Droning on against al-Qaeda

The New Republic has an excellent article up now looking at the increasing use of drone bombers in Pakistan. Authors Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann highlight a number of interesting points in their analysis of the program, which has undoubtedly eroded the capabilities of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In 2007, the sitting White House launched just three drone attacks in Pakistan, but in 2008 the pace of the bombings increased dramatically to 34. For 2009, the Obama administration has already pulled the trigger on 16 such attacks, and dozens more seem imminent as the assassination program emerges as the chief U.S. instrument for fighting bin Laden’s organization in Pakistan.

The attacks, and their civilian casualties, have of course produced political backlash in Pakistan in general -- but not so much in the tribal badlands formally called the Federal Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), where the strikes have taken place. From the article:

• The one place the drone strikes do seem popular is in the FATA itself. The Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, a Pakistani think tank that does work in the tribal regions, found that more than half the people it polled in the FATA say the drone strikes are accurate and are damaging the militant organizations. Fewer than half said that anti-American sentiment in the area had increased due to the drone attacks. This is perhaps less surprising than it might initially seem; if a bunch of heavily armed religious nutcases took over your neighborhood, you too might not mind if occasionally they were whacked by mysterious missiles falling from the sky, whatever their provenance.

Torture on Trial, Already

The running debate in Washington on whether to prosecute either CIA interrogators or the policymakers who authorized the harsh techniques they used is unlikely to yield any new information or legal actions any time soon. Lawmakers and Obama administration officials are essentially pondering questions already largely answered on the issue. A series of books, news articles, de-classified documents and public disclosures by Bush administration officials have revealed what interrogation methods were used, who authorized them and who is answerable legally. Continuing to wonder aloud about what to do now may prove cathartic to many in Washington, but it’s unlikely to produce any meaningful accountability for what many have long considered the commission of war crimes by the Bush administration. What some seem to have forgotten amid the latest headlines in the U.S. torture saga is that the issue is headed to court in a variety of venues at present anyway. A host of legal proceedings related to torture, detention and surveillance were already moving forward even before President Obama took office. The slow, quiet machinations of those are likely to produce some measure of accountability before Congress or the White House acts.