If Americans were still under the impression that drone warfare doesn’t pose risks to our national security, new revelations about the accidental killing of U.S. citizen and aid worker Warren Weinstein in a January drone strike over Pakistan should quickly end those delusions.
President Obama properly has said that he accepts full responsibility for the death of Mr. Weinstein — a hostage of al-Qaeda — and that Americans deserve to know why he was mistakenly killed. But taking responsibility should mean more than apologizing for civilian deaths, American and foreign, after the fact.
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The President continues to offer vague, unsatisfying explanations of specific drone strikes, and insists that Americans take him at his word. Obama Administration officials must make clear how they intend to prevent future tragedies such as Mr. Weinstein’s death. Greater transparency around how and why the Central Intelligence Agency selects drone targets and a re-evaluation of the government’s drone program should be part of that process.
The White House has defended and expanded the CIA’s drone program because of its ability to kill specific targets and, ostensibly, to minimize civilian deaths. The administration has authorized drone strikes not just in nations in which the United States has been at war, such as Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also in other hotbeds of terrorism in the Islamic world, including Somalia and Yemen.
To the extent they have aided the U.S. government in targeting dangerous fundamentalist groups while reducing harm to American and foreign civilians, the benefits of drones are undeniable. Yet they also have made it easier for the United States to justify perpetual war.
Most troubling, they have blurred the lines between civilian territories and legitimate war zones. U.S. drone strikes have killed far more civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan than the administration would like to admit, in part because Mr. Obama three years ago changed the definition of “combatant” to mean any military-aged male in a strike zone.
Independent counts of civilian deaths in drone strikes vary widely, but most investigations estimate that hundreds of civilians are killed in drone strikes each year — more than the administration estimates. Eight U.S. citizens have been killed by drones since the program’s inception, only one of whom was targeted.
A report by the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank, estimates that 10 Pakistani civilians are killed by drones for every militant who is killed; the White House disputes that figure. Yet whatever the actual numbers, the administration’s claims to do everything in its power to minimize civilian deaths invite skepticism, because it intentionally has changed the way that deaths are classified to avoid counting civilian casualties.
Some analysts argue that drone strikes, more than radical Islam, damage America’s image abroad and provoke the ire of ordinary people in Pakistan and the Middle East. The Obama Administration must show, not merely assert, that the benefits of its ever-expanding drone wars outweigh these risks.
First Published April 29, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
