In what is sure to be one of the most glaringly obvious headlines written about the General Petraeus-Paula Broadwell affair, the Washington Post writes: “Petraeus hoped affair would stay secret and he could keep his job as CIA director.”

Clearly, things did not go according to plan. Right after the [...]]]> via Lobe Log

In what is sure to be one of the most glaringly obvious headlines written about the General Petraeus-Paula Broadwell affair, the Washington Post writes: “Petraeus hoped affair would stay secret and he could keep his job as CIA director.”

Clearly, things did not go according to plan. Right after the election, Petraeus submitted his resignation to President Obama after being under investigation by the FBI for months; he had already reportedly broken off his relationship with Broadwell, his biographer.

ABC reports that the FBI did not in fact inform the White House because their findings were “the result of a criminal investigation that never reached the threshold of an intelligence probe” — but even as the FBI was mulling over what to do next, one of the agents on the case was contacting Florida socialite Jill Kelley to inform her of their findings so far.

The investigation showed just how broad the Bureau’s powers are with respect to communications monitoring. Rather than observing what The Daily Beast calls “the spirit of minimization to lead the FBI to keep any personal revelations within the bureau and not say anything to anybody” in other cases involving personal threats, it seems that the since-dismissed agent violated this policy and not only told Kelley, but Members of Congress as well, before the Tampa office handling the email-reading contacted the Director of the FBI to warn of possible national security implications.

As a result of the FBI’s case with Kelley, the US/NATO commander in Afghanistan, General John R. Allen, is also now “involved” in the scandal due to his lengthy email correspondence with Kelley that has raised concerns over potential breaches of national security.

Though the details of the affair have captured headlines and a large number of officials and foreign policy commentators are bemoaning the damage done to Petraeus’s military-policy reputation, some discussion is occurring over the ex-DCIA’s record as top general in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Langley’s chief drone advocate.

Issandr El Amrani at the Arabist offers a succinct observation of how Petraeus’s star rose in the Beltway hierarchy as the US sought a way out of Iraq: “[h]e delivered results of sorts for the US, which gave Washington political cover for an exit.” While this certainly represented a success for a despairing Bush White House, it was not a step towards carrying out an extended occupation, or even reinvigorating the potpourri of war aims increasingly advanced after 2003 to re-spin the war’s WMD casus belli. Iraq’s ongoing political troubles offer few hints as to how counterinsurgency, or COIN, may have staved off total collapse. At least, from the military’s perspective, the “Surge” staved off a complete collapse and ensured the US could withdraw in the near future, not unlike Nixon’s 1973 “peace with honor” adage in Vietnam. With Iran maintaining its influence in Baghdad (handed to them by the US invasion), disparate militias eyeing each other warily in Kurdistan, and Iraq’s anti-Iranian & anti-American terror cells looking to Syria to revitalize their regional struggle, America’s 21st century “peace with honor” may sound just as hollow for some Iraqi officials today as it sounded for South Vietnamese negotiators back then.

COIN itself never came to reoccupy the spot formerly reserved for “nation-building” in the years Robert McNamara’s whiz kids rode high. As Andrew Sullivan and Michael Hastings note, the general himself did not exactly follow his own press in practice when he transfered over to Afghanistan, emphasizing air strikes and special operations missions over his much-lauded counterinsurgency practices of going door-to-door to win the population over. As Spencer Ackerman, who has issued an apology for not being more aware of how the general’s Army office was influencing his past reporting, Petraeus has done much to expand the CIA’s own drone program, calling for a significant expansion of the program just weeks before his resignation.

COIN and its mythologizing aside, there are few reasons to expect that the general’s counterterrorism policies will suddenly fall out of favor with the White House, not least because Deputy NSA John O. Brennan has been one of the driving forces for institutionalizing drone warfare since his appointment in 2009. The influential former DCIA Michael Hayden, now coming off of his stint as an advisor to former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, is urging the agency to move away from its targeted killing trajectory and back towards threat assessment and anticipation. He remarked that looking to the future of the Agency, “[t]he biggest challenge may be the sheer volume of problems that require intelligence input.”

