The Three Battles of Wanat Read online

  “There is a very visceral connection to operations on the ground,” Dan says, “when you see combat, when you hear the guy you are supporting who is under fire. You hear the stress in his voice, you hear the emotions being passed over the radio, you see the tracers and the rounds being fired, and when you are called on to either fire a missile or drop a bomb, you witness the effects of that firepower.” He witnesses it in a far more immediate way than in the past, and he disdains the notion that he and his fellow drone pilots are like video gamers, detached from the reality of their actions. If anything, they are far more attached. At the same time, he dismisses the idea that the carnage he now sees close-up is emotionally crippling.

  “In my mind, as far as understanding what I did, I wouldn’t say that one was significantly different from the other,” he says.

  Drones collect three primary packages of data: straight visual; infrared (via a heat-sensing camera that can see through darkness and clouds); and what is called SIGINT (Signals Intelligence), gathered via electronic eavesdropping devices and other sensors. One such device, known as LDAR (a combination of the words light and radar), can map large areas in 3-D. The optical sensors are so good, and the pixel array is so dense, that the device can zoom in clearly on objects only inches wide from well over fifteen thousand feet above. With computer enhancement to eliminate distortion and to calm motion, facial recognition software is very close to being able to pick individuals out of crowds. Operators do not even have to know exactly where to look.

  “We put in the theatre [in 2011] a system called ‘Gorgon Stare,’” Lieutenant General Larry James, the air force’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, told me. “Instead of one soda-sized-straw view of the world with the camera, we put essentially ten cameras ganged together, and it gives you a very wide area of view of about four kilometers by four kilometers—about the size of the city of Fairfax [Virginia]—that you can watch continuously. Not as much fidelity in terms of what the camera can see, but I can see movement of cars and people—those sorts of things. Now, instead of staring at a small space, which may be like a villa or compound, I can look at a whole city continuously for as long as I am flying that particular system.”

  Surveillance technology allows more than just looking: computers store these moving images so that analysts can dial back to a particular time and place and zero in, or they can mark certain individuals and vehicles and instruct the machine to track these over time. A suspected terror cell leader or bomb maker, say, can be watched for months. The computer can then instantly draw maps showing patterns of movement, where the target went, when there were visitors or deliveries to his home. If you were watched in this way over a period of time, the data could not only draw a portrait of your daily routine but identify everyone with whom you associate. Add to this cell phone, text, and e-mail intercepts, and you begin to see how special-ops units in Iraq and Afghanistan can, after a single nighttime arrest, round up entire networks before dawn.

  All of this requires what James says is the most difficult technical challenge involved: the collection and manipulation of huge amounts of data.

  “Getting our arms around what we call the big data problem is something we’re absolutely invested in,” he says. “We are part of a big data IPT [Internet Processing Technology], if you will…. And so we are marching down that path pretty hard and in fact the secretary [of defense] has given us a task to really develop a road map for those tools. Take video, for example: ESPN has all kinds of tools where it can go back and find Eli Manning in every video that was shot over the last year and can probably do so in twenty minutes. So how do we bring those types of tools [to intelligence work]? OK, I want to find this red 1976 Chevy pickup truck in every piece of video that I have shot in this area for the last three months. We have a pretty hard push to really work with the air force research lab, and the commercial community, to understand what tools can I bring in to help make sense of all the data.”

  To be used effectively, a drone must be able to stay over a potential target for long periods. A typical Predator can stay aloft for about twenty hours; flown in relays, Predators can maintain a continuous CAP. Surveillance satellites pass over only once each Earth orbit. The longest the U2, the most successful spy plane in history, can stay over a target is about ten hours, because of the need to spell its pilot and refuel. The Predator gives military and intelligence agencies a surveillance option that is both significantly less expensive and more useful, because it flies unmanned, low, and slow.

  Precisely because drones fly so low and slow, and have such a “noisy” electronic signature, operating them anywhere but in controlled airspace is impractical. The U.S. Air Force completely controls the sky over active war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq—and has little to fear over countries like Yemen, Somalia, and Mali. Over the rugged regions of northwestern Pakistan, where most drone strikes have taken place, the United States operates with the tacit approval of the Pakistan government. Without such permission, or without a robust protection capability, the drone presents an easy target. Its data link can be disrupted, jammed, or hijacked. It’s only slightly harder to shoot down than a hot air balloon.

  So there’s little danger of enemy drone attacks in America anytime soon. As a weapons-delivery platform, drones are vastly inferior to manned aircraft. A fighter or bomber with a pilot or crew is, in essence, a self-contained system. It is able to carry more and different kinds of weapons; in addition, its brains are on board. A manned bomber is fully functional even when its communications links are shut down, which enables stealth. Any foreign power contemplating an air attack on the U.S. home land or military bases overseas would be better off launching a missile or attacking with a squadron of jet fighters than launching a drone. And anyone interested in detonating a bomb in an American city, as the Boston Marathon bombers demonstrated, can more easily deliver it by backpack than by drone.

