drones

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) asked Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal how he views the strategic importance of reducing civilian casualties and how he intends to reduce them in Afghanistan.
“I believe the perception caused by civilian casualties is one of the most dangerous enemies we face,” McChrystal said, as the loss of popular support “will be strategically [...]

Take a look at this Washington Post piece about a measure of optimism emerging from the Obama administration about Pakistan. Discount the happy talk — apparently al-Qaeda is taking some hits in Pakistan, and that would be nice to believe, but the claim is asserted and not demonstrated — and focus on the balance sheet [...]

Take a look at this New York Times op-ed call for a moratorium on the Pakistan drone strikes by counterinsurgency luminaries Andrew Exum and Dave Kilcullen. (This, if I’m not mistaken, is the furthest Kilcullen has gone: in a recent discussion of his book, “The Accidental Guerrilla” at a Center for a New American Security [...]

Whatever you do, don’t miss The New York Times’ epic interview with a Pakistani Taliban tactician about what has become “a seamless conflict” on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The tactician is based out of Wana, in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but spends much of his time focused on Afghanistan. His superiors, for [...]

Michael Shear of The Washington Post assesses that the rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips from the Somali pirates — a commenter points to this apt cartoon about the discrepancy between the pirates’ aims and the way they’ve been treated as a joke  — is an “early victory that could help build confidence in his ability [...]