drone strikes

Marc Ambinder has a seriously detailed curtain-raiser on a turf war that’s roiled the intelligence community for months. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, and Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, have clashed over who controls the top U.S. intelligence officer in various foreign countries. But Ambinder goes way deeper to provide a [...]

In an interview with Pakistan’s Dawn-TV, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton laid out some goals for her trip this week to Pakistan. “I talk about people-to-people diplomacy,” she said, “because for me, being Secretary of State is not just going somewhere and sitting in a government office or a conference room talking across the [...]

Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security, a critic of the CIA’s Predator drone program in the Pakistani tribal areas, writes:
I worry that the CIA is carrying out their own campaign in part because a) it’s been getting kicked around so much since 9/11 that it is now overly focused on killing [...]

One more thing about the New America Foundation’s drone-strike report, which found that the drones have “only” killed Pakistani civilians one-third of the time. (We’re talking about “250 to 320″ civilians killed, according to the report.) One of the reasons the report exists is to push back against criticism of the program, such as the [...]

The New America Foundation’s Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann have a new report out tallying how many civilians have died in the Pakistani tribal areas thanks to the CIA’s drone strikes. Their conclusion: the strikes have killed, since 2006, between 750 and 1000 people; 20 of them have been “leaders of al Qaeda, the Taliban, [...]

The Wall Street Journal has a wonderful story on the role of the CIA’s drones in harassing al-Qaeda in Pakistan, and it includes, at the bottom, this paragraph that explains why the efficacy of the drone strikes has reportedly increased:
At the same time, U.S. intelligence collection in Pakistan has vastly improved, officials say. Western intelligence [...]

I truly hope that CIA drones actually did kill Beitullah Mehsud. As leader of the Pakistani Taliban, he has a massive amount of blood on his hands. But I think my friend Annie Lowery is wrong about this:
If Mehsud is dead (and keep in mind, it’s been falsely reported before), it counts most as a [...]

Here’s The New York Times’ contribution to the what-in-the-world-was-this-series-of-CIA-’significant-actions‘-disclosed-and-stopped-by Director-Leon-Panetta fracas. It backs up Wall Street Journal reporter Siobhan Gorman’s account of a nascent assassination program: like Gorman, The Times reports that the unfruitful effort was aimed to create teams to hunt and take out al-Qaeda leaders, and it adds that the idea of it [...]

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the National Press Club, is asked about drone strikes and civilian casualties in Afghanistan. “Don’t think in the history of counterinsurgency you can win by killing civilians who live there.” Specifically endorses Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s metric of “the number of Afghan citizens we protect … civilian [...]

First, look into a mirror and say three times, “I will not interpret events in Afghanistan and Pakistan through strained analogy to Iraq, because doing so is sure to misinterpret organic and specific developments and the circumstances that gave rise to them.” Then note that Pashtun tribesmen near the Swat Valley are organizing a tribal [...]