In a series of recent posts, Baker Institute fellows have considered the effectiveness of “kingpin strategies” that target and kill top drug cartel leaders in Mexico. Today, in the final post of this installment of Baker Institute Viewpoints, Andrew Bowen, the institute’s visiting scholar for the Middle East, examines how President Barack Obama has adapted the approach to the war on terror.
President Obama has employed predator drones to target individuals associated with militant groups in the Middle East and South Asia, and has done so more often than his predecessor at any time. Looking at this strategy four years on, has it produced the results the administration was expecting?
Since taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama has shifted U.S. foreign policy away from his predecessor’s expansionist approach, which left the United States in a fiscally unsustainable position as a result of its commitments abroad and in a weakened position globally as a consequence of America’s unilateral actions. Shunning the rhetorical style of his predecessor, Obama refused to label his foreign policy a doctrine. This produced angst among many political scientists, policy wonks and journalists hoping to capture the president’s vision with the rhetorical flourishes they had grown accustomed to during George W. Bush’s eight years in office.
In practice, though, Obama’s foreign policy has become one that puts pragmatism and realism over the grand, arching ideological narrative of his predecessor. The United States acts to pursue, preserve and protect its interests but in a more judicious way — acting unilaterally when necessary but placing greater emphasis on multilateral action. The United States no longer goes ahead of the international community and expends the accompanying resources unless the issue is of central national security importance to America. The president has repeatedly made clear as well that any involvement in another ground war in the Middle East or South Asia is not in the cards, nor directly in America’s interests. Additionally, U.S. public opinion no longer supports nation-building when pressing challenges face the United States at home.
One of the central planks of Obama’s foreign policy has been the reframing of the “war on terror” away from the broader vision of the Bush administration to a more focused targeting of individuals affiliated with Al Qaeda and like-minded organizations. The hallmarks of the Bush administration’s war on terror that tied nation-building and regime change to the pursuit of militant organizations proved too costly and ineffective to continue and directly damaged the perception of American values — turning them from tools of America’s soft power into values associated with Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition and Abu Ghraib.
Predator drones, which had become a method increasingly employed by the CIA under its former director Michael Hayden to target Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan and Afghanistan, caught the particular attention of Obama when he entered office and they became the president’s method of choice in eradicating Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Afghanistan and Pakistan without the price tag and human costs of his predecessor’s policy.
Less than a year into his term, Obama had increased the number of drone strikes by 400 percent from the days of his predecessor, and in line with his campaign promises, he began to aggressively target individuals in Pakistan. In 2010, for example, twice as many drone strikes occurred in Pakistan as in Afghanistan. In Obama’s estimation, the new war on terror no longer required the ground troops of “the 9/11 wars” or as many of the technologies of the Cold War, but instead utilized predator drones and special operations teams. Obama’s use of special forces to successfully target Osama bin Laden underscored the potency of his tactical shift.
With instability in Yemen — marked saliently by the attempted underwear bombing of an American airline carrier by a young Nigerian who received training in Yemen, and the strengthening of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) — Obama, instead of committing ground troops to nation-build in Yemen, has employed drones to target both the leadership and the “foot soldiers” of AQAP. Since the start of this campaign by the CIA and the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, more than 40 attacks have been carried out and over 250 individuals have been killed.
This tactical shift, accompanying the withdrawal of ground forces from Iraq in 2010 and Obama’s commitment to end America’s ground operations in Afghanistan by 2014, has become central to the president’s refocus of U.S. commitments away from the wars of the first decade in the greater Middle East to the challenges posed by rising powers in East Asia. The shift was evident in the first American response to the assassination of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Libya: Instead of using traditional ground forces, the U.S. deployed intelligence-collecting drones to track individuals associated with the attack.
On many levels, Obama’s embrace of drones and special forces to fight the war on terror makes sense for accomplishing his larger strategy. It is cost effective, weakens the leadership of Al Qaeda and its affiliates through targeted strikes, and avoids many of the human costs of war for the United States. Through the targeting of leaders and individuals associated with the group, the U.S. has succeeded in decimating the core of Al Qaeda central in Pakistan and Afghanistan, weakening the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban and its affiliates, and severely weakening the leadership in AQAP. The attacks, even on mid-level individuals, have weakened the planning and execution capabilities of these organizations. A strong argument can be made that drone strikes have left these groups with weaker leadership and less talent, making them vulnerable to eradication at a fraction of the cost of Bush’s deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
But a larger question must be considered: Has this tactical shift made the United States safer at home and abroad? Fawaz Gerges, a noted analyst on militant Islamist movements, concludes, “Drone attacks have become a rallying cry and feed the flow of volunteers into a small, loose network that is hard to trace, even harder than the shadowy Al Qaeda.” For example, there is a growing trend of volunteers joining AQAP in Yemen. Drone attacks, while more precise than traditional aerial bombings, have invariably led to civilian casualties, making them unpopular with Yemeni public opinion and alienating the key tribal figures that the Yemeni government needs to work with to isolate and eradicate Al Qaeda.
Christopher Swift, a fellow at the University of Virginia Law School’s Center for National Security Law, concluded after a visit to Yemen in May 2012, “There is a psychological acceptance of Al Qaeda because of the U.S. strikes.” Such a message is not one that in the long-term will secure America’s interests, and will only lead to more individuals joining AQAP. This trend has also been mirrored in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where deep public disapproval of these tactics has weakened America’s counterinsurgency operation against the Taliban and become a central recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and its affiliates in South Asia. The use of drones has also led to an increasingly acrimonious relationship with the Pakistani military, whose cooperation is central to America’s efforts to secure and stabilize Afghanistan.
However, the most serious consequence the new tactic has been the growing link between homegrown radicalization and the use of predator drones abroad. For example, in his federal court testimony, would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad argued his acts were the result of U.S. drone strikes in the Greater Middle East. In “Obama’s Wars,” author Bob Woodward recounts a tense exchange between White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and then-director of national intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair over the risk of homegrown terrorism as a result of the U.S. drone program. “I’m trying to tell you,” said Blair. “I’m the president’s intelligence officer and I’m worried about this, and I think I owe it to him — and you — to tell him.”
While Obama’s tactical shift in the war on terror has produced results and is more cost-effective than his predecessor’s approach, this policy has undermined U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and Yemen, weakened stability in Pakistan, and contributed to homegrown radicalization. At the dusk of Obama’s first term, the United States needs to find a better balance in its approach to counterterrorism in order to strengthen local support for its policies and avoid the risk of alienating public opinion in these states. Drone attacks have weakened the organizations but are not a long-term solution to the challenges facing America in the region, and have the growing risk of domestic blowback.
Andrew Bowen is the institute’s visiting scholar for the Middle East. He is completing his Ph.D. in international relations at the London School of Economics.