The Drones Are Coming! The Drones Are Coming!

There is a guy named Philip Alston. He has a very, very important job. Mr Alston is the Special Rapporteur On Extrajudicial Executions for the UN Human Rights Council. In his official capacity he has (with the help of a female attorney and a duo of equally feminine research assistants) written a twenty-nine page report on the general subject of "targeted killings" or, what were called in the old days, "assassinations."

Mr Alston does not like anything to do with the use of "targeted killings." He likes the US employment of UAVs in the role of mechanical killer even less. He likes the use of drones so little that he appears to be sincerely convinced that the US has let some evil incubus out of the laboratory, and the result will be a form of blood drenched international chaos as state after state rushes to get their own drones in the air with the intent of killing as many people as they can under the dubious rubric of "fighting terror" by killing "terrorists." What makes this dystopian vision most alarming in the mind of Mr Alston is the simple reality that drones, in principle at least, can kill anyone, anywhere, thus making the entire globe a potential combat zone rather than having the killing restricted to tight little hygienic areas of battle.

To zero in a bit tighter on the target of Mr Alston's distaste for UAVs in the role of Controlled Killer In Faraway Lands, is the American tendency to treat the machines as being clandestine in nature and thus under the operational fingers of the US clandestine service, CIA. Somehow Mr Alston has convinced himself that UAVs operated by military personnel in uniform are somehow less distasteful than the same machines run by civilians wearing whatever. Apparently this distaste is rooted in Mr Alston's belief that the military services of the US are more accountable, more transparent, and more responsible than the spooks of the clandestine service, who, by the very nature of their task, work in the deepest of plausibly deniable shadows.

Reading the report, or at least the interminable sections focusing on the Sins of Uncle Sam, one gets the impression that Mr Alston and his lady associates have formed a strange view of how the American version of Assassinate A Terrorist is played. Mr Alston must be of the view that the spooks of CIA sit around idly choosing somebody, anybody, to put in the sights of one of their far off Predators or Reapers. Not only that, but Mr Alston has apparently concluded that the bloody spooks are totally unconcerned about their distant machines wreaking havoc among the civilians, or at least the non-combatant civilians down range.

These conclusions, to say nothing of the nightmare scenario constructed upon them, violate reality in numerous ways. The processes by which individuals are selected for the attention of the remotely operated vehicles are known in outline and appear replete with safeguards, reviews, and internal accountability of a high order. Further, the operators of the American programs are as aware as General McChrystal of the counterproductive effect of killing non-combatants, with the result that the strikes are more carefully planned and the munitions delivered have been made smaller in their lethal radii.

Mr Alston might be forgiven for his exaggerations were they not so underscored by numerous internal contradictions in his report. (Take a dekko yourself, bucko, as the Geek gets bored doing all the keystrokes necessary to import block quotes.) Mr Alston is not so easily forgiven for omitting the contextual reality that the spooks would much rather capture the targeted subject, because a corpse, particularly one which has been tastelessly spread over the landscape, is of no real intelligence value.

Killing bad guys is justified by the simple fact that doing so perturbs the organizational integrity and thus the operational effectiveness of groups dedicated to killing Americans and other people including the folks in whose midst the bad guys, the jihadists, exist, often without local permission other than that extorted by fear. A bad guy merits killing by his position in the hostile entity--and that liability is in no way compromised by his being remote from the scene of combat operations.

The World War II "targeted killing" of Admiral Yammamoto stretched American technology to its (literal) limits. But had the architect of Pearl Harbor been in Tokyo or even, hypothetically, some neutral nation's capital, killing him would have been just as appropriate and just as important as a means of undercutting the combat capability of Imperial Japan.

So it is with the non-uniformed, non-state actors of al-Qaeda, Taliban, or any other group engaged in hostile operations of whatsoever sort against the US. If a heavyweight or even a middleweight member of a jihadist group is taken out anywhere in the world whether by a UAV or more traditional means, say, a knife in the back, the result is to diminish the capacity of the hostile entity to operate against us or our allies.

This may strike the lofty thinking as an example of that dreaded ethic, the ethic of means being justified by ends. And, so it is. There is nothing inherently evil in this sort of ethical approach and there never has been.

The US government is not in the business of wholesale slaughter. Nor is it in the better interests of the US to appear to be so. Neither is it in the higher, better national interests of the US to encourage any and all comers to emulate our technological means. There is no better example of this contention than the continued American refusal to furnish Predator type UAVs to Pakistan despite repeated requests from Islamabad to do so.

The question that Mr Alston and his ilk in the Human Rights Council should be addressing is far removed from the use of UAVs by the US in so-called "extrajudicial killings." That question is how should the civilized states of the world work most effectively to stop the expression of political Islam through the violence, the indiscriminate, civilian slaughtering violence so common to the type of mind behind 9/11, 7/7, the Mumbai Raid, or the literally hundreds of suicide and roadside bomb attacks on civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Israel, Somalia, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, and other places.

That, Mr Alston, should have your sole and undivided attention for that is extrajudicial killing at its greatest body count.

The Geek's Praise And Pan For The Week

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finally stepped out of the shadows this week--twice really, but one of these rare appearances has already been covered. The real praise for the often invisible SecState is for her honesty in Pakistan.

