CIA to go ahead with drone strikes in Pakistan
WASHINGTON: The administration of
President Barack Obama is completing a counterterrorism manual that will
establish clear rules for targeted-killing operations, but it contains a major
exemption for the CIA’s campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan.
The Washington Post reported on Saturday this exemption will
allow the CIA to continue striking Al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistan for
a year or more before the agency is forced to comply with more stringent rules
spelled out in the document.
According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative
Journalism, between 2,627 and 3,457 people have been reportedly killed in US
drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, between 475 and nearly 900 being
civilians.
The covert strikes are publicly criticised by the Pakistani
government as a violation of sovereignty but American officials believe they
are a vital weapon in the war against terrorists.Few of the victims are
publicly identified. The manual is expected to be submitted to Obama for final
approval within weeks, the paper said.
The Post said the adoption of a formal guide to targeted
killing marks a significant milestone: the institutionalisation of a practice
that would have seemed anathema to many before the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The subjects covered in the playbook include the process for
adding names to kill lists, the legal principles that govern when US citizens
can be targeted overseas and the sequence of approvals required when the CIA or
US military conduct drone strikes outside war zones, the paper said.
According to The Post, the effort to draft the playbook was
nearly derailed late last year by disagreements among the State Department, the
CIA and the Pentagon on the criteria for lethal strikes.
They led to granting the CIA a temporary exemption for its
Pakistan operations as a compromise that allowed officials to move forward with
other parts of the playbook. –The decision to allow the CIA strikes to continue
was driven in part by concern that the window for weakening al-Qaeda and the
Taliban in Pakistan is beginning to close, with plans to pull most U.S. troops
out of neighboring Afghanistan over the next two years. CIA drones are flown
out of bases in Afghanistan.
The CIA exception is expected to be in effect for ‘less than
two years but more than one’, a former official said, although he noted that
any decision to close the carve-out ‘will undoubtedly be predicated on facts on
the ground.’
Obama’s national security team agreed to the CIA compromise
late last month during a meeting of the ‘principals committee’, comprising top
national security officials, that was led by White House counterterrorism
adviser John O Brennan, who has since been nominated to serve as CIA director.
Senior administration officials have expressed unease with
the scale and autonomy of the CIA’s lethal mission in Pakistan. But they have
been reluctant to alter the rules because of the drone campaign’s results.
The playbook is ‘a step in exactly the wrong direction, a
further bureaucratization of the CIA’s paramilitary killing programme’ over the
legal and moral objections of civil liberties groups, said Hina Shamsi, director
of the American Civil Liberty Union’s National Security Project.
Signature strikes contributed to a surge in the drone
campaign in 2010, when the agency carried out a record 117 strikes in Pakistan.
The pace tapered off over the past two years before quickening again in recent
weeks.
None of the rules applies to the CIA drone campaign in
Pakistan, which began under President George W. Bush. The agency is expected to
give the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan advance notice on strikes. But in practice,
officials said, the agency exercises near complete control over the names on
its target list and decisions on strikes.
Imposing the playbook standards on the CIA campaign in
Pakistan would probably lead to a sharp reduction in the number of strikes at a
time when Obama is preparing to announce a drawdown of US forces from
Afghanistan that could leave as few as 2,500 troops in place after 2014.
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Business News:
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