Al Qaeda in the Cross Hairs

President Obama is firing 30,000 more troops at the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and according to The Times’s Scott Shane, they aren’t the only incoming threats:

The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.

By increasing covert pressure on Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan, while ground forces push back the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan, American officials hope to eliminate any haven for militants in the region.

Hmmm … this follows pretty quickly on the heels of this morning’s Times Op-Ed article by Seth G. Jones, which argued that “The United States and Pakistan must target Taliban leaders in Baluchistan” by hitting them “with drone strikes, as the United States and Pakistan have done so effectively in the tribal areas.”

Anyway, in an age where a golf pro’s car accident at the end of his own driveway becomes the a topic of national conversation, you can bet the idea of lobbing blast-fragmentation warheads into the sovereign territory of a longstanding military ally disjointed a few noses. Jerome Armstrong’s was among them. “It is basically an expansion of the Bush Doctrine, that of preemptive war or military strikes within a country within we are not at war, through the CIA with US military drones in Pakistan,” he writes at MyDD. “The Bush Doctrine, perhaps the most radical un-American legacy of George Bush, is not going away. Yea, right now, its pretty easy to celebrate that the ‘warheads on foreheads’ is military technology which only the CIA holds, and is only being used by the US against terrorists in Pakistan. But how long do you think it will be until that utopian use of military technology is bought or attained by aggressive military forces which have their own design on using the Drone technology toward their own ends?”

Scarecrow at FireDogLake considers this passage in the Shane article — “The political consensus in support of the drone program, its antiseptic, high-tech appeal and its secrecy have obscured just how radical it is. For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for killing in a country where the United States is not officially at war” — and takes umbrage:

I don’t think that’s correct in any meaningful sense, even if you don’t count B-52s bombing countries in the 1970s as “robots.” The only technical change is the use of robots. If you substituted the word “agents” or “assassins,” there’s nothing new about the practice of some countries sending them into other countries to murder people, and to do so completely outside any legal framework.

What’s new is the public acknowledgment that this is what we do, and how we behave, that it’s routine, and the implicit acceptance that it’s okay. And all that has occurred with no recognition whatsoever that if an agent from another country did that here, it would be called a terrorist act carried out by a people without soul or morality.

At Commentary, Max Boot’s acceptance is more than implicit, it’s downright celebratory.

For years the U.S. has been carrying out Predator strikes against Islamist terrorists in Pakistan — but only in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The rest of Pakistan has been out of bounds, including Baluchistan, where in the city of Quetta, the Afghan Taliban have established their operational headquarters. That may be changing. The New York Times reports today: “American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.”

It’s about time. In a Times op-ed today, RAND’s Seth Jones quotes a Marine he met in Helmand Province: “The Taliban sanctuary in Baluchistan is catastrophic for us. Local Taliban fighters get strategic and operational guidance from across the border, as well as supplies and technical components for their improvised explosive devices.”

I heard similar sentiments when I was in Afghanistan in October. Indeed, one senior American officer told me that many Afghans can’t figure out why we are giving a pass to Mullah Omar and the senior Afghan Taliban leadership when we are targeting leaders of al-Qaeda and even the Pakistani Taliban (including their leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in a U.S. strike in August). This has led to the spread of conspiracy theories suggesting that the Americans are somehow in cahoots with the Afghan Taliban. Crazy, I know, but those are the kinds of wild theories that are believed in tribal societies like Afghanistan.

In reality, I suspect, we have refrained from strikes on the Taliban leadership for fear of offending the Pakistani government. But if we’re going to get serious about turning around the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, we have to take the gloves off and send the Predators over Quetta.

A.J. Strata, not usually a shrinking violet on these things, tries to temper the enthusiasm.

As noted this is part of the administration’s get tough on al-Qaeda and the Taliban push. I must say the expansion into one of Pakistan’s ‘normal’ provinces is very risky politically. What we don’t need is be seen hunting people down anywhere in the world. That backlash in Pakistan would obviously grow.

The lawless tribal area is a known festering hole of illiteracy and poverty, poisoned with Ilsamo Fascist zealotry. It is not humanity’s finest achievement by far. People can accept our attacks there (with a common sense dose of discomfort) since they are in conjunction with military operations by the Pakistan Army and Air Force.

But I would be wary of expanding this concept too far and outside joint military actions. [And if I’m unconformable then Obama’s liberal base must be apoplectic right now]

He’s not the only one who’s ambivalent. Here’s Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal:

My larger reaction is this is a great idea . . . and why would the Pakistanis not throw a fit if we tried to do exactly this. Seriously, is this realistic at all? And for once I’m not even being snarky.

Honestly, would the Pakistanis allow us to do this? Not long ago I watched a Frontline special where the Pakistan Army Chief of Staff and the country’s Interior Ministry basically denied that the Quetta Shura even existed or that Mullah Omar was not in the country – statements that if Jones op-ed is to be believed are simply laughable.

So how do you get from that to the Pakistanis just letting the US go in and arrest Afghan Taliban leaders or send Hellfire missiles into what are likely populated areas? This would represent an absolute sea change in how Pakistan deals with the Afghan Taliban in their midst. In other words, it would be a huge deal.

And the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder is the very definition of measured in his assessment:

The American program of using unmanned Predator drones in Pakistan doesn’t seem to have a lot going for it. The program, which seeks to find and kill high-value targets such as al-Qaeda leadership, is sharply and frequently criticized for killing far more civilians than it does terrorists, for promoting anti-American rage among previously indifferent locals, and for creating diplomatic tension with the Pakistani government … Yet despite all this, today The New York Times reports that the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan is being expanded. Why the continued reliance on a program with so many problems?

An answer may lie in a BBC interview with a Taliban detainee who claims he recently met Osama bin Laden. The detainee says the meeting was in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan where bin Laden has long been thought to be hiding. When asked why Afghanistan, the detainee responded, “Pakistan at this time is not convenient for us to stay in because a lot of our senior people are being martyred in drone attacks.” If his story is true (and it may very well be false, although Juan Cole calls it “plausible”), it would suggest that the drone program does exactly what Obama has said he wants to do in this war: deny al-Qaeda a safe haven.

This wouldn’t necessarily outweigh the many problems of the drone program, especially if, as critics insist, it creates more enemies than it eliminates. Kidnapped New York Times reporter David Rohde described drone strikes as killing innocent civilians but also as terrifying Taliban insurgents. If it’s true that drones have indeed made Pakistan’s border region inhospitable for al-Qaeda, that’s certainly worth considering as an argument in their favor.

And that means considering it with utmost consideration, something Tiger Woods probably wishes he was getting a bit more of right now.