New Drone Strike Undercuts Obama's Promises on Robot War

Obama seemed to say last week that U.S. drones are out of the business of killing militants who aren't senior al-Qaida leaders. Then he killed a Pakistani Taliban leader this morning.
Image may contain Human Person Transportation Vehicle Aircraft Airplane Helicopter Building and Hangar
Airmen assigned to the 432nd Aircraft Maintenance Squadron assemble an MQ-1 Predator after returning from Afghanistan May 19, 2008, at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada.Photo: U.S. Air Force

It took all of six days for President Obama to undermine his own new rules about restricting drone strikes.

On Wednesday morning, Pakistani security sources reported that a U.S. drone strike killed four people near the North Waziristani city of Mirim Shah. One of them, apparently, is Wali ur-Rehman, the second in command of the Pakistani Taliban, although the group for now denies Rehman is dead. Still, if you listened to Obama's big speech on counterterrorism Thursday, you could be forgiven for thinking that the drones weren't going to target the Rehmans of the world anymore.

"Beyond the Afghan theater, we only target al-Qaida and its associated forces," Obama said at the National Defense University, "and even then, the use of drones is heavily constrained." Among those constraints: preferring to "detain" terrorists instead of killing them; "respect for state sovereignty"; and the inability of other governments to handle the terrorists. Perhaps most importantly, Obama underscored, the drones will for now on only target "terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people."

In case the point was lost on anyone, the White House released a "fact sheet" clarifying whom it will and will not kill in the future. "[T]he United States will use lethal force only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons," it stated. "It is simply not the case that all terrorists pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons; if a terrorist does not pose such a threat, the United States will not use lethal force."

Did Wali ur-Rehman pose a "continuing, imminent threat" to U.S. persons?

Hard to say. Rehman was not a member of al-Qaida. He was said to be poised to inherit the leadership of the Pakistani Taliban, which is an ally of al-Qaida's residual core leadership in Pakistan. In 2010, the Pakistani Taliban boasted of training the naturalized U.S. citizen Faisal Shahzad for his ultimately unsuccessful bombing attempt in Times Square. The State Department put a $5 million bounty on ur-Rehman that year, but stopped short blaming him for Shahzad, although it did blame him for the deadly 2009 attack on a secret CIA base in Afghanistan. The group's involvement in ongoing plots against the U.S. is less evident, however, and Obama explicitly said "America does not take strikes to punish individuals."

The primary threat the Pakistani Taliban pose is to Pakistan. And the CIA got into the drone game in Pakistan in 2004 by agreeing to kill Pakistan's enemies for it, as the New York Times' Mark Mazzetti reported in his new book. Rehman, it's worth noting, has threatened Britain personally, though his involvement in any actual attack on the U.K. is unclear. Obama's speech seemed to signal that the U.S. was done with sending drones after the enemies of its friends -- but in any event, Pakistani military sources told Reuters in December that Rehman was "a more pragmatic" leader than incumbent Hakimullah Mehsud, with whom Rehman was said to be feuding. While Rehman was said to pursue reconciliation with the Pakistani government, the Pakistani military officers speculated that his rise "might lead to more attacks across the border in Afghanistan" on U.S.-led forces.

The Obama administration has yet to officially acknowledge the strike, let alone detail what if any "continuing, imminent threat" Rehman posed. (If it does, that really will be a departure from past practice.) However, Obama's team defines those terms so broadly that a whole lot fits under their banner.

Administration officials have previously defined "imminence" in such a way as to simply mean membership in an al-Qaida or an "associated force," not involvement in a forthcoming attack. They've also defined "associated force" to mean a group that's "co-belligerent" with al-Qaida. While both those terms are murky, a group of senior Pentagon officials testified to Congress recently that the administration understood "co-belligerence" to mean "in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners." Those hostilities are not limited by time or specific action.

You can debate whether the 2009 attack on the CIA's Forward Operating Base Chapman qualifies Rehman as an al-Qaida co-belligerent. But at the very least, Obama has chalk on his cleats for edging up to the lines of his ostensible restrictions on drone strikes. The more that happens, the more it calls into question whether Obama has actually imposed any restrictions on his deadly flying robots at all. Already, anonymous administration officials have told the New York Times that Obama's restrictions don't rule out the most controversial strikes of all: the "signature strikes" in which the CIA and the military don't need to know someone's identity before killing him.

"We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us," Obama said at National Defense University. That's shaping up to be the truest line in the president's speech.