Errant Drone Attacks Spur Militants in Pakistan April 15, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Pakistan, War.Tags: al-Qaeda, drone missiles, drone strikes, gareth porter, islamic militants, mccreary, mike mullen, obama administration, pakistan, pakistan insurgency, pakistani civilian casualties, pakistani govenment, pakistani military, pashtun militants, richard holbrooke, roger hollander, Taliban
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Published on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 by Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON – The U.S. program of drone aircraft strikes against higher-ranking officials of al Qaeda and allied militant organizations, which has been touted by proponents as having eliminated nine of the 20 top al Qaeda leaders, is actually weakening Pakistan’s defence against the insurgency of the Islamic militants there by killing large numbers of civilians based on faulty intelligence and discrediting the Pakistani military, according to data from the Pakistani government and interviews with senior analysts.
Some evidence indicates, moreover, that the top officials in the Barack Obama administration now see the program more as an incentive for the Pakistani military to take a more aggressive posture toward the militants rather than as an effective tool against the insurgents.
Although the strikes have been sold to the U.S. public as a way to weaken and disrupt al Qaeda, which is an explicitly counter-terrorist objective, al Qaeda is not actually the main threat to U.S. security emanating from Pakistan, according to some analysts. The real threat comes from the broader, rapidly growing insurgency of Islamic militants against the shaky Pakistani government and military, they observe, and the drone strikes are a strategically inappropriate approach to that problem.
“Al Qaeda has very little to do with the militancy in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” said Marvin Weinbaum, former Afghanistan and Pakistan analyst at the Bureau of Intelligence Research at the U.S. Department of State and now scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute.
John McCreary, a senior intelligence analyst for the Defence Intelligence Agency until his retirement in 2006, agrees with Weinbaum’s assessment. “The drone program is supposed to be all about al Qaeda,” he told IPS in an interview, but in fact, “the threat is much larger.”
McCreary observes that the targets in recent months “have been expanded to include Pakistani Pashtun militants.” The administration apparently had dealt with that contradiction by effectively broadening the definition of al Qaeda, according to McCreary
Ambassador James Dobbins, the director of National Security Studies at the Rand Corporation, who maintains contacts with a range of administration national security officials, told IPS in an interview that the drone strikes in Pakistan are aimed “in the short and medium term” at the counter-terrorism objective of preventing attacks on Washington and other capitals.
But as they have shifted to Pakistani Taliban targets, Dobbins said, “To degree the targets are insurgents and are Pakistanis not Arabs it would be correct to assess that they are part of an insurgency.” That raises the question, he said, whether the drone program “is feeding the insurgency and popular support for it.”
The drone program cannot even be expected to be a decisive factor in al Qaeda’s ability to operate, according to McCreary. “All you can do with drones is decapitate leadership,” McCreary told IPS in a recent interview. “Even in relation to al Qaeda’s organizational dynamics, it has only limited, temporary impact.”
McCreary warned that the drone strikes will cause much more serious problems when they increase and expand into new parts of Pakistan as the administration is now seriously considering, according to a New York Times article Apr. 7. “Now al Qaeda is fleeing to other cities, “said McCreary. “The program is escalating and having ripple effects that are incalculable.”
McCreary said one of the longer-term consequences of the attacks is “the public humiliation of the Pakistan Army as a defender of the national patrimony”. That effect of striking Pakistani targets with U.S. aircraft is “the least understood dimension of the attacks, the most discounted and most dangerous”. McCreary said the attacks’ “ensure that successive generations of Pakistani military officers will be viscerally anti-American.”
Administration officials have defended the drone strikes program as necessary to weaken and disrupt al Qaeda to prevent terrorist attacks, and officials have leaked to the media in recent weeks the fact that the program has killed nine of 20 top al Qaeda leaders.
But the Pakistani government leaked data last week to The News in Lahore showing that only 10 drone attacks out of 60 carried out from Jan. 29, 2009 to Apr. 8, 2009 actually hit al Qaeda leaders, while 50 other strikes were based on faulty intelligence and killed a total of 537 civilians but no al Qaeda leaders.
