disregard of their concerns. They especially resented strikes – like the one on
March 17, 2011, just a day after CIA contractor Raymond Davis was freed
from jail in Lahore – that exposed their own very limited control over U.S.
operations.88 In May 2011, Kayani was further stung by public reports that
unmasked his tacit consent on America’s use of drones. Based on Wikileaks’
online release of thousands of classified U.S. government documents, the news
stories were hardly the product of a considered policy decision in Washington.
Nevertheless, they complicated Pakistani drone politics and further soured
relations between the Pakistani military and Washington.89
America’s Drone Debate
This is not to say that Washington was in complete denial about the political
and diplomatic downsides to the drones. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, an
affable career diplomat named Cameron Munter, was plunged into the deep
end of the pool when he showed up to Pakistan in October 2010, just months
before the Raymond Davis affair broke. But by March 17, he had enough of
a sense about Pakistan’s military to understand that the CIA’s planned drone
87 For instance, Kayani was willing to accept U.S. training for Special Operations forces, as long as it was done quietly. See Jane Perlez, “Soldier Deaths Draw Focus to U.S. in Pakistan,” New York Times, February 3, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/world/asia/04pstan.html.
88 “Timing of US Drone Strike Questioned by Munter,” Associated Press, August 2, 2011, http://www.dawn.com/2011/08/02/timing-of-us-drone-strike-questioned-by-munter.html.
89 For one such story, see “Wikileaks: Kayani Wanted More Drone Strikes in Pakistan,”
Express Tribune, May 20, 2011, http://tribune.com.pk/story/172531/wikileaks-kayani-wanted-more-drone-strikes/.
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Great Expectations to Greater Frustrations
159
strike would set back the relationship just as it was coming out of a crisis.
Munter protested to no avail. Then-CIA Director Leon Panetta overruled him,
either because the target was too important or he wished to send a firm message
to Islamabad, or both.
The Pakistani army’s explosive response to the March 17 strike convinced
the Obama White House to review its drone policies.90 That internal debate
had evolved over time. Early on, the main question was how far to expand the
program. In the first months of his presidency, President Obama considered
sending armed drones beyond the FATA, including into Pakistan’s Baluchistan
province where senior Afghan Taliban leaders were believed to live.91 This
would have marked a significant shift in the drone campaign. Not only did
Pakistan’s military view the Afghan Taliban as unthreatening, but most of
Pakistan also perceived a difference between the remote “tribal areas” where
strikes had so far taken place and the “settled areas” where new strikes were
being contemplated. The distinction was as much psychological as geographic
or political. Nevertheless, some administration officials feared a major Pak-
istani public backlash would be sparked by an expanded drone campaign. The
president decided against it.92
Instead of widening its scope, the United States intensified its drone campaign
in the FATA. From 2008 to 2011, the CIA expanded its use of “signature
strikes.”93 This meant the agency had the authority to launch strikes against
people who acted like terrorists – for example, people who moved about in
armed convoys or visited known terrorist camps – even if it was not entirely
clear to the drone pilots who they were. Without that expanded authority,
it would have been impossible to ramp up the drone program. Yet these less
discriminating strikes were more likely to hit militant foot soldiers (or even
innocent bystanders) than top terrorist leaders.
As U.S.-Pakistan relations frayed in 2011, American officials like Munter
raised questions about whether killing no-name militants was worth the high
diplomatic price with Islamabad.94 That summer, the White House instituted
minor changes in its drone policy intended to give the U.S. ambassador (and his
boss, the secretary of state) more input. In some cases, Pakistani officials would
also be informed of impending strikes. Still, final responsibility remained with
the CIA director.
90 Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman, and Matthew Rosenberg, “Drone Attacks Split U.S. Officials,”
Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2011; Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman, and Julian E. Barnes, “U.S.
Tightens Drone Rules,” Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2011.
91 David E. Sanger, and Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Weighs Taliban Strike into Pakistan,” New York Times, March 17, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/world/asia/18terror.html?hp.
92 Mark Hosenball, “The Drone Dilemma,” Newsweek, December 11, 2009, http://www
.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/12/12/the-drone-dilemma.html.
93 Greg Miller reports that the chief of the CIA Counterterrorism Center was the chief advocate for the use of signature strikes. See “The CIA’s Enigmatic al-Qaeda Hunter,” Washington Post, March 25, 2012, pp. A1, A16.
