Saroka 1 Steven Saroka Dr.

Lori Bedell CAS 137H Section 4 4 November 2013 Covert and Denied: the Post-9/11 Mindset of American Warfare While the years after the 9/11 attacks are best known for the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, these invasions were only a part of the global War on Terror. Due to the failure of conventional warfare to eliminate al-Qaeda, the mindset with which the United States prosecutes the War on Terror swiftly "went black"operations attacking secret targets, selected via classified means in pursuit of vague goals, became commonplace occurrences in far-flung regions of the world with little or no official acknowledgement from the U.S. government. The post-9/11 use of both drone warfare and special operations forces to execute such operations is a symptom, not the cause, of a paradigm shift in the United States' approach to warfare: a shift to a mindset of deniability characterized by the use of these two tools to engage in covert warfare in which targets, objectives, criteria, and entire theaters of operation are obscured from the public eye and from any meaningful oversight. This shift is due to two intertwined factors: the allure of covert and seemingly risk-free drone technology and special forces, combined with the need to respond with lethal force to the dispersal of al-Qaeda and associated groups beyond the battlefields of Afghanistan after conventional tactics failed to eliminate them. However, this mindset of concealed deniability, necessary to pursue al-Qaeda on a global scale outside of internationally recognized war zones, came with a resultant lack of transparency and accountability that led to serious abuses of lethal force.

Saroka 2 This paradigm shift could not happen instantaneously; it first required the development of its primary tools: armed drone technology and military special forces. While drone technology existed before the year 2001, it was successfully weaponized in testing that occurred during the first two months of that year (Mazzetti 95). While the existence of drones was not a new element, this weaponization was: for the first time, the United States government had the option of unmanned, impersonal, long-range warfare at its disposal. Paralleling this development was the existence of military special forces: while conceptually in existence since World War II (Army Special Forces), the pre-9/11 arm of the U.S. Special Operations Command containing the most elite commandos, the Joint Special Operations Command, only contained small niche forces that could not carry out extensive covert operations without more funding (Mazzetti 75). Despite this, the basic tools were in place to enable the coming paradigm shift. September 11th, 2001, inadvertantly catalyzed the paradigm shift as the United States found itself at war with a new foe: the amorphous terror network al-Qaeda. The U.S. responded under the conventions of its former paradigm, primarily attempting to defeat al-Qaeda through the use of conventional warfare strategies. These conventional strategies, which were developed with enemy nations in mind, enabled a successful invasion of Afghanistan, firmly occupying the enemy country. However, these strategies were not nearly as successful as they appeared: the real targets were the networks of terrorists that happened to reside in Afghanistan. The post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which was passed by Congress three days after 9/11 (Crowley) enabled these strategies through a clause that empowered the President 'to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided' the Sept. 11 attacks (Crowley). Interpreted to give

Saroka 3 authorization to pursue al-Qaeda anywhere it could be found, this enabled the invasion of Afghanistan as a sympathetic haven for terrorists. While initial successes due to conventional invasion tactics seemed clear, such as the fall of the al-Qaeda-sympathetic Taliban government in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda's nature meant that it could easily go into hiding to recover before striking again. The true threat had not been dealt with. While the conventional invasion of Afghanistan appeared to be a success, the ensuing decade-long battles with insurgent forces and the survival of al-Qaeda showed it to be anything but. This proved conventional warfare in the Middle East to be ineffective in eliminating alQaeda, as heavy-handed U.S. tactics both failed to eradicate al-Qaeda's key leaders while simultaneously causing collateral damage, inadvertantly supporting al-Qaeda propaganda that America was at war with the entire Muslim world (Bowden 80). Meanwhile, al-Qaeda's mobile nature had allowed it to disperse across the Middle East, with the core of al-Qaeda's leadership fleeing across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the 'ungoverned territories' of NWFP and FATA-areas [of Pakistan] (Gunaratna and Nielsen) after the American invasion of Afghanistan. In short, the epicenter of global terrorism moved from Afghanistan to tribal Pakistan (Gunaratna and Nielsen). There was only one problem with this: Pakistan was and remains, technically, an American ally (Haqqani). Allies do not react well to invasions of their country by other allies, regardless of the stated reason. The failure of conventional tactics to eliminate al-Qaeda, combined with the dispersal of al-Qaeda across the Middle East into seemingly safe areas like Pakistan where it was not politically feasible to invade, initiated a paradigm shift in the way the United States approached the War on Terror. This dispersal of al-Qaeda called for a new way of waging war: a way that

