Angry Planet - One reason the U.S. isn't winning the 'War on Terror'

Episode Date: September 8, 2016

In the 15 years since America first went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has reduced the number of troops on the ground and increased the number of unmanned robots picking off high value targets.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' news. These civilians who were killed in Syria, they don't care how the United States accidentally blew them up. They want to know how that situation. not going to happen again and how that situation is going to get fixed.

They're not worried that it was a drone, they're not worried that it was a manned airplane. If some American soldier had ran down the street with a knife stabbing them all because he believed they were terrorists, it wouldn't change how destructive that is to the overall American strategy. For all the notable successes, like the reported killing of Islamic State's top spokesman Muhammad Abu al-Aidnani, there are misses. Some strikes by the CIA or the Pentagon lead to civilian deaths. This week on War College, we're talking about an issue that hasn't grabbed much attention in the U.S.

but civilian deaths have become a central issue for U.S. detractors and allies. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Jason Fields and Matthew Galt. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields with Reuters. And I'm Matthew Galt with War is Boring. Today we're speaking with Joseph Trevethic about one of our favorite topics, which is drone strikes. And this week I think it's particularly current because one of Islamic States' founding members, or at least that's what is being said about him, was recently killed in a strike.

His name is Abu Muhammad al-Adnani. and he's someone that has been on the wanted list for quite some time. So, Joe, can you tell us a little bit about what just happened, and we can sort of take it from there? Yeah, definitely. The strike was important in no small part because Al-Anani was not just considered to be a founding member, but he was also one of the group's primary spokespeople and largely believed to be sort of coordinating a lot of their public relations, which Islamic State has become very known for its really slick media presentations and other outreach, both locally and internationally, which present the group as being more of an actual state, a parallel sort of government. You know, they show that they're running cities and, you know, running social services as well as having a freestanding army and the rest of it and that they, you know, conduct real military operations.

they present this very effective public face. So taking out Al-Anani was at least described by the Pentagon as a very significant operation against the group in terms of taking out their, not only their ability to plan their military operations and their terrorist operations, but just to disable the group's ability to present its public face positively in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere. Now, are we sure that the Pentagon took him out? I know there's some question about that. The issue always is that a lot of the assessment of these strikes, of course, is done by reviewing the footage from the cameras on the drones or other aircraft in the area, and it can be very difficult to determine just who you're hitting,

which has long been one of the major criticisms of all of these. kind of targeted strikes. So the United States believes with a high degree of certainty that they've killed him, but they've been wrong in the past. And there's also, you know, a sort of ongoing, I'd say, kerfuffle with the Russians about who was actually responsible for the strike that killed Adnani or is believed to have killed Adnani. The Russians claimed that they had that they had actually killed him in a strike, and the United States has dismissed that entirely. Called it a joke, I think? One Pentagon official called it a joke when talking to Reuters and the United States said that it had no information on any Russian strikes in the area

at that time and date. The Russians then claimed that since the United States wasn't privy necessarily to all of its operations, you know, basically how could you know? And they said put a very snarky statement online, at least through their Facebook page and probably elsewhere, basically asking where, you know, where the United States could possibly be getting its information on what they're doing in Syria since, you know, they're not in the Russian command center. Well, so aside from that, there's also been Adnani, but a lot of civilians have recently been reported killed, not just by the United States, but by a lot of the other forces that

are operating in the region. But there was a report a little while ago from the United States discussing the actual number of civilian casualties from all of these. I should, what's going to say drone campaigns, but I know that actually it's not always drone. Sometimes the strikes are actually carried out by aircraft. But I think that report was kind of crucial. Can we talk about that? Yeah. Earlier this year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the first.

