The U.S. drone strike on a suspected al Qaeda compound in Pakistan that mistakenly killed an American and an Italian, both civilians, is spurring a new debate about America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and its impact on our intelligence capabilities in that region.
Lawmakers and counter-terrorism experts told the Washington Examiner a lower U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan had very little or nothing to do with the intelligence failure related to the death of the two al Qaeda hostages.
But the tragedy is giving ammunition to critics of President Obama’s efforts to stick to a 2017 U.S. exit plan from Afghanistan.
“When you don’t have boots on the ground, then the identification of targets is incredibly more difficult,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told the Washington Examiner Thursday. “I’m not saying that we could have had boots on the ground where [the U.S. and Italian hostages] were, but the prohibition of that obviously complicates the mission rather dramatically.”
James Carafano, a top national security expert at the Heritage Foundation, agrees, and he argues that U.S. special operators would never have been able to successfully execute the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound if the U.S. didn’t have a large military and special operations presence — 30,000 troops — in Afghanistan at the time.
January’s drone tragedy, which President Obama publicly lamented Thursday, “is a warning sign about thinking that you can conduct accurate drone strikes and not have a presence there,” Carafano said.
“Trying to do counterterrorism operations and lethal strikes from a long distance dealing with very weak and unreliable partners with no footprint on the ground is very hard — and it makes avoiding these type of tragic incidents very hard,” he said. “This Joe Biden idea that let’s pull everyone out and let’s just do drone strikes just doesn’t work in practice.”
Some Democrats acknowledge problems with the U.S. intelligence operation that led to the botched drone strike but say the president has little choice but to remove U.S. troops from the region as planned.
“It is a concern,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., referring to the diminishing U.S. intelligence-gathering capability as troops leave. “But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t withdraw. We’re not occupiers. We don’t have as much intel as we once did in Iraq, but that’s because Iraq didn’t want us to stay. ”
Michael O’Hanlon, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution, is not convinced the January tragedy had anything to do with a diminished U.S. footprint but says he’s more concerned about what lies ahead as the troop levels dwindle to zero by 2017.
At that point, he said, “We’re not going to have any basis whatsoever to do this kind of thing.”
Other key conservatives, however, only partly agree.
Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican who chairs the Intelligence Committee, told the Examiner that the U.S. footprint in the region had nothing to do with January’s intelligence failure.
“Any time you reduce your footprint, you reduce your capabilities,” he said. “Up until this point, our capabilities are as robust in that region as they have ever been. This morning’s news is unfortunate but I don’t think it changes our capabilities, or more important, our intent in the region — and that’s when we can’t capture any individuals that we will use any options that are available to us.”
“I think we continue to try to prosecute terrorists wherever they are with whatever tools are available,” he said.
National security experts who support a more interventionist U.S foreign policy also warn against a push from the left to abandon U.S. drone strikes altogether or severely limit the program in the wake of the killing of two civilian hostages.
Were the al Qaeda terrorists cleverly trying to get the hostages killed in order “to make us more hesitant to use drone strikes next time?” O’Hanlon asks. “We have to rethink our procedures for how we got this wrong.”
January’s U.S. drone strikes were a mixed bag because they also took out some high-value terrorists, although the White House admitted Thursday that they weren’t the terrorists the United States intended to target.
The administration acknowledged that Ahmed Farouq, an American al Qaeda leader, was killed in the same operation as the two hostages, and Adam Gadahn, an American who became a prominent member of al Qaeda, was killed in a separate strike.
Reacting to Thursday’s news, the American Civil Liberties Union released a statement arguing that the mistaken killings of the civilians raise “troubling questions about the reliability of the intelligence that the government is using to justify drone strikes.”
In each of the drone strike operations, the United States “quite literally didn’t know who it was killing,” said the ACLU.
“These and other recent strikes in which civilians were killed make clear that there is a significant gap between the relatively stringent standards the government says it’s using and the standards that are actually being used,” said Jameel Jaffer, the group’s deputy legal director.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest strenuously disagreed with the ACLU statement, arguing that there’s “no evidence at this point that U.S. counter-terrorism deviated from professional protocols.”
Instead, he said that the U.S. operations in question — the White House wouldn’t confirm that drone strikes had occurred — took place in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, a part of the world that is “exceedingly remote.”
“What this means is when we’re talking about an environment like this, absolute certainty is just not possible,” he said, noting that in the compound where the hostages were killed, U.S. intelligence officials conducted hundreds of hours of surveillance and continuous surveillance in the days leading up to the operation.
“Now, what we also know is that Al Qaeda considers these kinds of hostages to be extraordinarily valuable,” he said. “And they go to tremendous lengths to try to conceal the location of these hostages. And that is why, unfortunately, that near certainty assessment was wrong.”
Obama has directed an independent inspector general review to determine if there are any changes U.S. intelligence officials can make “to make it less likely that these kinds of unintended consequences would occur again.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, also said the committee would conduct thorough oversight into the intelligence failure in January, but she pointedly declined to draw broad conclusions about the nation’s drone policies.
“I think it’s wrong to judge intelligence capabilities on any one event,” she said.
