Unveiled on June 29, President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism strategy is as significant for what it says as for what it obliquely refers to or is silent on.
The principal focus of the strategy is on what poses the “most direct and significant threat to the US – Al-Qaeda, its affiliates and its adherents”.Presenting the 19-page strategy document, Obama’s top anti-terrorism adviser, John Brennan declared that America’s “best offense won’t always be deploying large armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure” against groups that threaten” the US. This affirms the shift in US policy underway in the past two and a half years from large-scale military interventions to clandestine campaigns.Little was explicitly stated in the document about how this strategy will continue to be pursued: by a form of secretive war involving armed drones and Special Operation forces. The closest Brennan came to acknowledging the use of unmanned aerial vehicles was a reference to deploying “unique assets” against the terrorist threat.Washington has already extended the covert drone campaign to six countries – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Somalia. Its escalation has involved the violation of national sovereignty of many of these states including Pakistan. The document’s emphasis on building regional security partnerships therefore sounds hollow in the face of this reality.What the strategy fails to acknowledge are the risks, limits and consequences of waging covert offensives in countries with which the US is not at war. There is no recognition that pursuit of this course could undercut America’s security objectives by engendering deep hostility in the very countries whose cooperation the US needs to eliminate Al-Qaeda.The ramifications of relying on missile-firing drones have become more complex since the Obama administration adopted this as its weapon of choice and the originally modest programme targeting only a small number of high-value terrorists underwent a dramatic escalation.Obama’s counterterrorism plan to replace the Bush-era 2006 strategy comes soon after Osama bin Laden’s death in a secret raid. The strategy paper describes this as the “most important strategic milestone” in the effort to defeat Al-Qaeda. While the organisation is on “the path to defeat”, it is still seen as a significant threat. This requires the use of “targeted force” to complete the job according to the strategy paper. “Defeating Al-Qaeda”, Brennan explained, does not require a global war but a focus on specific regions. Currently, says the official document, the US “is focused on eliminating the Al-Qaeda safe haven in Pakistan”.This indicates that more unilateral actions involving an intensification of drone strikes can be expected in the country’s border areas in pursuing an approach that has already pushed America’s relations with Pakistan to the brink.The increasing even exclusive US reliance on this approach is predicated on the low cost, so-called ‘precision’ capabilities of drone warfare that involve no risk of US lives. Cast aside are legal questions raised by this war-by-assassination approach. Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, highlighted these last year in a report. This criticised the secrecy of the CIA-run drone campaign and its lack of accountability under international law.As the American programme is an undeclared one it has operated beyond the purview of international law even though Washington insists it has the legal right to target individuals who are planning attacks against the US. The acquiescence by America’s European allies and silence of western human rights organisations has helped to maintain its secrecy. There has also been no public debate in the US except for the occasional newspaper article questioning the approach. Absent is any public oversight of the campaign.It is worth recalling that the tactic of targeted assassinations was pioneered by Israel and used for over three decades in the occupied territories and Lebanon. It failed to overpower the Palestinian resistance and ended up radicalising the movement and the region.Three aspects of the US covert campaign merit discussion: its limits, unintended practical consequences and the fallout on relations with Pakistan. This strategy with its one-dimensional kinetic approach has measured success by how many militants have been eliminated rather than on how the flow of recruits into terrorist organisations is retarded.This overly militarised approach has distracted attention from the need to address the ideological and political dimensions of the challenge: the appeal of militants and the conditions that breed them. There is a telling lack of ‘non-kinetic’ dimension to US counterterrorism strategy despite the acknowledgement in the document of its importance. Unless a strategy is able to thwart recruitment and break the cycle of radicalisation it falls dangerously short of being effective.The limits of an approach that relies on targeted executions turns counterterrorism into a numbers game and overlooks the fact that terrorist organisations including Al-Qaeda’s newer incarnation have morphed into loose and decentralised networks that survive by forging alliances with local partners and are therefore hard to eliminate by this top down tactic.According to one CIA assessment there are around 200 to 300 Al-Qaeda fighters in Pakistan’s tribal region. In that case over 257 strikes by Hellfire missiles since 2004 should have eliminated most of its leaders and members. But why hasn’t this happened?The limits of a decapitation strategy are evident from the fact that rather than stop the flow of recruits into terrorist organisations it often ends up swelling its ranks. Its perverse effect has been to drive otherwise disparate groups into combining their efforts, expanding their goals and enlarging their area of operation. The Faisal Shahzad incident involving the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is a case in point.Ramped up drone attacks have provided an incentive to militant networks to make common cause and ally with Al-Qaeda. Aerial strikes and the indeterminate civilian casualties they have caused have enabled Al-Qaeda to leverage local allies and affiliates. Therefore the goal to isolate the organisation has risked being lost in the fog of this covert war.Unilateral drone-launched missile strikes into Pakistan’s borderlands have had a number of other consequences, which show that the strategic costs of this campaign far outweigh the claimed ‘tactical’ gains. The rising public hostility these actions have evoked is reflected in successive opinion polls. The most recent by the Pew organisation found that 62 per cent of Pakistanis now oppose US antiterrorism efforts, with 89 per cent respondents believing that drones kill innocent people.Other than fracturing ties with Islamabad the anti-Americanism fuelled by these go-it-alone actions raise questions about how Washington’s anti-terrorism efforts can succeed in this environment and the quality of cooperation it can hope to elicit as a result from Islamabad. The key to the success of antiterrorism efforts is good, solid intelligence. If this is unavailable no effort can endure even if there are notable one-off successes.Among the consequences of more aggressive American actions has been the erosion of the post-2009 political consensus in the country so painstakingly forged in support of the anti militancy campaign. Opinion poll findings and anecdotal evidence point to a correlation between falling public support for military campaigns and unilateral American strikes into Pakistan’s sovereign territory – testimony to the counter productiveness of US strategy.Buoyed by its success in eliminating “more key Al-Qaeda leaders” in the past two and a half years than at any time since 9/11, the Obama administration appears to see little reason to modify a course of action that is so destabilising for Pakistan and which has fanned the flames of radicalism in the tribal areas and beyond.Belief in the soundness of its approach has blindsided Washington to the long-term consequences of this strategy as well as to the danger of a break in relations with Pakistan. Disregarding these costs at the strategic level the Obama administration seems set on a course at stark variance with its own words in the strategy document: “We will defeat Al-Qaeda only through a sustained partnership with Pakistan.” The only viable way to secure this goal is to work with Pakistan and not seek to bypass it