official tally of strikes, targeted strikes, in what it referred to as areas outside active hostilities, which actually specifically does not include Iraq and Syria and this current campaign against Islamic State in those countries. The report was exceedingly vague on what areas it actually covered. Most people assume that it referred to Yemen and Pakistan and possibly some other locations that are believed to be outside of this, what is generally understood to be these areas of traditional military operations like Iraq and Afghanistan. But again, it was not clear and it was not defined. It was vaguely outlined, but there were no, there were only specific countries that it didn't cover

that were included specifically Iraq and Syria. and the numbers that were provided for both total strikes, total numbers of terrorists killed, and total number, or I should say suspected terrorist killed, and total numbers of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire were, seemed low, seemed both low and to be rather vague in of themselves. The casualty figures and the kill figures were, both displayed as ranges rather than specific numbers indicating that even the Pentagon didn't know for sure based on the information they had available to them how many terrorists

they had actually killed and how many civilians had actually been killed. They could only give a broad range separated by dozens of individuals in both cases. So on July 1st, America's Office of Director of National Intelligence released a report detailing new information about the drone program. So what's in the report, Joe? Well, first it's important to point out that we understand it to be about drone strikes, but that's not ever specifically said. It just says strikes. The actual amount of data in this three-page report, which has been years in the making, is basically the numbers you can fit them inside a tweet. There's very little actual.

data and very little actual specifics and a whole ton of caveats about basically what this data may or may not mean and sort of what it does and doesn't cover sort of. It's actually surprisingly vague for how big a deal they wanted it to be and it, you know, it lists the total number of, as they put it, strikes against terrorist targets outside areas of active hostilities, a zone never defined against targets who are never defined. And they give a number for that. It's 473 of these strikes by either drones or manned aircraft or some combination thereof. And then they give a total number of combatant deaths, that being deaths of supposed terrorists.

and then they give a total number of non-combatant deaths, that is to say, anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in the strike who wasn't the target. And both of those other numbers are given as a range. There is no set number, and the range is quite large in both cases. combatant deaths is 2,372 to 2,581, two amazingly specific numbers that are quite, quite, you know, widely apart here. And non-combatant deaths are 60, between 64 and 116. Again, a very large gap in the official numbers. This is what they determined based on the information available to them.

All right, so we're looking at these civilian casualties, I think, is specifically what jumps out at a lot of people. Are there any other third parties that are tracking civilian casualties from UAVs? Yes, there's a number of groups tracking civilian casualties, human rights watch, amnesty International, and other projects dealing just with the drone war in general. And I think it's safe to say that these numbers don't really agree, right? Well, like I said, you know, the numbers, the official government tally doesn't agree with those independent numbers. They're widely different. The numbers of civilian casualties reported by independent groups is exponentially higher. And while they also give them a range, their numbers are hundreds rather than maybe just over a hundred. But it's also important to point out that the government numbers, don't agree with themselves. You know, it's a range.

It's not a set number. They could only guesstimate based on the information available to them, which is, I feel like the scarier thing is that they don't even know how many civilians they've killed. Doesn't that seem, in a sense, not just plausible, but maybe in some sense inevitable, in that they are not going into these zones themselves, I'm talking about like any members of the military or government to actually count bodies, right? Oh, without a doubt. I mean, the whole purpose of these strikes is to get at militants, terrorists, what have you,

that are in places that are otherwise difficult to get to. The U.S. government, while it has offered very few details on how it targets people and how it decides on these targets, has made it very clear that it tries its best, and we can debate that point, but it tries its best to not use these strikes if there is an actual viable opportunity to capture the target, which apparently doesn't happen very often. All right, so thinking about that, what happened in Syria recently? There was a pretty nasty drone strike, correct? It was a, was it a drone strike or was the, I mean, it was an air? I mean, it was an air. strike in Mabidj, you're talking Mambidge. Yeah, where again there's... Syria, right? Which is... Yeah. And it's near... It's actually been a target now.