She had the guts to bring the rhino in the john front and center as she quite properly accused the government of Pakistan for having had the knowledge necessary to get Osama bin Laden and his number two guy, Zawahiri, at any time over the past nine years. As an exercise in "fence-mending," her approach is noteworthy in its unconventionality. But, public honesty in this matter is long overdue--and still incomplete.

The government of Pakistan or at the very, very least, its Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has known where the top men of al-Qaeda have been all along the way. The many, many stories of bin Laden's having traipsed around the country, including stays in military hospitals, have been too numerous, too consistent, and from too many diverse sources over the years to be the creation of fabricators and other pitfalls in the wacky world of intelligence.

Further, when the intimate relationship between ISI and the Taliban of Afghanistan is factored into consideration, it becomes even more unlikely that the al-Qaeda pandjandrums' whereabouts is unknown to the Boys of Islamabad. They may have experienced the embarrassment of having their creation, Taliban, turn against its creators, but that doesn't imply the ISI has lost its ability to collect what is known as "actionable intelligence."

They have. They know it. We know it. They know that we know. So, there is no excuse to pussy-foot around the issue. And, to her credit, Ms Clinton hasn't kept on the artful dodging that typified the Bush/Cheney years. Presumably, some of the credit must go to President Obama for allowing the sharp and amazingly public change in policy.

Pakistan, in a way which resembles the old French policy of placating terrorist groups but which has taken it to much, much greater extremes, has sought to buy its peace from terror attacks by both permitting "foreign" groups to operate from its soil and protecting them from other "foreign" antagonists. The government and military of Pakistan sat back, hands folded on their collective laps, until it had become explosively evident that Taliban had slipped its ISI leash and unilaterally cancelled the old deal.

The US would have acted quickly and (hopefully) effectively had the government of Pakistan, the Pakistani military, or ISI given notice of bin Laden's or Zawihiri's address. Not only did the phone call never come, the Pakistani organs publicly (and privately) maintained they were completely mystified and baffled as to where any of the terrorist heavyweights might be. They often added that the wanted men must still be in Afghanistan.

Considering the largess spread by the US Congress and administrations both past and present, a largess which will be paid by our descendants on to the fifth generation, the Clinton Bluntness Gambit is well justified. Now, both the administration and the congress must back her play. The challenge, the glove cast before Islamabad, must be renewed--and expanded. It is all well and good to praise the Pakistanis for finally having taken some sort of more or less effective action against the Islamist jihadists, but that is not enough.

It is not enough to justify all the money we have and will spend on the Lads of Islamabad. It is not enough that they have finally decided that they have to do something or lose their heads to the swords of what they like to call "miscreants."

To not only justify the money we have lavished upon their regime and its assorted military goodies, they must now show they really have joined the side of civilization in opposition to the barbaric forces of the Islamist jihadists. To do this they must hand us the head of Osama bin Laden, with or without the rest of his body. Ditto, al-Zawihiri.

It may have been a thumbs-up for Secretary Clinton. But, it is the back of the Geek's hand to the UN Human Rights Council. Well, to err on the side of specificity, its Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, Philip Alston.

Mr Alston is all het up over the use of Predators and Reapers in the FATA of Pakistan. He is reportedly even more exercised over the unwillingness of the US, specifically CIA, to supply the family jewels on how targets are determined and engaged. The Special Rapporteur used language in his press conference the other day which echoed very well the approach taken by Justice Goldstone regarding the IDF.

He hinted darkly that the US "may" be committing war crimes in its use of UAVs. He can't be sure of this, however, unless the US provides all the relevant and requested information.

There is no doubt that Mr Alston would like to know the details of UAV missions and the supporting targeting systems. So would the targets. And their supporters around the world, many of which are represented on the Human Rights Council.

When not engaged in absurdities such as the widely decried hang wringing over the probable abuse of the human rights of transgendered persons as was the case with the UNHRC in-house "expert" on counterterrorism, the august body undertakes travesties such as its perversion of the already malformed Goldstone Panel Report. Now, the Council wants to drag the US into the same mire as it has Israel.

Recently the Jerusalem Post quoted a critic as terming the Goldstone effort as "a Magna Carta for terrorists." Mr Alston seems to be doing his best to augment the Goldstone effort.

While there is no debating the unfortunate fact that non-combatants have died from the Predator attacks, there is also no debating that this was not the desired effect of the attacks. US decision makers and those who execute the decisions are quite well aware of the ground truth that the killing of uninvolved civilians is counterproductive to say the least.

The gold (not Goldstone) standard for adjudicating an action during war as a crime is that of intent. The law of land warfare in the US and everywhere for that matter is intent pure and simple. It has been acknowledged for decades, centuries, perhaps longer, that in war civilians will be killed. It is unavoidable. Inescapable. So, showing a commonsense usually lacking in the area of jurisprudence, the standard of intent was evolved long times past.

Mr Alston needs to get a grip. The collateral loss of civilian life is an unfortunate reality of war whether carried out by UAVs or undertaken in a very up close and personal fashion. And, intent cannot be proven or disproven from an examination of the protocols and procedures for targeting and servicing the targets chosen.

Not unless someone, somewhere, at sometime, deep inside the Beltway wrote an order saying in effect," It is our intent that civilians be intentionally targeted." Sooner whales will fly than that sort of order would surface--or even exist. Not even Dick (Kill-'em-All-And-Let-Hell-Sort-It-Out) Cheney was that stupid.