There is little chance though that Petraeus’s downfall will see the downgrading of the Agency’s robot presence. With both the US and Pakistan unwilling to launch ground major operations into the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions due to the casualties their armed forces would incur, the drone wars are regarded as the most effective military option available. Neither Washington nor Islamabad — or on the other side of the Indian Ocean, Sana’a and Mogadishu — have either the capacity or will for anything more. Or for anything less, in fact, since that would mean ceding the field to the targets, who despite their losses, can draw strength from these strikes. The CTC man told the Washington Post last year while the Agency may be “killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them now,” he himself does not think he’s implementing a truly sustainable policy for this Administration, or for those that will follow.

But as the Post reported this past month, Deputy NSA Brennan seems to think otherwise, along with those reportedly elevated in the CIA under Petraeus’s directorship.

While the relationship between reporter and officer — whether sexualized or not — is likely to remain a topic of debate and “soul-searching” for commentators in the coming months, and COIN may fade away from Army manuals trying to plan out the next “time-limited, scope-limited military action, in concert with our international partners,” the new face of counterterrorism that is the General Atomics MQ series is likely to be the general/DCIA’s most lasting legacy. And this will be the one that holds the fewest headlines of all in the weeks to come, given it’s broad acceptance across both major parties and the “punditocracy.”

Election Day in the United States was — as it has been since 1845 — a Tuesday, which meant that it also coincided with “Terror Tuesday,” the label attached to the meetings held by President Obama and his inner national security circle to discuss and authorize drone strikes based on the Administration’s [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Election Day in the United States was — as it has been since 1845 — a Tuesday, which meant that it also coincided with “Terror Tuesday,” the label attached to the meetings held by President Obama and his inner national security circle to discuss and authorize drone strikes based on the Administration’s secretive “targeted kill lists.” Shortly after the election results came in, it was reported that the US almost certainly carried out a targeted killing operation in Yemen against a reported al Qaeda target in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The individual targeted, ’Adnan al-Qadhi, who is said to have been killed along with 2 other AQAP suspects, was reportedly suspected of helping plan the 2008 Embassy Sana’a bombing.

As usual, there has been no independent verification for Yemeni claims that the three men were killed.

Yemen-watcher Gregory Johnson noted on his blog Waq al-Waq that the strike suggested there would be little reevaluation of the drone program — being carried out over Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and in the coming weeks, Mali and Libya — even though it continues to raise costs not wholly justified by reported successes:

So, even if the accusations against al-Qadhi were true and he was involved in the 2008 US Embassy attack and even if the US did have intelligence that he was about to carry out an attack on US personnel in Yemen or planning a strike against the US – did the US also have intelligence that all of the other individuals within the car were also involved?

This is important.  The US has carried out, by my best estimate, between 37 – 50 strikes this year in an attempt to kill 10 – 15 people.  Many of those 10 – 15 people are still alive (see: Nasir al-Wihayshi, Said al-Shihri, Qasim al-Raymi, Ibrahim Asiri and so on) but people are dying in Yemen.

And while we in the US may not feel or realize this, it is very real in Yemen.  And this is causing problems and – I continue to say – is one of the key reasons behind the rapid growth of al-Qaeda in Yemen. 

There are, however, some signs suggesting the program will be reevaluated by the President and his White House advisers as calls mount for greater scrutiny.

It would be difficult for the Administration to scale back a program it has invested so heavily in and touted without actually admitting to too much, Stephen Walt blogged, following Obama’s victory. He went on:

I fear that re-election will convince his team that they’ve basically got the right formula: drones, special forces, covert action, secrecy, etc., combined with a very cautious approach to diplomacy. This is certainly preferable to the follies of the Bush administration, but it also means that the U.S. will be engaged in lots of trouble spots but unable to resolve any of them.

Greg Miller, the author of the Washington Post‘s recent insider account of the intra-Administration debate on expanding the drone program, had also noted that the debate was rather circumscribed: “[t]here were a couple dissenters who had a seat at the table … They lost those seats at the table.”

The program has again received a full-throated endorsement from the Center for a New American Security — a think tank close to the Obama Administration — as the lesser evil in comparison to deploying Pakistani or American forces to to carry out ground offensives.