It's trying to cut off Islamic State's supply lines, if I remember, right? Right. It's near the de facto, I believe it's near the de facto capital, the Islamic States de facto capital in Raqa. The idea is that it's another strategic point for them. and it's been a target, it's continued to be a target. In fact, they've, American-like coalition has hit Mombich again, and they are investigating a new potentially credible allegation of civilian casualties in the latest strikes as well. But again, the government's view, the U.S. government's view on how many people were

potentially killed in the initial strike that is now formally under investigation, is much lower than that of independent monitoring groups in Syria and outside Syria, such as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Are there different agendas behind the different numbers? I mean, I can see how the United States, of course, doesn't want to have, you know, wants to have as small numbers of civilian casualties as possible. And that's actually, I think it's fair to say that's probably the actual goal as well. It's not just to report fewer number, you know, lower number.

but probably, I mean, I would think it's fair to say they're not actually trying to kill civilians. So, but for something like Human Rights Watch, is there any kind of motivation behind the, you know, getting it the truth or any, I mean, is there any kind of agenda there that you know about? I think personally that there is a pacifism agenda. I don't, not sure maybe agenda isn't the right word, but groups like Human Rights Watch are generally against war. are very, very inclined to point out the civilian tolls in war and basically the idea that if civilian casualties are an inevitable cost of war, then the objective should be to end war. And that's a laudable goal. I personally do not necessarily think it's particularly realistic. But I think if there is anything that could be described as an agenda, that is their

agenda, it, in my opinion, may be biased against the United States because the United States is the most transparent. You know, people can say that they're not, you know, the United States is not 100% transparent. And there's a lot of really important steps they could make to be more transparent and more accountable. But compared to, say, the Russians who don't talk about basically their airstrikes at all beyond saying we do them and we're winning. the United States says, you know, we've attacked these areas, we've killed this many people, we've destroyed all these targets, you know, these are how many bombs we drop, this is what we're doing, here's some strike footage of what we're doing. It's definitely easier for human rights groups and NGOs to question those statistics and really

pick them apart, which, you know, they definitely should do, but it makes it easier to sort of focus on American strikes rather than even other Western countries. countries that don't report nearly as much detail about their participation in the campaign against Islamic State. All right. I want to switch tracks just a little bit then. We talk a lot of, and we've talked quite a bit about the ethics and the morality of targeted killings in the drone program. We don't talk a lot about, I think, is it's effectiveness. Do we have any numbers about that? Does this kind of warfare work? So the Georgetown Public Policy End of Things at Georgetown University, they recently published a study that was widely reported as proving that drone strikes in Pakistan have not worked. That's actually not what the study said. The study basically said that there was a correlation between drone strikes and terrorist retaliation, i.e. that if there was a drone strike in that province, there was very likely to be a terrorist retaliation.

i.e. that if there was a drone strike in that province, there was very likely to be a terrorist attack within the next so many months. And they said that there was an interesting correlation between those two and called for additional research. And actually a lot of people are actually saying, despite what it gets reported as, is that they're calling for additional research. Because it's hard. It's hard to do any kind of real, you know, on the ground studying of exactly what's going on in a lot of these places because they are so dangerous. And studies in Pakistan have repeatedly shown that educated people in Pakistan

are generally against drone strikes. People living in the Northwest Frontier provinces who don't like the terrorists encroaching on their daily life actually don't really care that much. There have been studies like this recent one that shows a correlation between the terrorists being more violent

and drone strikes. But again, that doesn't take into any account whether Pakistani military strikes, because the Pakistani government flies their own air strikes and launches their own counterterrorism operations on the ground, which again have been linked to generating significant numbers of refugees, significant numbers of civilian deaths, and significant amounts of terrorist retaliation. And so there are all sorts of factors at play here. I am glad that I do not have to try and pick it all apart, because it is an amazing morass of data and people debate about what are the factors that are most important.

And like I said, I don't think we've come to a place where there is a conclusion about the debate about, you know, whether decapitating, you know, this idea of decapitating terrorist organizations by knocking out their, their leadership works. We've been doing it for some time, but there's, you know, there's not a lot of information on how that policy is implemented either. So we don't know if the policy is ineffective because it's ineffective inherently or because it's not being done correctly. I mean, there's so much we don't know. What do we actually mean by effective? I mean, because it would seem to me that it's not just the number of incidents going up or down by some percentage. I mean, it's talking about, I mean, the success, I think, that the United States, States is looking for, the West is looking for, is for the threat of terrorism or attacks to go