The drone strikes have been even less accurate in their targeting in 2009 than they had been from 2006 through 2008, according to the detailed data from Pakistani authorities. Of 14 drone strikes carried out in those 99 days, only one was successful, killing a senior al Qaeda commander in North Waziristan and its external operations chief. The other 13 strikes had killed 152 people without netting a single al Qaeda leader.
Dobbins, speaking to IPS before the Pakistani data on drone strikes was released, said it was difficult for an outsider to evaluate the benefits of the program but that “we can assess that there is a significant price that is being paid” in terms of the impact on Pakistani opinion toward U.S. efforts to stem the tide of the insurgency.
Dobbins said one of the reasons for the continuing drone attacks, despite the high political price, is that “it is an incentive aimed prodding the Pakistani government.” He said he believes the United States would be happy to trade off the strikes in return for a more effective counterinsurgency campaign by the Pakistani government.
Further bolstering that interpretation of the objective of continued drone strikes is a report, in the same story in The News, that the most recent strike took place only hours after U.S. officials had reportedly received a rejection by Pakistani authorities Apr. 8 of a proposal for joint military operations against militant organizations in the tribal areas from U.S. South Asia envoy Richard Holbrooke and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, who were visiting Islamabad.
Other analysts suggest that the program has acquired bureaucratic and political momentum because it a politically important symbol that the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are against al Qaeda and because the United States has no other policy instrument to demonstrate that it is doing something about the growth of Islamic groups that share al Qaeda’s extremist Islamic militancy.
McCreary believes that the program is related to the fear of the Obama administration that it would be unable to get support for operations in Afghanistan if it didn’t focus on al Qaeda. “I think it was a way to link Afghanistan operations to al Qaeda,” he said.
“That suggests to me that the tactic for motivating domestic support is influencing the policy,” said McCreary. The former senior DIA analyst added that the drone strike program “has acquired its own momentum, which is now having immense consequences.”
Weinbaum told IPS in an interview that the drone attacks are being continued, “primarily because we’re enormously frustrated, and they represent the only thing we really have.”
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising 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.
Debunking the Rationale for War in Afghanistan March 30, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, War.Tags: Afghanistan, Afghanistan War, al-Qaeda, atlantic council, chuck hagel, gareth porter, john kerry, obama strategy, pakistan, pakistan isi, pakistan military, pakistan tribal region, pakistani militry, Petraeus, preventive war, richard holbrooke, roger hollander, Taliban
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Published on Monday, March 30, 2009 by Huffington Post
After the Bush administration went to war based on charges of WMD programs that were later found to have been nonexistent, you would think there would be a strong demand for a thorough examination of the strategic rationale the next time an administration proposes a new war or a major escalation of an existing one.
Yet there has been no public examination of the Obama administration strategic argument that the United States must do whatever is necessary in Afghanistan to ensure that al Qaeda cannot have a safe haven there. The assumption seems to be that that there is no need to inquire about the soundness of that premise, because al Qaeda planned the 9/11 terrorist attacks from Afghanistan.
But the rationale for U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan that seemed obvious in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks no longer applies today. Osama bin Laden and the central al Qaeda organization left Afghanistan in late 2001 for Pakistan, where they have now established an even more secure base than they had in Afghanistan, thanks to the strong organization of Islamic militants in the Northwest tribal region of Pakistan. So the real al Qaeda safe haven problem is not about Afghanistan but about Pakistan.
Instead of candidly acknowledging that the al Qaeda safe haven problem is located in Pakistan, however, Barack Obama’s first major statement on the war in Afghanistan sought to obscure that problem. Obama said, “[W]e have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.”
That made it sound like al Qaeda still has a base in Afghanistan. The “White Paper” of his Interagency Policy Group, however, contradicts that formulation. It states the U.S. goal as “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.” Obama’s suggestion that U.S. forces are somehow fighting to defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan marks the first clear instance of playing fast and loose with the facts in order to increase the very weak public support for the war.
If the real problem is ending an al Qaeda safe haven in Pakistan, then going to war in Afghanistan makes sense only if one assumes that al Qaeda is going to be pushed out Pakistan or in danger of being destroyed there. The real question, therefore, is whether there is any realistic possibility that the Pakistan government can shut down al Qaeda’s safe haven.