Saroka 4 could send in troops and apply lethal force in places where full-scale invasion would be neither politically feasible nor even legal; in short, a mindest of unconventional warfare. This was a shift of necessity, as al-Qaeda was still very much a threat and its geopolitical location did not matter: the United States military and government were committed to its destruction. Thus, conventional wars slowly turned into unconventional covert wars, and as these were unconventional they required military assets that were low-risk, impersonal, and covert. The zero-risk unmanned drones, which had been battle-tested in Afghanistan (Mazzetti 99), along with the covert Navy SEALs and Army Delta Force commandos of the Joint Special Operations Command (Mazzetti 75), were ready to implement this paradigm shift. However, more than a change in the forces used, this paradigm shift required a change in mindset: an approach to warfare that embraced military operations wherever al-Qaeda was hidden, even if those operations had to be deniable and covert, hidden due to political and legal necessity from the countries in which they took place and by extension from the general public as well. This shift began very early in the War on Terror, with the first known drone strike carried out on November 4, 2002 in Yemen (Mazzetti 87) against an al-Qaeda operative named Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi (Mazzetti 85). The strike was successful, and as a targeted killing outside a declared war zone (Mazzetti 87), it definitively inaugurated the paradigm shift to a mindset of deniability that would be characterized by such targeted drone attacks, which were easily ignored or denied. Yemen's President Saleh began that pattern when he ordered his government to issue a cover story (Mazzetti 87) surrounding the strike, obscuring U.S. involvement. The first drone strike in Pakistan took place in mid-June 2004 (Mazzetti 109), with a similar pattern of government cover-up. The mindset of deniability had rapidly come into

Saroka 5 effect. The first deniable drone strikes had successfully been run, and door was wide-open for expansion of the program through the legal authority of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force which, by giving the President powers to pursue al-Qaeda anywhere it hid, essentially made the world into a free-fire zone (Kaplan). As this interpretation of the A.U.M.F. was codified in a Justice Department white paper (Kaplan), essentially enshrining the right to global covert action against al-Qaeda in United States law, this was exactly what occurred in the ensuing years. Drone strikes, as well as harderto-document special forces raids, slowly built in number and intensity, while the list of target countries and al-Qaeda groups continued to grow. While the conventional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on which the media fixated, lost momentum, the unconventional warfare only accelerated in places like Pakistan. During his entire presidency, George Bush launched 48 drone strikes in the Waziristan region of Pakistan. . .36 of them during his last year in office (Kaplan). Obama, in a series of executive actions that made his selection for a Nobel Peace Prize appear positively baffling, launched 52 drone strikes in Pakistani territory in his first year in office, 122 strikes in 2010, 73 strikes in 2011, and then 48 (Kaplan) in 2012. The nowfamous Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden's Abbottabad compound in Pakistan in 2011 was a rare reminder that this war is not solely fought by dronesflesh-and-blood American special forces remain secretly involved, rarely coming into the media spotlight. These statistics from Pakistan do not even convey the full extent of the expansion of undeclared warfare that this paradigm change catalyzed. During this same period, the undeclared drone strikes against al-Qaeda in Yemen, now known as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP (Shachtman and Ackerman), continued and reached a peak of 54 (Kaplan) in the year