down, right? And it doesn't seem that these strikes have really had any true impact on that. Well, the existential threat still lingers as a political, as a domestic political consideration. One should realize that in the United States, unlike a number of our European allies, we have actually done a pretty good job in avoiding spectacular terrorist attack since 9-11. There have been a number of isolated incidents, and while horrific and tragic, have been nowhere near on the scale of the London subway bombings or bombings in Spain at the train stations or any of these things that still do happen. Even the now apparent regular arrest of terrorist plotters in Germany and such things. I mean, we're

seeing far more expansive networks elsewhere. And so, you know, again, it's how do you define success? And it's definitely at the moment, it's a very isolationist definition of success. And I'm not sure that's a good definition of success.

But it is important to point out that we have not suffered a spectacular terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. And while there is an important amount of discussion to be had about whether counterterrorism operations are responsible for that, it is a fact that has to be included in the discussion. So, you know,

it's a, again, it's a debate. And that's interesting. I mean, and I think that sounds like a really reasonable definition of success, which is to keep as many people safe as much as possible. And it does, though still leave open the question to me of, you know, is this a policy that leads to ultimate success? You know, to Al-Qaeda saying, you know, we're going to throw in the towel or that, you know, negotiations really need to start up. It seems like it sounds like what we're talking about is what might even be a very successful but sort of holding, you know, pattern, right? Well, that's exactly what the current strategy seems to be.

And a lot of people very rightly point out that what that effectively means is that you've unfortunately more or less condemned a certain portion of the world to near constant conflict. And that's not good. Iraq and its neighbors, I'm sure, do not feel that they are better off for this. And the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan, no doubt, do not feel. broadly that they are better off for any of this, even if they agree that they would like to kill all these terrorists. I mean, I don't think in a lot of these places, you would find that there is universal

support for the kind of people that were killing. There may be pockets of support. And in Iraq, the government in Baghdad was so awful that initially Islamic State was seen as a viable alternative, which again is yet another portion of the debate to consider that, you know, Islamic State's rise was in no small part because of the ineffective of the government in Baghdad to be there for its people. So there are definitely these things to consider, but the idea that you're going to kill enough terrorists for them to go away forever is

absurd, just patently absurd. That's just never going to happen. And secondly, what do you, what would you ever, you know, people talk a lot about basically trying to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan, for instance, by sitting down and negotiating with, these groups without ever basically explaining what points there are between the United States and those groups to negotiate. I don't know.

I've never understood what officials in Washington have to gain by negotiating with the Taliban. There's no policy issues that are directly, you know, the issue between Washington and Taliban is please stop attacking our troops. And the Taliban's position is, fine. take your troops out of our country. Like, you know, they have a very simple solution to that problem. They're like, you know, you don't need to be here. This isn't your problem.

You can leave any time you'd like. Our beef is with the government in Kabul. You know, and negotiating some sort of deal. And this is, you know, this is a problem that transcends terrorism. This is a problem of negotiating the future of the Vietnam's. and when the United States sat down to negotiate with the parties and the South of Vietnamese said, hey,

these are our grievances, this is what we'd like, the United States said, we're trying to extricate ourselves from the situation, we need something that looks like peace, at least for the next 18 months, sit over there and shut up about it. And they were not happy.

You know, and I don't think the government in Kabul is particularly happy about basically being negotiated for with its enemies. Well, I mean, it is a lot of... I hate the word treasure, but, you know, it's used,

I mean, lives and treasure that have been spent in order to create a different vision of Afghanistan. I mean, it does seem unsurprising that the United States doesn't want to leave 13 years later at this point

and have things revert to exactly. the status quo that they went in to disrupt. Oh, no, without a doubt. But again, it's, if the United States were to cut a deal tomorrow with the Taliban that says, you will not change the status quo after we leave, the Taliban would be like, sure. And then that paper would be worth less than what it's, you know, that treaty would be worth less than what it's printed on the day American troops leave because they're not there anymore.

