additional commitment in aid that would also be required from the United States and its allies.
“An invaluable tool, (the CIA) said, is the practice in which U.S. agencies transfer individuals arrested in one country to another allied country that is able to extract information from them and relay it to the United States.”
Washington Post, 1 Nov. 2002
In their haste to fall over themselves in praising the Obama administration’s decision to close Guantanamo and CIA secret prisons, much of the media forgot to ask if that also applied to rendition. Rendition, a practice that began not with the now departed Bush administration but with its Democratic predecessor, involved the transferring of terrorism suspects from American control to the custody of American allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. And how do these countries “extract information” from suspects. Here’s an account from the Washington Post of some of the methods employed by Jordan’s General Intelligence Department:
16:25 The German Foreign Ministry has stated that “senior officials from major powers (United States, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and China) will meet in Germany next week to discuss the conflict with Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program”, the first such meeting since Barack Obama came into office.
As Enduring America reported yesterday, Pres. Obama will be visiting Ottawa on 19 February. The visit is significant for several reasons beyond that it will be Obama’s first foreign trip since taking office. In making this journey, Obama restores a tradition going back to at least Ronald Reagan whereby the new American president makes his first foreign visit to his northern neighbour (Here’s a Canadian news story about Reagan’s visit, which occurred less than a month before he was shot). Pres. Bush ended this pattern when, to the chagrin of Ottawa, he went to Mexico shortly after taking power.
Typically, when it comes to Canadian-American relations, the significance is mainly for Obama’s Canadian hosts. There is some importance for the new administration, however. Early in his term, Obama will want to look presidential on his first foreign visit through media coverage back home and around the world. The President will have to do this without the trappings of an official state visit since his sojourn will be for private meetings with Canadian officials. He will also be seeking Canadian support for Washington’s strategy in Afghanistan, a potentially tough sell since Canadian participation is widely unpopular among the general public and several of the opposition parties. Over one hundred Canadian soldiers have been killed in action, a higher proportion in relation to national population than that of the United States. The government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper has already committed itself to withdrawing Canadian troops from Afghanistan in 2011.
For Canada, the only foreign relationship that really matters is with Washington. Roughly 90% of Canadian trade goes to its southern neighbour and, until very recently, Canada was the United States’ largest trading partner (it’s now second after China). The concern in Ottawa is with talk of greater American protectionism, traditionally associated with the Democrats.
Here’s where it gets complicated. For the first time since possibly the 1930s, a U.S. president is in power who is arguably to the left of the Canadian prime minister. Stephen Harper is not a traditional Canadian Conservative. He is an ideologue who emerged out of a breakaway right-wing party that eventually seized control of Canada’s long-running Tory party. Philosophically, Harper was much more at home with Pres. Bush than the new president, mimicking the foreign policy of his fellow traveller.
Complicating the picture even more is that a Harper official caused consternation and damage to Obama’s chances for the Democratic nomination back in February 2008. Ian Brodie, Harper’s chief of staff, leaked to the Canadian media that Austan Goolsbee, an Obama economic advisor, had privately assured a Canadian diplomat that Ottawa had nothing to worry about when it came to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) despite Obama’s public pronouncements in rust-belt states that he would seek to change the treaty. Harper was forced to apologize for the embarrassing leak and Canadian officials scrambled to patch things up with the Obama campaign. Whether enmity still exists may emerge on 19 February.
Then there’s the Igantieff factor but that will be the subject of a future post …
The media is all excited over a Labour minister disparaging the term “war on terror” and saying things like “this isn’t us against one organised enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives” and “What these groups want is to force their individual and narrow values on others, without dialogue, without debate, through violence. And by letting them feel part of something bigger, we give them strength.”
Except the example above is not drawn from David Miliband’s Op-Ed piece in today’s Guardian that the paper highlighted on page 1 and which the BBC repeatedly reported on. Instead, it is from a speech that then International Development Secretary Hilary Benn gave in New York City in April 2007 that both the BBC and the Guardian reported on extensively.
This morning the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 had an interesting contrast in perspectives on the current crisis. First came former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, appearing in his capacity as a Middle Eastern envoy, to criticize Hamas. Then came Blair’s former ambassador to the United Nations and Iraq, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who began by criticizing Blair and then went after Israel over the current crisis. In the course of his interview he said that:
that Israel had broken the ceasefire by not opening the border crossings;
that Hamas is not a proxy of Iran;
that Hamas is not trying to set up a Taliban-style government in Gaza;
that Hamas’ unwillingness to accept the existence of Israel was about rhetoric and not about reality;
that Israel continues to inflame the situation in the region by constructing illegal settlements;
that Israeli domestic politics were also driving the crisis;
that Fatah and Islamic Jihad have also been firing rockets;
Greenstock, who has had contacts with Hamas through a charity called Forward Thinking, referred to the precedent of Northern Ireland, noting that Blair had already followed the path of talking with interests that engaged in terrorism.
In response to Mike’s post, why does Mumbai make the threat from asymmetric attacks any greater than it already is? It has always been there and it always will be unless we choose to live in a complete police state.
Take the case of the airports–because of the attack at Glasgow you now can’t drive up to a terminal to drop a passenger off or pick someone up. Yet, there’s absolutely nothing to stop someone from walking in with a backup containing an explosive and either leaving it in the terminal or detonating it amongst the passengers lined up to go through security. It’s a “soft target.” Now airports could institute a measure requiring everyone entering the terminal to be searched but then someone could blow themselves up in the parking lot so that would require a perimeter around the airport with every car being searched but then someone could blow them self up at the checkpoint …. and on …. and on. The only real solution would be to shut down air travel. So society wide there is an illusion of security created by the state to encourage people to go about their daily lives but in reality there is little that could be done to stop a determined terrorist. It’s about containment, not elimination, a point I make in the conclusion to my book (gratuitous plug).
By the way, for an interesting examination of the faults with U.S. airport security see this from the current issue of The Atlantic.
Much tinkling of the keypads has ensued in the drive to comment on the Obama Administration’s Afghanistan strategy, in particular the escalation of troop strength. Less noticed in the clatter, particularly in the UK, has been the Pakistan portion of the strategy. Dribs and drabs of that approach have leaked out over the last few months. In February 2009, Senator Diane Feinstein inadvertently (or possibly deliberately in an effort to illustrate the hypocrisy of the Pakistani government) revealed that the unmanned drones carrying out missile strikes in Pakistan were being flown out of a secret base in Pakistan.
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