By Steven Poole
Christopher Hitchens is optimistic about the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan:
[T]he four requisites are in place: citizens rejecting theocracy and its partner, organized crime; an indigenous army that fights for its own reasons; American airstrikes that are careful and discriminating; and the development of splits that can be exploited among the jihadists.
Oh good, the airstrikes are "careful and discriminating" now! Not only are targets chosen, or the fire button pressed, with care, but also there is discrimination afoot - presumably discrimination between evil guys who deserve to die and other people who don't necessarily? It is surely reassuring news if so, but how does Hitchens know it? That is a mystery left intriguingly intact by his column. Still, at least he does, in the previous paragraph, cite one recent strike that he perhaps means to stand synecdochically for the new careful-and-discriminating paradigm: the drone attack that killed Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, as well as Mehsud's wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, and eight other people.
In a way, that does count as "careful and discriminating" when compared to the overall record of Predator attacks over the last few years. According to Pakistani authorities, US drone attacks carried out in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009 killed 687 civilians. Or, as David Kilcullen, former strategic adviser to General Petraeus, puts it:
He said the US had killed 14 mid-level or lower level al-Qaeda leaders since 2006 but the strikes had killed 700 civilians. "That's a hit rate of two per cent on 98 per cent collateral. It's not moral."
Of course, it's a bit more moral if the strikes really have become "careful and discriminating" (always assuming that discriminating between enemies and civilians is what Hitchens actually means, rather than, say, discriminating between wedding parties and funerals). But what the hell - even if they haven't, we could perhaps give the impression that they have anyway by dusting off that old classic of military Unspeak, "surgical strikes"? Why thank you, New York Times, we don't mind if you do:
The White House has begun promoting the missile strikes and raids that have killed Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere. [...] President George W. Bush approved a more aggressive campaign of surgical strikes last year before leaving office, and Mr. Obama has embraced and expanded the program.
How has Obama's embracing and expansion been going? According to Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann in the New Republic, as of June 2009, not all that well:
Just three days into his presidency, Obama authorized a near-simultaneous pair of drone strikes against targets in North and South Waziristan. Since he took office, there have been a total of 16 airstrikes, or roughly one per week. Our analysis shows that these attacks have killed some 170 people, but only one has killed an important Al Qaeda or Taliban leader, presumably because many of them have decamped from the tribal areas.
Still, we have Christopher Hitchens's word that now, the firing of 100lb missiles from remote-controlled aircraft in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a "careful and discriminating" business, such that presumably they will from now on kill only top bad guys and their entire families, but no one else. Possibly Hitchens is privy to classified information that boffins have installed a new "moral clarity" circuit in the Predator's nosecone?
