What's the Cost of America's Secret Drone War?

By Gareth Porter, CounterPunch. Posted June 15, 2009.

The knowledgeable Washington source told IPS the Guardian article is consistent with past CIA intelligence-gathering methods in Afghanistan and elsewhere. "We buy data," he said. "Everything is paid for."

The implication of the system of purchasing targeting information for drone strikes is that there is "no guarantee" that the people being targeted are officials of al Qaeda or allied organisations, he said.

Fick, who is a veteran of the post-9/11 military operations in Afghanistan and the early phase of the Iraq war, said that kind of intelligence for targeting is "intrinsically problematic".

Although the CNAS paper by Fick, Andrew Exum and David Kilcullen does not explicitly call for ending drone attacks, it is highly critical of the programme, charging that the use of drones represents a "tactic... substituting for a strategy".

It concedes that, by "killing key leaders and hampering operations", the drone attacks against al Qaeda and some other militants in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) "create a sense of insecurity among militants and constrain their interactions with suspected informers".

But it argues that the drone attacks have also "created a siege mentality among the Pashtun population in northwest Pakistan", and likened them to similar strikes against Islamic militants in Somalia in 2005-2006. The net result of those earlier strikes, the authors assert, was to anger the population and make the Islamic insurgents more popular.

The drone strikes in Pakistan are having a similar impact, not only in the tribal areas but in other provinces as well, the paper said. In a panel discussing the paper at the think tank's annual meeting Thursday, Exum, a former officer in Afghanistan, said, "We are not saying that the drone strikes are not part of a solution, but right now they are part of the problem."

The new CNAS criticism of drone strikes is of particular interest because of the close relationship between the think tank and CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, who was the keynote speaker at Thursday's conference. The new president of CNAS, John Nagl, is a former adviser to Petraeus and co-author of the Army's counterinsurgency manual. CNAS is widely regarded as reflecting the perspective of the Petraeus wing of the U.S. military.

Another co-author and former Petraeus aide, Australian David Kilcullen, who was also a senior fellow at CNAS last year, had already come out strongly against drone strikes as politically self-defeating.

However, Nagl himself told this writer that he disagrees with the CNAS paper's position on drone strikes. He said he believes the benefits of the strikes are greater than have been publicly communicated by the administration, and suggested the failure to release any more figures on the results could be attributed to a "culture of secrecy".

Petraeus made no mention of the issue in his presentation to the CNAS conference on Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Washington Post reported Jun. 1 that Petraeus wrote in a secret May 27 assessment, "Anti-U.S. sentiment has already been increasing in Pakistan... especially in regard to cross-border and reported drone strikes, which Pakistanis perceive to cause unacceptable civilian casualties."

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Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specializing in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

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