Saroka 6 2012 before declining in the first months of 2013 (Crowley). This same effort also involved the less-quantifiable usage of commandos, [and] cruise missiles (Shachtman and Ackerman) to continue the assault on this regional branch of al-Qaeda. In neighboring Somalia, dozens (Crowley) of drone strikes have been carried out against the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab movement (Ackerman), in addition to at least one sea-to-land missile strike and a hostage rescue (Shachtman and Ackerman). The latest known attack against them came in the form of a raid on a coastal Somali town on [October 5] in which American Special Forces were forced to retreat due to intelligence failures (Kulish and Schmitt). Beyond these countries, the pattern of expansion continues with the news that the U.S. has recently opened or enlarged drone bases in Saudi Arabia, Djibouti and Niger (Crowley), expanding the fight against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Crowley) even further into Africa. As evidence of this, U.S. special forces recently conducted a successful abduction raid in Libya, capturing one al-Qaeda-linked terrorist for trial in the United States (Libya Terror Suspect). However, this paradigm shift to deniable global warfare and the resulting silent expansion of the War on Terror has not come without costs, primarily in the strategic, legal, and transparency realms. While a cursory examination of these statistics may yield the conclusion that the war against al-Qaeda is proceeding well, the true results are not nearly so positive, for a very simple reason: not every drone strike kills a terrorist. One collateral damage estimate for Pakistan posits that from 2004 to mid-May of 2013, drone strikes killed between 258 and 307 civilians in Pakistan (Kaplan). Another puts the minimum civilian body count at 447 (Shachtman). The issue is muddied by the inherent nature of drone warfare: the long-range and impersonal methods of elimination that drones enable necessarily mean that assessing the effectiveness of any

Saroka 7 particular strike, or even if a legitimate target was killed, is difficult at best. The fact that these wars are waged covertly, in areas are that not legally declared war zones, only further decreases the amount of attention and thus the accuracy of these reports. While the civilian body count may not be very high, at least on an absolute scale, the true damage comes from the psychological effects on the people who live with drone strikes as a daily reality. Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan and the former leader of Joint Special Operations Command (Stanley McChrystal), stated that 'The resentment caused by American use of unmanned strikes is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who've never seen one or seen the effects of one' (Kaplan). Media interviews of Pakistani civilians in drone-targeted areas show that drones create extended terror and strain (Walsh and Mehsud) amongst civilian residents. Evidence that, Since the US ramped up its operations in Yemen in 2009, the ranks of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, have swelled from 300 fighters to more than 1,000 (Shachtman and Ackerman) shows that the resentment of drone strikes can undermine the effects of the strikes themselves, leading angry people to join al-Qaeda out of sheer resentment at the automated and seemingly indiscriminate death falling out of their sky from America. The resentment from these civilian death tolls is further exacerbated by the indiscriminate targeting protocols used for drone warfareprotocols developed a world away from any public supervision or oversight. The primary objectionable feature of these targeting protocols is the inclusion of so-called signature strikes, in which a potential target's observed behavior . . .strongly suggests that they're active members of some organization whose leaders would be the

Saroka 8 natural targets of a drone strike (Kaplan). In effect, this means that people whose actions merely look similar to those observed by al-Qaeda members can be condemned to death by observers on a different continent. This definition, in practice, is incredibly loose and made even more so by President Obama's definition of all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants (Becker and Shane)a presumption that is so logically flimsy (Becker and Shane) as to be a wholly inadequate reason for killing anyone. While legal under current U.S. law, the toll that this is taking on the populations targeted cannot be underestimated, as the civilian death toll is most likely serving to strengthen the very organization these drone strikes are intended to eliminate, by driving recruits to al-Qaeda out of resentment for America. The fact that all of these targeting protocols were developed and implemented secretly, with no real chance for serious Congressional or public examination of target criteria, is one of the most troubling elements of this new deniable paradigm of war. Nor is this the only legally disturbing element of this drone campaign. The death of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical al-Qaeda preacher eliminated in Yemen by a drone strike on September 30, 2011 (Scahill) stands out from the overall toll due to one fact: he was, at the time of his death, a citizen of the United States of America (Scahill). This attack itself, which also killed another American citizen and terrorist named Samir Khan (Scahill), marked a smaller shift within the larger paradigm shift to deniability: the application of this deniable mindset of warfare to American citizens. Granted, both were terrorists and clear members of al-Qaedathey were not innocents. Despite this, the fact that American citizens, regardless of their illegal terrorist activities, were killed in a manner identical to that other foreign terrorists is disturbing because it meant that the drones had, under orders from the Obama administration, [killed] American

