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al-Qaeda’s Mohamed Ilyas Kashmiri was believed to be involved in one of the 2003 assassination attempts on Pervez Musharraf ordered by Ayman Zawahiri. Last month, we were told, the Predator predatored him. Until he turned up to give an interview to the Asia Times. Butterfingers! Eli Lake gets the laugh-to-keep-from-crying quote:
“While there were preliminary indications that Kashmiri may have been dead, there is now reason to believe that he could be alive,” a senior U.S. official told The Washington Times on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing intelligence matters. “It’s not always an open-and-shut case.”
Believeth not everything they tell you about the efficacy of drones. One missed target does not invalidate the entire enterprise. But it does provide additional reason for skepticism about the claims made by CIA about these things as magical mystery weapons.
(Also, read through in Eli’s piece for a wonderful Fran Townsend walk-you-thru of the varieties of intelligence that go into supporting a drone strike.)
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Don’t forget that every time one of these guys turns up alive, that means we probably killed an innocent civilian. Nobody seems to want to include the ‘false positives’ in their calculation of the efficacy of this political assassination program.
Re: Drone Strikes (AKA Targeted Extra-Judicial Killing)
I tend to be pretty skeptical of the “Slippery Slope” argument, as it is always intellectually lazy and often historically inaccurate, but this program really makes me squirm uncomfortably.
For a group of unaccountable government employees to be empowered to determine who should be summarily executed in the name of the American citizen seems wrong on it’s face, and leads to a variety of unpleasant outcomes.
Maybe it’s necessary. Maybe it IS war, and not murder. But it sure seems to me that if China or Sudan was doing it, we’d have something negative to say about it. I don’t believe that “9/11 changed everything”, but it certainly changed how we define “American Values”…
mikey
It’s striking how quickly hawks have turned on their once-beloved drones now that they might stand in the way of a troop escalation.
And while criticisms of unnecessary civilian deaths by any method are very much to the point, does anyone really believe that 100,000 US troops tramping about – and occassionally ordering in air or artillery strikes – will actually cause less civilian deaths than a handful of drones?
Regards, Steve