  Drone technology has applications that go way beyond military uses, of course—to everything from domestic law enforcement to archeological surveys to environmental studies. As they become smaller and cheaper, drones will become commonplace. Does this mean the government might someday begin hurling thunderbolts at undesirables on city sidewalks? Unlikely. Our entire legal system would have to collapse first. If the police wanted to just shoot people on the street from a distance, they already can—they’ve had that capability going back to the invention of the Kentucky long rifle and, before that, the crossbow. I helped cover the one known instance of a local government dropping a bomb on its own city, in 1985, when a stubborn back-to-nature cult called MOVE was in an armed standoff with the Philadelphia police. Wilson Goode, who was then the mayor, authorized dropping a satchel packed with explosives from a hovering helicopter on a West Philadelphia row house in order to set fire to a rooftop bunker. The bomb ignited a conflagration that consumed an entire city block. The incident will live long in the annals of municipal stupidity. The capability to do the same from a drone will not make choosing to do so any smarter, or any more likely. And as for Big Brother’s eye in the sky, authorities have been monitoring public spaces from overhead cameras, helicopters, and planes for decades. Many people think it’s a good idea.

  The drone is new only in the sense that it combines known technology in an original way—aircraft, global telecommunications links, optics, digital sensors, supercomputers, etc. It greatly lowers the cost of persistent surveillance. When armed, it becomes a remarkable but highly specialized tool: a weapon that employs simple physics to launch a missile with lethal force from a distance, a first step into a world where going to war does not necessarily mean fielding an army, or putting any of your own soldiers, sailors, or pilots at risk.

  3. The Kill List

  It is the most exclusive list in the world, and you would not want to be on it.

  The procedure may have changed, but several years back, at the height of the drone war, President Obama held weekly counterterrori
sm meetings at which he was presented with a list of potential targets—mostly Al Qaeda or Taliban figures—complete with photos and brief bios laid out like “a high school yearbook,” according to a report in the New York Times.

  The list is the product of a rigorous vetting process that the administration has kept secret. Campaigning for the presidency in 2008, Obama made it clear (although few of his supporters were listening closely) that he would embrace drones to go after what he considered the appropriate post-9/11 American military target—“core Al Qaeda.” When he took office, he inherited a drone war that was already expanding. There were fifty-three known strikes inside Pakistan in 2009 (according to numbers assembled from press reports by the Long War Journal), up from thirty-five in 2008, and just five the year before that. In 2010, the annual total more than doubled, to 117. The onslaught was effective, at least by some measures. Letters seized in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 showed his consternation over the rain of death by drone.

  As U.S. intelligence analysis improved, the number of targets proliferated. The definition of a legitimate target and the methods employed to track such a target were increasingly suspect. Relying on other countries’ intelligence agencies for help, the United States was sometimes manipulated into striking people who it believed were terrorist leaders, but who may not have been; or it was implicated in practices that violate American values.

  Reporters and academics at work in zones where Predator strikes had become common warned of a large backlash. Gregory Johnsen, a scholar of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, documented the phenomenon in a 2012 book about Yemen, The Last Refuge. He showed that drone attacks there appeared to have the opposite of their intended effect, particularly when people other than extremists were killed or hurt. Drones hadn’t whittled Al Qaeda down, Johnsen argued; the organization had grown threefold there. “U.S. strikes and particularly those that kill civilians—be they men or women—are sowing the seeds of future generations of terrorists,” he wrote on his blog in 2012.

  Michael Morrell, who was deputy director of the CIA until June, was among those in the U.S. government who argued for more restraint. During meetings with John Brennan, who was Obama’s counterterrorism adviser until taking over as CIA director last spring, Morrell said he worried that the prevailing goal seemed to be using the drone as artillery, striking anyone who could be squeezed into the definition of terrorist—an approach derisively called “Whack-a-Mole.” Morrell insisted that if the purpose of the drone program was to diminish Al Qaeda and to protect the United States from terror attacks, then indiscriminate strikes were counterproductive. Drones might be helping us to win the battle, Morrell argued, at the cost of losing the war.

  Brennan launched an effort to select targets more carefully. Formalizing a series of ad hoc meetings that had begun in the fall of 2009, Brennan in 2010 instituted weekly conclaves—in effect, death penalty deliberations—where the fate of would-be successors to Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was selected for execution, for the “kill list” presented to Obama. Brennan demanded clear definitions. There were “High-Value Targets,” which consisted of important Al Qaeda and Taliban figures; “Imminent Threats,” such as a load of roadside bombs bound for the Afghan border; and, most controversial, “Signature Strikes,” which were aimed at characters engaged in suspicious activity in known enemy zones. In these principals’ meetings, which Brennan chaired from the Situation Room in the basement of the White House, deliberations were divided into two parts—law and policy. The usual participants included representatives from the Pentagon, CIA, Department of State, National Counterterrorism Center, and, initially, the Department of Justice—although after a while the lawyers stopped coming. In the first part of the meetings, questions of legality were considered: Was the prospect a lawful target? Was he a high-level target? Could he rightly be considered to pose an “imminent” threat? Was arrest a feasible alternative? Only when these criteria were met did the discussion shift toward policy. Was it smart to kill this person? What sort of impact might the killing have on local authorities, or on relations with the governments of Pakistan or Yemen? What effect would killing him have on his own organization? Would it make things better or worse?