94 See Entous, Gorman, and Barnes, “U.S. Tightens Drone Rules.”
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No Exit from Pakistan
The Power of (Classified) Information
The Obama administration’s internal drone debate was accompanied by greater
public scrutiny and discussion. Most of that debate centered on the question
of whether Washington has overreached in its use of drones; whether the
political costs in Pakistan outweigh the counterterror benefits. The problem
with the debate has always been that the public has no realistic way to judge
the significance of killing any terrorist or small group of militants. Arguments
that stress the futility of targeted assassination campaigns and their negative
effects on local populations, however compelling, are still hard to square with
apparent reality that al-Qaeda has been dealt a devastating blow.95
The Munter-versus-Panetta dispute over specific drone strikes suggests that
perhaps the CIA is poorly suited to making the cost-benefit calculations associ-
ated with any particular targeting decision. This tactical issue misses the larger
point. Weighing the potential political repercussions of a strike is a routine
part of the targeting process. Numerous terrorists have escaped missile strikes
because they traveled with women or children or because they found refuge
inside a mosque and the trigger-pullers decided to hold off.96 Only members
of the intelligence community, armed with a keen appreciation for the value of
killing a specific target as well as relevant political input from someone like the
U.S. ambassador in Islamabad, could possibly attempt such a tactical calcula-
tion. They will not always decide wisely, but it is hard to imagine anyone else
who could do
better.
The fundamental decision about the use of drones takes place well before
any specific targets are selected. This decision is about how to prioritize U.S.
counterterror objectives against other political and diplomatic goals. President
Obama clearly put counterterrorism first. He dealt a strong hand to members
of the administration who argued for more aggressive tactics, including the
expanded use of drones in Pakistan.
In general, access to privileged, highly classified information will always give
the CIA (or any other agency conducting covert activities) an upper hand in
a policy debate with officials from other departments. As always, information
is power. When sensitive information about American covert operations in
Pakistan is accessible to only a tiny handful of the most senior policymakers
outside the intelligence community, it narrows the policy debate and excludes a
95 One such report that received a lot attention is “Living under Drones,” International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and Global Justice Clinic (NYU
School of Law), September 2012, http://livingunderdrones.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/
Stanford NYU LIVING UNDER DRONES.pdf. For more on this debate, see Peter Bergen and
Katherine Tiedemann, “The Drone War,” New Republic, June 3, 2009; David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, “Death from Above, Outrage from Below,” New York Times, May 16, 2009; Daniel Byman, “Do Targeted Killings Work?” Foreign Policy, July 14, 2009; C. Christine Fair,
“Drone Wars,” Foreign Policy, May 28, 2010.
96 Ken Dilanian, “CIA Drones May Be Avoiding Pakistani Civilians,” Los Angeles Times, February 22, 2011.
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Great Expectations to Greater Frustrations
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a level playing field in the policy debate between the intelligence community,
military, and diplomats.
For better and for worse, that playing field was not level during the
early Obama administration. America’s covert activities in Pakistan enjoyed
a higher priority than normal, overt U.S. interaction. Drones, CIA contractors,
and the bin Laden raid – far more than KLB aid dollars, diplomatic dia-
logues, or American businessmen – defined the U.S. presence in Pakistan. The
imbalance was striking. It effectively subordinated the State Department and
Pentagon to the intelligence community when it came to making U.S. policy in
Pakistan.
As long as al-Qaeda – and counterterrorism, in general – were considered the
most vital U.S. interests in Pakistan, perhaps this subordination was defensible,
even if it contributed to a near rupturing of relations between Washington
and Islamabad. With bin Laden dead and al-Qaeda backed against the ropes,
there was more reason to question the practice of privileging counterterrorism
and accepting the intelligence community’s de facto command over the policy
process. Yet at the end of the Obama administration’s first term, when senior
officials drafted a formal guide, or “playbook,” to establish clearer rules for
using lethal drones, the program in Pakistan was specifically exempted.97 The
president and his top advisers were yet not convinced of the need to rebalance
their priorities in Pakistan.
pak-af, not af-pak
At the same time that the Obama administration’s efforts in Pakistan were
handicapped by weak civilian policy tools and dominated by the counterterror
agenda, they were also heavily influenced by the escalating war in Afghanistan.