And the deal does not, unless the deal is between the Afghan government and the Taliban, the Taliban has no responsibility to the Afghan government to not attack them and not to basically interpret, you know, the understanding of its deal with the United States in its own way. I mean, we did work with the Taliban, you know, as the leaders of Afghanistan until that became politically untenable. I mean, so it's not like they don't understand that as long as things are more or less stable that they can't work with the United States. They've been to Washington. Those guys know what this looks like. This isn't new to them.

So to bring it back to drones, I guess it sort of shows whatever the numbers, you know, civilians killed, which obviously is problematic in terms of, well, everything, especially including the individuals involved. But it does sound like drones, no matter what, are just such a small part of the picture, even though that it's something that is so central in the American way of war. I like to say all the time that it's the policy, not the platform. Okay, drone strikes are one part of a broad idea of containing terrorism abroad. And drones are a, you know, if you want to believe that that strategy isn't working, then drones are a symptom of the problem because it's how the strategy is implemented. They are not inherently problematic on their own.

you know, the drone strike is a tool of what could be phrased as a bad or incoherent policy, you know, or a schizophrenic policy. It would be just as damning if, you know, like we've seen in the past, if you used manned aircraft to try and from afar have the same impact in containing terrorism. and again you sort of risk losing that war you know on the ideological level and on the you know basically presenting a functional alternative you know the civilians who were killed in Syria they don't care how the United States accidentally blew them up they want to know how that's that situation is not going to happen again

and how that situation is going to get fixed they're not worried that it was a drone they're not worried that it was a manned airplane. If some American soldier had ran down the street with a knife stabbing them all because he believed they were terrorists, you know, a thing we've more or less seen happened in Afghanistan that one time with the massacre of Afghan civilians outside a U.S. military facility there, you know, it wouldn't change how destructive that is to the overall American strategy.

And so there's an issue there. And people are perfectly welcome to debate whether the distance offered by drones and the relative safety to American soldiers allowed by drones makes it more likely that we're going to use drones to do these things and do them more recklessly. But it's not, it's still then that there's been no demand for firm policies in place to prevent that from being the case. because you could demand policies that basically say, yeah, we know we have these options, but you still have to be extremely discerning about how you use them. And I think we're seeing that debate in the United States domestically after what happened recently in Dallas, where a police department took a bomb disposal robot and rigged up an explosive and blew up a person who had been shooting

at police officers and civilians in downtown Dallas. And again, you know, people are, we're immediately like, oh my God, is this the future of American policing? You know, like, we've left the door open for this. It's like, no, you leave the door open for this by not immediately implementing policies that say, here are the extreme situations where you would ever think about doing this. Like, here's the checklist of everything that needs to happen. before you do this, and making sure that that is codified and broadly understood, because again, it's about the policy, not the platform. You know, we've already seen problems with SWAT teams,

but it's not that SWAT teams are the problem, it's the fact that police have SWAT teams, and then they feel the need to use them for everything. And when you say problem, do you mean overly forceful responses to provocation or to crime? time, that's kind of what you're talking about? Right. It's a, it's an over response that, that magnifies errors. So you've seen SWAT teams deliver no-knock warrants to the wrong house. Okay.

Now, if a, if a uniform police officer delivers a warrant to the wrong house, he goes next door and delivers it to the right house. If a SWAT team delivers a no-knock warrant to the wrong house, you know, they give, they give an old woman a heart attack. They shoot somebody's dog. Like, I mean, there's, there are very serious issues that happen. And again, it's, you know, we've, seen a rise in the use of SWAT teams and the rise in the use of SWAT teams and no-knock

warrants for what are essentially non-violent crimes. And that's a problem. And people are saying, man, we need to, like, get rid of SWAT teams. It's like, well, the first thing you need to do is set very clear ground rules about, like, what kind of situation you get to use your SWAT team. That would be a really good first step. You know, you could end a lot of this concern about militarized police. by saying you don't get to roll that out

any time you want. You don't get to pull your bear cat armored trucks out for anything at all. You know, you have to have a very clear reason to do this, you know, because that's the thing. If you're going to complain about having those things makes people more likely to use them, it's like, well, a first step would then be to implement rules to prevent that from happening. I mean, that's a thing that can be done. And you see a similar thing has happened with

