I wrote last week about the worthwhile new Stanford/NYU study on the civilian impact of the drone war in Pakistan. Today brought the release of another new study of the drone war, this one conducted by the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human [...]]]>
I wrote last week about the worthwhile new Stanford/NYU study on the civilian impact of the drone war in Pakistan. Today brought the release of another new study of the drone war, this one conducted by the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights clinic. (I’ll refer to these as the “Stanford” and “Columbia” studies respectively for ease of reference.) This study is similarly worth reading, and its authors provide still more reasons to be skeptical of the Obama administration’s rosy claims about the civilian toll of drone attacks.
However, for reasons that seem mostly to do with the Internet punditocracy’s thirst for novelty and contrarianism, the Columbia study is being held up as if it refuted the pessimistic take of the Stanford study. Thus Wired‘s Noah Shachtman suggests that whereas the Stanford study claims that drones are “covered in children’s blood,” the Columbia study provides a more “nuanced view” that “doesn’t fit neatly into the dominant narratives about the drone campaign, pro or con.” The main piece of evidence for this claim is that the Columbia team stresses the impossibility of knowing how many people have been killed by drones.
Of course, as the reader may have guessed, the claim that drones are “covered in children’s blood” appears nowhere in the Stanford report; it’s Shactman’s hyperbolic gloss on the report’s conclusion (following the Bureau of Investigative Journalism) that 176 Pakistani children have been killed by drone strikes. (Since we can reliably assume that children are civilians, but can’t always do so for adults, it’s easier to accurately assess the number of children killed than civilians as a whole.) However, the Stanford study is keen to stress the unreliability of all the available data, since it comes primarily from US and Pakistani government sources with incentives to fudge the body count. The study explains why the Bureau of Investigative Journalism numbers — which show a significantly higher civilian death toll — are more reliable than those provided by the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal: while all three sources are reliant on government reports, the Bureau is the only one that attempts to supplement these with on-the-ground follow-up investigations. But they certainly make no claims that their numbers are completely exact or sacrosanct; what’s important is that whatever the precise toll, it’s far higher than the Obama administration is claiming.
The Columbia report makes no attempt to delve into the numbers and come at an estimated death toll, but it similarly examines all the factors which suggest that the official civilian body counts may be grossly understated. It also, like the Stanford report, takes note of all the ways that drones negatively impact even those civilians who aren’t killed or injured by strikes — for instance, the devastating impact on the mental health of residents (particularly children) who hear drones hovering above them at all hours of the day and never know if and when they will be hit. On the basic question of whether drones have been as precise and miraculous as advertised, or whether on the contrary they enact a high price upon the lives of civilians, the two studies are completely in agreement.
The way that the Columbia study in being spun seems to reflect the baleful influence of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand Beltway centrism: government officials say that drones have no civilian toll, outside groups say that they have a high one, so the answer must lie somewhere in the middle. This kind of empty “moderation” is no more useful in navigating the drone war than it is anywhere else.
]]>Unfortunately, so far he’s been right, as war skeptics in both parties have proved unwilling to speak forcefully against Obama’s expansion of the drone war. Some Democrats seem to have made an opportunistic calculation that Predators and Reapers give the administration an opportunity to look tough and claim terrorist scalps at minimal political risk, while the murmurings of discontent over Afghanistan and Libya among Republicans — particularly visible in Monday’s primary debate — have not translated into any vocal criticism of the drone war. As long as American soldiers aren’t on the ground and taking casualties, there seems to be no appetite even among relative doves and anti-interventionists in Congress to criticize the administration on this issue.
This is a shame, because Obama’s expansion of drone warfare is extremely problematic both morally and strategically and deserves to be more publicly debated. The administration would like the public to believe that drone strikes are surgical operations targeting terrorist leaders based on surefire intelligence, and that civilian casualties are the exception rather than the rule. While the sheer number of reported civilian casualties and “high-value targets” who have been announced dead only to reappear suggest that this is a wildly optimistic picture, it’s difficult to tell just how wild — since the amount of reliable information that makes it back to the U.S. media is low and the administration has both the ability and the incentive to euphemize the civilian cost of the drone war. (Muhammad Idrees Ahmad has an important piece examining what he terms the “magic realism” of the body count numbers coming out of Afghanistan and Pakistan.)
And while the short-term domestic costs of the drone war for Obama are virtually nil, the long-term international costs are likely to be far greater. In the wake of the Arab Spring, it’s been grimly ironic these past few months to watch various Beltway pundits earnestly debating how the U.S. can “get on the side of the protesters” while having nothing whatsoever to say about the drone war. It only stands to reason, however, that the U.S. will continue to have trouble demonstrating its good intentions to the Muslim and Arab worlds so long as its primary instrument of foreign policy is a technology that seems more appropriate to the George Lucas’s Galactic Empire. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the only prominent pundits to question the use of drones have been counterinsurgency gurus such as David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, who have observed the political fallout of the use of Predators and Reapers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Given the political incentives in play, it seems likely that the Obama administration will continue to expand the use of drones until factions within the U.S. show that they are willing to make the administration pay a political price at home. Some of this mobilization would have to come from the left, but this is also a scenario where self-styled Tea Party Republicans could put their money where their mouth is and go beyond mere murmurings of discontent over the course of U.S. foreign policy. Perhaps Michelle Bachmann can finally make herself useful?
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