Spencer Ackerman, writing at Wired, suggests a debate could occur due to diplomatic considerations, but with few officially put-forward alternatives in play:

“There is a recognition within the administration that the current trajectory of drone strikes is unsustainable,” [Michael] Zenko [of the Council on Foreign Relations] says. “They are opposed in countries where strikes occur and globally, and that opposition could lead to losing host-nation support for current or future drone bases or over-flight rights.” In other words, tomorrow’s America diplomats may find that drones overshadow the routine geopolitical agenda they seek to advance. The trouble is, the administration’s early search for less-lethal policies to supplement or supplant the drones isn’t promising.”

In what is hopefully a wake-up call for US news media, the New York Time’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, has called on the paper to challenge its sources on the vagueness of the information they provide on drone strikes:

Some of the most important reporting on drone strikes has been done [...]]]> via Lobe Log

In what is hopefully a wake-up call for US news media, the New York Time’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, has called on the paper to challenge its sources on the vagueness of the information they provide on drone strikes:

Some of the most important reporting on drone strikes has been done at The Times, particularly the “kill list” article by Scott Shane and Jo Becker last May. Those stories, based on administration leaks, detailed President Obama’s personal role in approving whom drones should set out to kill.

Groundbreaking as that article was, it left a host of unanswered questions. The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed Freedom of Information requests to learn more about the drone program, so far in vain. The Times and the A.C.L.U. also want to know more about the drone killing of an American teenager in Yemen, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, also shrouded in secrecy.

But The Times has not been without fault. Since the article in May, its reporting has not aggressively challenged the administration’s description of those killed as “militants” — itself an undefined term. And it has been criticized for giving administration officials the cover of anonymity when they suggest that critics of drones are terrorist sympathizers.

Americans, according to polls, have a positive view of drones, but critics say that’s because the news media have not informed them well. The use of drones is deepening the resentment of the United States in volatile parts of the world and potentially undermining fragile democracies, said Naureen Shah, who directs the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia University’s law school.

“It’s portrayed as picking off the bad guys from a plane,” she said. “But it’s actually surveilling entire communities, locating behavior that might be suspicious and striking groups of unknown individuals based on video data that may or may not be corroborated by eyeballing it on the ground.”

The US’s Acting Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Hoagland disclosed the information in an exchange with a number of American activists and journalists against the US’s undeclared drone war waged primarily in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of the country.

The US Government has not published casualty lists for Pakistanis reported killed and [...]]]> via Lobe Log

The US’s Acting Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Hoagland disclosed the information in an exchange with a number of American activists and journalists against the US’s undeclared drone war waged primarily in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of the country.

The US Government has not published casualty lists for Pakistanis reported killed and wounded by drone strikes. A similar policy of non-disclosure is present with respect to US operations in Yemen and Somalia.

Available information on Pakistani drone casualties comes from investigative reports produced with the assistance of local NGOs. But according to Robert Naiman, the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, Amb. Hoagland offered a rare public acknowledgement of the program itself and civilian casualties:

“Well, first of all, for the numbers, to be very honest, I looked at the numbers before I came here today, and I saw a number for civilian casualties that officially — U.S. government classified information — since July 2008, it is in the two figures, I can’t vouch for you that that’s accurate, in any way, so I can’t talk about numbers. I wanted to see what we have on the internal record, it’s quite low.”

Iran’s Zahedan airport is located on a road named for Allama Iqbal (also known as Sir Muhammad Iqbal), the great Indian philosopher whom Pakistan adopted after partition as its national poet. The shaheen, or eagle, features prominently in Iqbal’s poetry, as a symbol of vigour, dignity and daring. It is contrasted against the [...]]]> By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Iran’s Zahedan airport is located on a road named for Allama Iqbal (also known as Sir Muhammad Iqbal), the great Indian philosopher whom Pakistan adopted after partition as its national poet. The shaheen, or eagle, features prominently in Iqbal’s poetry, as a symbol of vigour, dignity and daring. It is contrasted against the figure of the kargas, or vulture, which represents cunning, cowardice and ignobility. It is the latter appellation that the region frequently applies to the CIA drones which today dot the skies from Waziristan, Kandahar to Zahedan. But shaheen or kargas, they are both ferocious; and it is considered a feat to capture either. Small wonder then, that some in Iran see cause for celebration in the capture of CIA’s RQ-170 sentinel drone, a stealth surveillance craft manufactured by Lockheed Martin.

