Major US paper calls heavy reliance on drones troubling

Terming the Obama Administration’s heavy reliance on drones against suspected militants on foreign soils as “troubling,” The Washington Post Friday called for bringing transparency and political accountability to drone warfare, which it suggested should be conducted by US military rather than the country’s intelligence agency.
An editorial in the newspaper saw self-defense justification in the US waging drone strikes against al-Qaeda terror planners in the aftermath of 9/11 attacks but said plans to institutionalize the drone attacks and extend the unmanned warfare tactic to regions away from the original al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan, raises new legal questions.
The Post editorial came in the backdrop of a series of reports by the newspaper, which said the Obama Administration plans to continue adding names to the drone “kill list” even as it winds down the Afghanistan war.
The American politicians and officials rarely discuss details of civilian casualties or drone methods, although the issue has long been a subject of serious debate in the world beyond American shores.
A recent American study said the drones have killed hundreds of civilians in Pakistan and led to sharp rise in public resentment against the United States. Since publication of the report and American peace activists’ participation in a high-profile anti-drone demonstration in Pakistan, the American media have started discussing implications of the drone tactic more openly.
Friday’s lengthy Post editorial begins with the acknowledgment that it has been ten years since the first strike by an armed U.S. drone killed an al-Qaeda leader and five associates in Yemen.
Since then, according to unofficial counts, there have been more than 400 “targeted killing” drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — countries where the United States is not fighting a conventional war, it says.
About 3,000 people have been killed, including scores — maybe hundreds — of civilians. And though the United States is winding down its military mission in Afghanistan, the Obama administration, as The Post’s Greg Miller reported last week, “expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.”
“All of this causes increasing unease among Americans of both political parties — not to mention many U.S. allies. They are disturbed by the antiseptic nature of U.S. personnel launching strikes that they watch on screens hundreds or thousands of miles from the action. They question whether drone attacks are legal. They ask why the process of choosing names for the kill list as well as the strikes themselves are secret and whether such clandestine warfare does more harm than good to long-term U.S. interests,” the editorial board say, arguing that the drone war be brought out of shadows.
The editorial claims that some of these anxieties seem misplaced.
“But the means and objectives of drone attacks — and the Obama administration’s steps toward institutionalizing the system — deserve much more debate than they have attracted during the presidential campaign,” it adds.
Many critics, second Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO under President George W. Bush, who wrote in the Post on Sunday that drone strikes allow U.S. adversaries to portray the United States as “a distant, high-tech, amoral purveyor of death.”
“While drones may indeed prompt such propaganda, they are really a more effective and — yes — humane way to conduct one of the age-old tactics for combating an irregular enemy: identifying and eliminating its leaders. That drones do not put the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk and cause fewer collateral deaths are virtues, not evils,” the newspaper editorial said, commenting on Volker’s observations.
“Similarly, Mr. Volker asks “what we would say if others used drones to take out their opponents” — such as Russia in Chechnya or China in Tibet. The answer is twofold: Other nations will inevitably acquire and use armed drones, just as they have adopted all previous advances in military technology, from the bayonet to the cruise missile. But the legal and moral standards of warfare will not change. It’s hard to imagine that Russian drones would cause more devastation in Grozny than did Russian tanks and artillery, but if used there they would surely attract international censure.