The honest answer must be that the possibility is vanishingly small — at least for next generation. A report on Pakistan by a panel of experts headed by John Kerry and Chuck Hagel and published by the Atlantic Council last month provides a detailed analysis that suggests why it is so unlikely. It describes a Pakistani army that is demoralized and lacking a viable strategy for dealing with the burgeoning jihadi movement in the Northwest tribal region which has sheltered al Qaeda. It recalls how Pakistan was on the brink of economic collapse last fall, and was forced by the IMF to accept a crippling austerity plan. And it warns that a military takeover is likely if dramatic steps are not taken in the coming year, and that the military leadership is no better prepared than civilian politicians to cope with the country’s problems.
Pakistan is not even on the U.S. side in its war against al Qaeda and the Taliban, as was confirmed by a report in the The New York Times March 25. Despite previous pledges that ISI, the Pakistani military’s intelligence agency, had ended its covert assistance to the Taliban, The Times detaiIs ISI ‘s continuing provision of “money, military supplies and strategic planning guidance” to Taliban commanders fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and CENTCOM chief Gen. David Petraeus conceded in an interviews with PBS that Pakistani assistance to the Taliban is a central problem and that trying to get the Pakistani military to end its support for the Taliban is their highest priority.
But the idea that the Obama administration’s “regional strategy” is going to change a Pakistani strategic fixation on India that has persisted ever since the Pakistani military was created is nothing but wishful thinking. No less an enthusiast for war in Afghanistan than neoconservative military analyst Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute testified at a House subcommittee hearing Thursday that the Pakistani Army actually defines itself in terms of the threat from India and opined that It would require “a multi-generational effort” to change that perspective.
As for closing down al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Pakistan, a report by Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post from Pakistan last September showed that U.S. intelligence had no human assets in the tribal region, and that Pakistani military was doing nothing to change that. CIA Director Leon Panetta’s statement that drone bombing attacks “are probably the most effective weapon we have to try to disrupt al Qaeda right now” is a pretty good indication that there is little chance of the United States rolling up al Qaeda in Pakistan unilaterally.
The war in Afghanistan is being justified, in effect, as a “preventive war,” but the contingency it is supposed to prevent — an al Qaeda base in Afghanistan — is one that that isn’t going to occur, regardless of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. In that regard, the rationale for this war is very much like the rationale for the invasion of Iraq, which was that the United States had to prevent the acquisition by Saddam Hussein of a nuclear weapon.
Although the war in Afghanistan cannot solve the al Qaeda problem in Pakistan, it can accelerate the destabilization of Pakistan and strengthening the jihadi movement there. Even air attacks by drone aircraft in Pakistan, which is now settled U.S. policy, create a powerful political backlash in favor of the militants in Pakistan. But once the administration’s “regional” approach to changing Pakistani policy stalls, we can expect growing pressure from the military to resume U.S. Special Operations forces cross-border raids against Taliban sanctuaries inside Pakistan. And that would certainly lead to more serious destabilizing developments, such as increased ideological splits within the Pakistani military. The National Intelligence Council warned the Bush administration about the near certainty of such consequences last August, as I reported for IPS September 9.
The administration’s rationale for escalating war in Afghanistan does not stand up to careful examination. Not only is Afghanistan not a war of necessity, as it is being portrayed by the administration; it is a war that is very likely to make the terrible mess in Pakistan substantially worse and increase the likelihood of spreading chaos in that country.
Iran in the Crosshairs March 5, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Israel, Gaza & Middle East, War.Tags: gareth porter, Iran, iran intelligence, iran nuclear, iranian nuclear facilities, israel, israel nuclear weapons, Middle East, mike mullen, netanyahu, nuclear weapons, president obama, preventive war, raymcgovern, roger hollander
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By Gareth Porter and Ray McGovern
www.consortiumnews.com, March 4, 2009
Last year, the Middle East dodged the danger of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the inevitable spread of hostilities.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen was sent to tell the Israelis that the United States would not support such an attack, and after the fiasco in Georgia, the Russians too sent stern warnings to Tel Aviv.
But now the specter of an Israeli strike has reappeared. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s incoming prime minister, is far more committed to an attack on Iran than his predecessors.
Remember when Joe Biden told supporters of Barack Obama last October that Obama would be tested in his first six months in office?