This is not the first time the CIA has delivered one of its most advanced aircraft for inevitable reverse engineering to its putative enemy. On April 9, 1960, people at the Zahedan airport watched anxiously as an aircraft with unusually wide wings approached from the north-east. The Lockheed U-2C was on a top-secret spying mission for the CIA, but its target was not Iran. Indeed, it was coming in to land after being chased by several fighter planes. Over the previous 8 hours, the plane had photographed four strategic Soviet military sites from an altitude of 70,000 feet, well out of the reach of the Russian MiGs and Sukhois. It embarked on its mission from the Badaber air force base 10 miles to the south of Peshawar.

Three weeks later, on May 1, 1960, another aircraft lifted off from Badaber. It was the U-2′s 23rd mission behind the Iron Curtain, an ambitious mission deep into the heart of the Soviet Union. Flying well over the reach of Soviet fighters, the CIA figured the U-2 could proceed with impunity. But where MiGs feared to tread, a SAM rushed in; a Russian SA-2 surface-to-air missile exploding near the high-flying jet sheered off one of its giant wings and its pilot, Gary Francis Powers, bailed out in time to provide the Soviets with living proof of the intrusion. The incident soon turned into an international scandal, putting an end to the ongoing Four Powers Paris Summit; it also soured relations with Pakistan where few had known about the nature of a mission which now left them vulnerable to the possibility of Soviet retaliation.

But another consequence of the U-2 incident is more germane to recent events. After Powers’s capture, the CIA determined that it will have to invest in new technology in order to avoid similar scandals in the future. One option was a faster plane like the CIA’s A-12, a Mach-3.35 reconnaissance plane developed by Lockheed which would later morph into the better known SR-71. Another option was to invest in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. In October 1962 development began on the D-21, a drone went into service in 1969 but was cancelled in 1971, after just 4 flights over China. The UAV program remained in limbo until advances in GPS revolutionalized the technology and, with the advent of the global war on terror (GWOT), the drones were finally weaponized. The rest is an all-too-sanguine history. And Badaber and Iran have both continued to feature in it.

Having briefly shed its obscurity in April 1985, when the Pakistani Army and its Afghan allies massacred 52 Soviet and Afghan prisoners of war during a prison uprising there, Badaber once again made headlines when it was discovered that the Pakistani military had leased its local base to the CIA to launch drone attacks in the neighboring tribal regions. The news predictably endangered the whole city of Peshawar, which became a frequent target of retaliating militants. Meanwhile, the new impunity accorded by the unmanned aircraft encouraged the US to push farther into the region, sending reconnaissance aircraft first into Pakistan itself (as during the killing of Bin Laden) and later Iran (as we have just discovered).

However, things have changed since the Cold War. Whereas in the past development of new technology like the D-21 required major industrial investment, today it can be done on the cheap, using pilfered R&D. Israelis have long used this strategy to develop their own variants of US and French technology. China, Russia and Pakistan, among others, have long engaged in industrial espionage to acquire advanced military technology which allows them to stay abreast of modern military technology without having to make the kind of massive investments that only rich countries like the US can afford. All resent (or envy) the impunity that the drones have accorded the US and would like to develop their own without reinventing the wheel. There was already news that Pakistani gave China access to the stealth technology that the US used during its raid to kill Bin Laden. It would therefore have come as nothing less than a blessing for the US to land its most advanced stealth drone virtually intact into Iran’s hands for possible delivery to China and Russia. It is not hard to imagine the glee with which the CIA’s gift will be received in Moscow or Beijing. It will save both years of R&D and plenty of dollars.

More alarming however is the prospect that this development could lead the CIA to move toward the development of more autonomous unmanned crafts in order to avoid interception or hijacking. Research along these lines is already under way. One such project, the Ethical Governor, inspired the following animation from the genius Glaswegian animator John Butler:

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a Glasgow-based sociologist and a columnist for Al Jazeera English.