  Brennan himself was often the toughest questioner. Two regular participants in these meetings described him to me as thoughtful and concerned, with a demeanor one described as “almost priestly.” Another routinely skeptical and cautious participant was James Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state for the first two and a half years of Obama’s first term, who adhered to a strict list of acceptable legal criteria drawn up by the State Department’s counsel, Harold Koh. These criteria stipulated that any drone target would have to be a “senior member” of Al Qaeda who was “externally focused”—that is, actively plotting imminent attacks on the United States or on its citizens or armed forces. Koh was confident that even if his criteria did not meet all of the broader concerns of human rights activists, they would, under international law, support a claim of self-defense—and for that reason he thought the administration ought to make the criteria public. Throughout Obama’s first term, members of the administration argued about how much of the deliberations process to reveal. During these debates Koh’s position on complete disclosure was dismissively termed “the full Harold.” He was its only advocate.

  Many of the sessions gave rise to contention. The military and the CIA pushed back hard against Koh’s strict criteria. Special Forces commanders, in particular, abhorred what they saw as excessive efforts to “litigate” their war. The price of every target the White House rejected, military commanders said, was paid in American lives. Their arguments, coming from the war’s front line, carried significant weight.

  Cameron Munter, a veteran diplomat who was U.S. ambassador in Pakistan from 2010 to 2012, felt that weight firsthand when he tried to push back. Munter saw American influence declining with nearly every strike. While there were factions in the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) who believed in the value of strikes, the Pakistani public was increasingly outraged, and elected officials were increasingly hostile. Munter’s job was to contain the crisis, a task complicated by the secrecy of the drone program. It prevented him from explaining and defending America’s actions.

  Matters came to a head in the summer of 2011 during a meeting to which Munter was linked digitally. The dynamics of such meetings—where officials turned to policy discussions after legal determination had been made—placed a premium on unified support of policy goals. Most participants wanted to focus on the success of the drone program in the battle against America’s enemies, not on its corrosive side effects in foreign policy.

  At the decision meetings, it was hard for someone like Munter to say no. He would appear digitally on the screen in the Situation Room, gazing out at the vice president, the secretary of defense, and other principals, and they would present him with the targeting decision they were prepared to make. It was hard to object when so many people who titularly outranked him already seemed set.

  By June 2011, however, two events in Pakistan—first the arrest and subsequent release of the CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who had been charged with murdering two Pakistanis who accosted him on the street in Lahore; and then the raid at Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden—had brought the U.S.-Pakistani partnership to a new low. Concerned about balancing the short-term benefits of strikes (removing potential enemies from the battlefield) and their long-term costs (creating lasting mistrust and resentment that undercut the policy goal of stability and peace in the region), Munter decided to test what he believed was his authority to halt a strike. As he recalled it later, the move played out as follows.

  Asked whether he was on board with a particular strike, he said no.

  Leon Panetta, the CIA director, said the ambassador had no veto power; these were intelligence decisions.

  Munter proceeded to explain that under Title 22 of the U.S. Code of Fed
eral Regulations, the president gives the authority to carry out U.S. policy in a foreign country to his ambassador, delegated through the secretary of state. That means no American policy should be carried out in any country without the ambassador’s approval.

  Taken aback, Panetta replied, “Well, I do not work for you, buddy.”

  “I don’t work for you,” Munter told him.

  Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stepped in: “Leon, you are wrong.”

  Panetta said, flatly, “Hillary, you’re wrong.”

  At that point, the discussion moved on. When the secretary of state and the CIA director clash, the decision gets made upstairs.

  Panetta won. A week later, James Steinberg called Munter to inform him that he did not have the authority to veto a drone strike. Steinberg explained that the ambassador would be allowed to express an objection to a strike, and that a mechanism would be put in place to make sure his objection was registered—but the decision to approve or reject a strike would be made higher up the chain. It was a clear victory for the CIA.

  Later that summer, General David Petraeus was named to take over the intelligence agency from Panetta. Before assuming the job, Petraeus flew from Kabul, where he was still the military commander, to Islamabad, to meet with the ambassador. At dinner that night, Petraeus poked his finger into Munter’s chest.

  “You know what happened in that meeting?” the general asked. (Petraeus had observed the clash via a secure link from his command post in Afghanistan.) “That’s never going to happen again.”

  Munter’s heart sank. He thought the new CIA director, whom he liked and admired, was about to threaten him. Instead, Petraeus said: “I’m never going to put you in the position where you feel compelled to veto a strike. If you have a long-term concern, if you have a contextual problem, a timing problem, an ethical problem, I want to know about it earlier. We can work together to avoid these kinds of conflicts far in advance.”