There is good reason to believe he was referring to the likelihood that Netanyahu would become prime minister after the February 2009 Israeli election, and that he would waste little time finding a pretext to attack Iran.
Netanyahu has been laying the groundwork for such an attack for years, constantly repeating that Tehran is “preparing another Holocaust” a la Germany in the Thirties.
He keeps hammering home the “existential” threat that would be posed to Israel (with its 200-300 nuclear weapons) if Iran had just one.
Netanyahu has made no bones about the fact that his preferred solution to the problem is a massive air attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and other military targets, and that he would not wait for any evidence that Iran had actually manufactured a weapon before doing so.
It would be, you see, a Bush-type “preventive” war. Netanyahu would fully expect Iranian retaliation of some kind and knee-jerk U.S. intervention on Israel’s side.
If such adventurism were to prevail, it would be a tragedy not only for Iran and the United States but for Israel as well. And it would bring to Israel more serious risk than at any time since its implantation in Palestine.
It is also completely unnecessary. There has never been a shred of evidence that Iran has any intention of committing suicide by attacking Israel.
Nor is it clear that Iran has irrevocably decided to seek nuclear weapons.
The U.S. intelligence community determined unanimously in its most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, completed in November 2007, that Iran had abandoned the nuclear weaponization part of its nuclear development program in 2003 and had not resumed such work.
Largely forgotten is the fact that this estimate also concluded that Iran would extend the halt to its nuclear weapons program if the United States were to offer “credible” opportunities for Iran to achieve its “security, prestige and goals for regional influence.”
In other words, the way to avoid an Iranian nuclear weapon is not the threat of an attack – which is very likely to have the opposite effect – but to give Iran additional reason to continue the halt in weaponization.
Unfortunately, it is far from clear that President Obama understands that he must draw a hard line against an Israeli attack. Some of his old-think advisers believe the threat of an attack should be part of his overall strategy.
The President’s adviser on proliferation, Gary Samore, declared last September, “We…want the Iranians to believe that if they actually try to make nuclear weapons, or if they build secret facilities that we detect, they run the risk of being attacked.”
What needs to happen: President Obama needs to order an update of the 2007 intelligence estimate on Iran.
Then he should ask for a briefing by intelligence analysts able to think outside the box, including the ones who concluded in 2007 that Iran needs positive incentives to continue to forego work on nuclear weapons.
Obama should encourage his diplomats to pursue talks at a senior level with their Iranian counterparts, with the objective of reaching agreements that will give Iran just the kind of incentives the intelligence analysts had in mind.
And he must tell Netanyahu that the U.S. will not support an Israeli attack on Iran. Indeed, the U.S. will not tolerate it.
Gareth Porter is an investigative journalist and historian and the author of Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam. Ray McGovern was an Army Intelligence Officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 years and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
The Terrorism Issue That Wasn’t Discussed September 12, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in War on Terror.Tags: al-Qaeda, anti-americanism, civilian casualties, counter terrorism, daniel benjamin, drone missile, gareth porter, global terrorism, jihad, jihadist movement, Middle East, obama's wars, predator missiles, roger hollander, terrorism, war on terror
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Roger’s note: Back in the good old days of Barry Goldwater conservatism a right-wing nutcase by the name of John Stormer wrote a book called “None Dare Call it Treason.” I never read it but it probably asserted something like the US government secretly turning the country over to the Communists. In reading the article I have posted below, I cannot help but think of the word “Treason.” If it is true that the government will not abandon its wars in the Middle East for fear of admitting that it sent Americans to die in vain; if it is true that it knowingly is promoting terrorism with its drone missile program (and this is not to mention the lies that justified the invasion of Iraq, American soldiers dying for the Oil Industry, or the self-defeating Imperial ambition fueled by the military-industrial complex); then are not the leaders of the government, from the president on down, guilty of nothing less than treason? There … I “dared” to say it.
Published on Monday, September 12, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
In the commentary on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the news and infotainment media have predictably framed the discussion by the question of how successful the CIA and the military have been in destroying al Qaeda. Absent from the torrent of opinion and analysis was any mention of how the U.S. military occupation of Muslim lands and wars that continue to kill Muslim civilians fuel jihadist sentiment that will keep the threat of terrorism high for many years to come.