Even in the early days of Obama’s term when he ordered a sixty-day review
of “AfPak” strategy, it was clear that for many U.S. officials Pakistan was first
and foremost an extension of the American mission in Afghanistan.98
In early 2009, when Pakistani Taliban briefly extended their control over
territories just sixty miles from Islamabad, some prominent American commen-
tators likened the situation to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan.99 They
97 Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, and Karen De Young, “CIA Drone Strikes Will Get Pass in Counterterrorism ‘Playbook,’ Officials Say,” Washington Post, January 19, 2013, http://articles
.washingtonpost.com/2013-01-19/world/36474007_1_drone-strikes-cia-director-playbook;
Scott Shane, “Election Spurred a Move to Codify U.S. Drone Policy,” New York Times, November 24, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/world/white-house-presses-for-drone-rule-book.html.
98 On the Obama team’s first AfPak review, see Daniel Markey, “From AfPak to PakAf: A Response to the New U.S. Strategy for South Asia,” Policy Options Paper, Council on Foreign Relations, April 2009, http://i.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/POP AfPak to PakAf
.pdf.
99 The New York Times editorial, for instance, lamented that “The latest advance by the Taliban is one more frightening reminder that most Pakistanis – from top civilian and military leaders to ordinary citizens – still do not fully understand the mortal threat that the militants pose Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sussex Library, on 05 Mar 2019 at 17:35:49, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107053755.005
162
No Exit from Pakistan
fanned fears of an imminent collapse in Islamabad. Secretary Clinton even went
so far as to suggest that the Pakistani Taliban might topple the government and
taken seriously only because too many Americans viewed Pakistan through
the prism of the Afghan experience, where Taliban fighters had indeed taken
the capital city of Kabul in the mid-1990s. By the time Obama entered the
White House, many times more U.S. officials, particularly military ones, had
seen action in Afghanistan than in Pakistan. They spoke and acted as if the two
countries were more alike than different.
Washington’s decision to draw a tighter connection between its policies on
Afghanistan and Pakistan – even the symbolism associated with the “AfPak”
term – was flat-out rejected by Pakistanis. How, Pakistanis asked, could
Afghanistan – a landlocked, tribal society of 30 million people emerging from
decades of civil war – possibly be compared to Pakistan – a nuclear-armed
nation of nearly 200 million? Even if Pakistan’s western border regions had
a great deal in common with Afghanistan, the vast majority of the Pakistani
public felt itself quite distant and distinct from its Afghan neighbor, and with
good reason.
Eventually, at Pakistan’s urging, Washington dropped the “AfPak” label.
But the mental framework stuck. American policy discussions tended to treat
Pakistan as an extension of the war in Afghanistan. In Obama’s strategic
review of late 2009 – recounted in scandalous detail by Bob Woodward’s
book, Obama’s Wars – the lion’s share of attention focused on the question of U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan.101 Some of this was only natural. An overwhelming majority of American troops were fighting and dying in Afghanis
tan,
not Pakistan. And Washington had many more policy tools – military, civilian,
and economic – inside Afghanistan, which offered both the prospect for greater
influence and the need for greater direction.
The problem was not simply that Afghanistan drew attention and resources
away from Pakistan. Beyond that, the intense focus on Afghanistan meant that
unresolved differences between Washington and Islamabad over the Afghan
war came to dominate the U.S.-Pakistan relationship more than ever before.
At the core of the dispute was Pakistan’s approach to territories like North
Waziristan along the border with Afghanistan, where Taliban insurgent leaders
continued to find safe haven after years of war. Washington wanted Pakistan
to cut off the head of the snake that was biting NATO and Afghan forces,
to their fragile democracy. . . . And – most frightening of all – if the army cannot or will not defend its own territory against the militants, how can anyone be sure it will protect Pakistan’s 60 or so nuclear weapons?” “60 Miles from Islamabad,” New York Times, April 26, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27mon1.html? r=1.
100 Ben Arnoldy, “Why the Taliban Won’t Take Over Pakistan,” Christian Science Monitor, June 7, 2009, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2009/0607/p06s07-wosc
.html.
101 Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).
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Great Expectations to Greater Frustrations
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but Pakistan was unwilling to sever ties with the Haqqani network or Mullah
Omar’s Afghan Taliban. From an American perspective, such a shift would
have improved prospects for resolving the war in Afghanistan and, simulta-
neously, would have set Pakistan on a path to greater stability over the long
haul. That it never happened was primarily a reflection of Pakistan’s own
intransigence.
Pakistan: Do More
Pakistan resisted U.S. pressure despite an intensive series of diplomatic dia-
logues between political and military leaders in Washington and Islamabad.