Saroka 9 citizens without trial (Scahill). The mindset of deniability, which had enabled these drone strikes to begin, was now being applied to America citizens by deliberately depriving them of their Constitutional rights to trial by jury. These were replaced with right to execution by drone, which is a poor substitute and a troubling legal precedent: if this occurred once, it could occur again. While the Obama administration asserted that the killing was legal, it refused to make its evidence public (Scahill) and efforts by legislators to extract the legal rationale for the alAwlaki killing were thus stymied (Scahill). The mindset of deniability, once confined to farflung parts of the Middle East and Africa, had come home in the form of bland denials and secrecy in the White House itself. It is worth noting that drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen appear to have decreased in the past year. If the downward trend of strikes in Pakistan continues to hold, as each year after 2010 has seen decreases in the number of strikes (Kaplan), then Pakistan may see lessened drone activitybut a cessation still seems out of the question. Yemen appears to have seen a decline in the first few months of 2013, but whether this decline is permananent or temporary remains to be seen (Crowley). However, these numbers are by nature approximate, and say nothing about American activities in Somalia or Africa as a whole. It is possible that this seeming decrease has been a response to building public scrutiny of the drone warfare program. In October 2013, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued reports stating that drone strikes had unlawfully killed civilians, while a new U.N. report found that US drone strikes had killed at least 400 civilians in Pakistan (US Defends Drone Strikes). These civilian deaths were undoubtedly consequences of the extremely loose targeting protocols used by the Obama administration, as detailed above. This mounting

Saroka 10 scrutiny, and these strong independent affirmations of the civilian death toll of drone strikes, might prove enough to force the Obama administration to release a coherent account of its drone targeting protocols, including those that led to the al-Awlaki killing. Mounting public scrutiny might even force the Obama administration to revise its targeting protocols to produce a more balanced use of forceat least, it would in a perfect world. However, any such optimism is stymied by the nature of the deniability paradigm that led to the global drone campaign: the impersonal, long-range, classified nature of these strikes mean that any changes would be extremely hard to independently verify and practically impossible to enforce. The drones and target lists are considered government secrets, and to date the Obama administration has only strengthened its deniability mindset by guarding them jealously while employing drone strikes on a near-continuous basis. In the post-9/11 era, the widespread use of drone warfare and special operations forces to prosecute the War on Terror were both symptoms, not causes, of a paradigm shift within the American government to a mindset of deniability to enable operations against al-Qaeda on a global scale. This paradigm shift was due to the failure of conventional tactics, such as the invasion of Afghanistan, to eliminate al-Qaeda combined with al-Qaeda's subsequent dispersal across the Middle East and even into Africa, spreading outside of declared war zones. In order to pursue al-Qaeda outside of official war zones, the American government underwent a paradigm shift to a mindset of deniable and undeclared warfare, using drones and special operations troops to attack al-Qaeda in countries like Pakistan and Somalia without officially acknowledging these actions, as such acknowledgments would have led to thorny legal questions about the use of military force outside of war zones. This paradigm shift was legally buttressed by an

Saroka 11 interpretation of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force which functionally defined anywhere in world that al-Qaeda hid as a war zonean interpretation other countries were unlikely to share, hence the mindset of deniability. However, the secretive mindset this paradigm shift produced led by its very nature to a number of abuses as classified targets, operations, and selection criteria led through a lack of public oversight to hundreds of civilian deaths, widespread native resentment, and even the denial of Constitutional rights to American citizens. While recent public scrutiny may possibly serve to force the Obama administration to relax its drone stance, the effects of this post-9/11 change to a paradigm of secrecy and deniability are so widespread and so covert that one question remains: even if American drone policy was altered to be more ethically and legally transparent and sound, how would the public be certain that those alterations had been implemented? In a paradigm of deniability, after all, nothing can be trusted at face value.

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