The failure to have that discussion is not an accident. In December 2007, at a conference in Washington, D.C. on al Qaeda, former State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Daniel Benjamin offered a laundry list of things the United States could do to reduce the threat from al Qaeda. But he said nothing about the most important thing to be done: pledging to the Islamic world that the United States would pull its military forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq and end its warfare against those in Islamic countries resisting U.S. military presence.
During the coffee break, I asked him whether that item shouldn’t have been on his list. “You’re right,” he answered. And then he added, “But we can’t do that.”
“Why not,” I asked.
“Because,” he said, “we would have to tell the families of the soldiers who have died in those wars that their loved ones died in vain.”
His explanation was obviously bogus. But in agreeing that America’s continuing wars actually increase the risk of terrorism against the United States, Benjamin was merely reflecting the conclusions that the intelligence and counter-terrorism communities had already reached.
The National Intelligence Estimate on “Trends in Global Terrorism” issued in April 2006 concluded that the war in Iraq was “breeding deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim World and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.” It found that “activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.” And in a prophetic warning, it said “the operational threat from self-radicalized cells will grow in importance…particularly abroad but also at home.”
Given the way intelligence assessments get watered down as they ascend the hierarchy of officials, these were remarkably alarming conclusions about the peril that U.S. occupation of Iraq posed to the United States. And that alarm was shared by at least some counter-terrorism officials as well. Robert Grenier, who had been head of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center in 2005-06, was quoted in the July 25, 2007 Los Angeles Times as saying the war “has convinced many Muslims that the United States is the enemy of Islam and is attacking Muslims, and they have become jihadists as a result of their experience in Iraq.”
As the war in Iraq wound down, the U.S. war in Afghanistan — especially the war being waged by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) — was generating more hatred for the United States. As JSOC scaled up its “night raids” in Afghanistan, it never got the right person in more than 50 percent of the raids, as even senior commanders in JSOC recently admitted to the Washington Post. That indicated that a very large proportion of those killed and detained were innocent civilians. Not surprisingly, the populations of entire districts and provinces were enraged by those raids.
If there is one place on earth where it is obviously irrational to antagonize the male population on a long-term basis, it is the Pashtun region that straddles Afghanistan and Pakistan, with its tribal culture of honor and revenge for the killing of family and friends.
Meanwhile, after fleeing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in 2001, al Qaeda had rebuilt a large network of Pashtun militants in the Pashtun northwest. As the murdered Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad recounted in Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, President Pervez Musharraf, under pressure from Washington, began in 2003 to use the Pakistani army to try to destroy the remnants of al Qaeda by force with helicopter strikes and ground forces. But instead of crushing al Qaeda, those operations further radicalized the population of those al Qaeda base areas, by convincing them that the Pakistani government and army was merely a tool of U.S. control.
Frustrated by the failure of Musharraf to finish off al Qaeda and by the swift rise of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the Bush administration launched a drone war that killed large numbers of civilians in northwest Pakistan. An opinion survey by New American Foundation in the region last year found that 77 percent believed the real purpose of the U.S. “war on terror” is to “weaken and divide the Muslim world” and to “ensure American domination.” And more than two-thirds of the entire population of Pakistan view the United States as the enemy, not as a friend, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project.
The CIA and the Bush and Obama administrations understood that drone strikes could never end the threat of terrorist plots in Pakistan, as outgoing CIA Director Michael Hayden had told the incoming President, according to Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars. And if the Obama administration didn’t understand then that the drone war was stoking popular anger at the government and the United States, it certainly does now. Former DIrector of National Intelligence Dennis Blair has pointed out that “hatred of America is increasing in Pakistan” because of the drone strikes.
Yet the night raids and the drone strikes continue, as though the risk of widespread and intense anger toward the United States in those countries doesn’t make any difference to the policymakers.
There is only one way to understand this conundrum: there are winners and losers in the “war on terrorism”. Ordinary Americans are clearly the losers, and the institutions and leaders of the military, the Pentagon and the CIA and their political and corporate allies are the winners. They have accumulated enormous resources and power in a collapsing economy and society.
They are not going to do anything about the increased risk to Americans from the hatred their wars have provoked until they are forced to do so by a combination of resistance from people within those countries and an unprecedented rebellion by millions of Americans. It’s long past time to start organizing that rebellion.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.
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