“As President and Commander-in-Chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations,” President Obama said in a press conference at the White House on Thursday. Obama was announcing the news that C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan last January killed two hostages being held by Al Qaeda—Warren Weinstein, an American, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian—along with two American-born Al Qaeda members. Obama added, “I profoundly regret what happened.”
That is what a President ought to say at such a moment. Obama owns the decision to prioritize lethal drone strikes over other counterterrorism strategies. He owns the record of civilian and other collateral deaths that those strikes have created—a record still frustratingly shrouded in secrecy. But the President’s mea culpa masks an important and timely question: How exactly did this mistake at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center happen, and who will be held accountable for it? By putting the President out front and withholding all but the broadest details about the failed operation, the Obama Administration apparently hopes to evade that question.
There is circumstantial evidence that the Administration has been preparing for this announcement for some weeks. On March 25th, news organizations reported that the powerful longtime leader of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, a dyspeptic Muslim convert whose code name is Roger, was being replaced. The Center carries out the great majority of covert drone strikes; the Pentagon carries out a smaller number. Roger, who took full charge of drone operations about nine years ago, had become perhaps the most powerful figure inside the C.I.A. since the days of James Angleton, who, as the agency’s chief of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975, was charged with identifying Soviet moles.
When the news of Roger’s ouster emerged—he was to be replaced with a former Kabul station chief and operations officer in South Asia—anonymous officials characterized him as a casualty of larger bureaucratic reorganizations. Was that all it was? After word of Weinstein and Lo Porto’s killing first materialized, and then was investigated, and then was confirmed, who documented and evaluated the causes of the botched drone strike? What form did the investigation take? What did the evidence show? What were the findings and recommendations?
The idea that detailed answers to such questions should lie beyond public or congressional scrutiny simply because drone operations are secret does not pass the laugh test. When covert drone operations and sensitive decision-making protocols are depicted on “Homeland,” with colorful details drawn from the coöperative explanations of former C.I.A. officials, they no longer qualify as state secrets, and certainly not ones important enough to trump the democratic imperatives of transparency and accountability.
The C.I.A. and the Obama Administration have sold their policy on the proposition that drone strikes—and the intensive, sometimes days-long aerial surveillance that typically precedes them—are a highly discriminating form of warfare. In a hostile and inaccessible environment like the western tribal areas of Pakistan, they claim, a drone is preferable to the alternative, which might include a conventional bombing attack, a helicopter raid, or a more passive containment strategy in collaboration with (sometimes compromised) local security forces. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s embrace of drones, partly on humanitarian grounds, is sure to increase their legitimacy as instruments of war in the future. But how can Obama’s choice be squared with the accumulating record of mistakes?
The question must be contextualized. Obama has actually presided over two drone policies—one during his first term, the other since 2013. During his first term, Obama oversaw an undeclared air war in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, a drone campaign designed not only to put pressure on Al Qaeda but also to support the Administration’s “surge” of ground troops in Afghanistan. The pace of strikes in Pakistan reached two per week in 2010. The campaign produced substantial but unknown numbers of civilian casualties; the Administration’s unpublished count of civilian deaths, heavily influenced by the C.I.A.’s grading of its own homework, runs only into the dozens, but the counts of independent researchers, relying on local press reporting and field interviews, runs into the hundreds. The Administration has refused to make its accounting of civilian deaths during these violent years available for any sort of scrutiny or redress.
In May, 2013, under pressure from human-rights groups and European governments, Obama announced a rewrite of the rules for lethal drone attacks. The Administration disclosed that it would now only allow strikes to be launched if there was a “near certainty” of zero civilian casualties. After that, the number of strikes fell substantially. Now, however, Obama must own up to the fact that the changes he ordered failed to prevent a tragic, consequential error. The best way for the President to accept responsibility would be for him to order greater transparency about what happened in January and why, and, more broadly, to accept that secret violence beyond public accountability, no matter its justification, cannot play such a central role in any democracy’s “long war” strategy.
One aspect of this particular mistake in Waziristan colors the news with a distinctive sadness. Warren Weinstein was the forgotten man of the war against Al Qaeda. He was an Urdu-speaking aid worker on contract with U.S.A.I.D., a man past retirement age, who was kidnapped from his home, in Lahore, in the summer of 2011, days before he was supposed to return to the States. The kidnapping occurred three months after Navy SEALs raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden. Yet, despite efforts that the Obama Administration described on Thursday as extensive, no SEALs ever located or attempted to rescue Weinstein, who was seventy-three years old when he died.
Nor did the White House negotiate his release. Last May, after long talks with the Taliban, U.S. Special Forces flew into Waziristan to accept custody of Bowe Bergdahl, an Army soldier who had wandered off his base, on the Afghan border with Pakistan, and been captured by fighters with the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network. In exchange for Bergdahl’s release, the Obama Administration released four Taliban prisoners held at Guantánamo. Weinstein did not figure into the deal and was left behind. Judging by the videos that his captors released, he was ill and deeply demoralized.
Of course, Al Qaeda, not the Obama Administration, is responsible for Weinstein’s miserable fate. Still, the fact that Weinstein’s own government accidentally killed him—during his fourth year in captivity, and without a rescue ever being attempted—is a disturbing coda to the short history of drone warfare. It reminds us that the problem with drones is not just that their operators sometimes make mistakes. It is that the heavy reliance—in time, dollars, and bureaucratic priorities—on a technological panacea for the problem of terrorism can cause a government to lose sight of the people on the ground.