drones. We have this new weapon decided we needed to use it and weren't great about setting up policy positions. Well, we, again, you know, with drones, we still really don't know what the policy positions are. I would, I would hazard to guess that there is a lot of that. Because what we've seen in leaked documents is that the, the immense amount of steps to get a, to get a drone strike authorized, at least on the military side of things, you know, it has to go through a lot of people, but it still originates very close to the target. You know, somebody basically develops that, you know, people say, well, you know, the president has to sign off on these things because of the concerns involved.

That's true, but there's still people on the ground developing those targets and people very close to the, to the scene, you know, trying to compile dossiers on potential terrorists and the rest of the things. And we don't know basically if what kind of criteria, if any, is implicitly. to say, this person is Syrian enough to warrant a drone strike. And whether you could dial that back a bit and say, really don't need to do this right now against this person or this person. It's this, what constitutes an imminent threat.

And we really, we still don't know. You know, the United States justifies this by saying these people are imminent threats, but offers no definition of an imminent threat. We don't know what imminent means. and that's an important term of art there that goes undefined. It's interesting to think about it in terms of policies as opposed to in terms of destruction in a sense. Do you think that there will ever come a time

that we will have this kind of information in the public arena, or do you think that, you know, is the argument that even having this information about what constitutes an imminent threat, do you think there's any problem with having that information out there? What's the hesitation about letting people know what an imminent threat is? I'm sure the government's position is that releasing any kind of information on the criteria for a strike would give these potential targets an opportunity to change their daily routine so that they don't stand out.

you know, it's a rules of engagement response. We don't release our rules of engagement because then we worry that our opponents will use those against us. You know, they will know what we can and cannot do. And, you know, there's some merit to that argument. But there doesn't even seem to be a, there's no reports of debate in a classified setting by our elected officials who are clear to have those conversations. Because, I mean, our elected officials in Congress are, you know, many of them are part of the people who are in charge of developing these policies. They sit on committees and they grill the other people, you know, in the intelligence community and in the Pentagon who are on the other side developing these policies. And they have back and forth discussions with them behind closed doors in a classified setting.

You know, I don't think I've ever seen, at least not in the title of the classified hearing. but basically I classified hearing by the, you know, Senate Committee on Intelligence or the Senate Armed Services Committee on just on what an imminent threat is. You know, to sit down and basically demand that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence basically turn over a stack of documents that basically says, here, look, this is exactly how we define. You know, and I'm sure they've had these discussions, but I think it would give the American people a lot more confidence. to basically believe it when they say that their elected officials have looked at the criteria and have analyzed the criteria if we believe that they were actually actively having these kind of very broad debates on this policy rather than, you know, very narrow debates on sort of the legal justifications for hitting individual targets and all these other things. Because we have

seen that, but again, it's very specific. And, you know, because we know they're capable of having these deep drawn-out conversations, the continuing discussions about the, you know, enhanced interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay show that there is a, there is a capacity for honest debate, even in a non-transparent setting about what's actually going on and how the U.S. government is treating terrorists. So we do know it can happen. It's complicated. But, you know, So it's, one wonders why that isn't happening more. And I don't know, because again, it's all, it's all so wrapped up in, in these layers of secrecy. Every study that comes out about this, more or less concludes that there's a need for more data.

And I am in a complete agreement with that. You know, we, we need to do more research. And people need to have more, more discussions and, and more exchange, just of the, of the details and be willing to, you know, talk about things. firstly as correlation and not causation. Well, and having the conversations here makes it so that it's not just something that's happening across the water. And I think that's important. Right, definitely. It's a debate that Americans need to have because how we wage war is an immensely important topic,

regardless of whether you believe that war should end. Joe, thank you again so much for joining us. Always a pleasure to talk to you. And hopefully we'll talk to you again really soon. Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to this week's show. If you liked it, check out our archive on SoundCloud and iTunes.

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