From Slate...http://www.slate.com/id/2203742/

Note: In-depth info in word/links in the article that will scare the soup out of thinking people...

Call Off Your Drones
Negotiating with Pakistan over remote-controlled killing.
By William Saletan
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, at 9:18 AM ET
By tonight—trust me—Barack Obama will be president-elect of the United States. One of the first messes he'll face is the insurgency in Afghanistan. Specifically, he'll have to decide what to do about the robot proxy war in Pakistan.

If you've been following Human Nature's coverage of this war, you know the players: On one side, anti-American insurgents from al-Qaida and the Taliban; on the other, unmanned aerial spying and killing machines operated from the United States. We're less than thrilled about putting American troops on the ground in the treacherous physical and political terrain of northwest Pakistan. We tried it once, and the Pakistani government basically threatened to fight us. So we're hunting our enemies there by remote control, with drones. The death tally from the drones since August is around 100.

The last two days bring increasing evidence that the insurgents are trying to punish drone strikes the same way they punish manned military action against them: by killing lots of people with suicide bombs. The principal display was a Sept. 20 hotel bombing in Islamabad. Two days ago, the militants struck again. A truck bomb killed eight Pakistani soldiers, "apparently retaliation for deadly missile strikes," according to the New York Times. Our drone operators had just tried to take out a senior Taliban commander, and Pakistani analysts construed the truck bomb as his "warning call" to the Pakistani government to back off. According to the Times, a Pakistani newspaper says the militants have "threatened to scrap a peace accord with the government if the United States did not halt air attacks against militant leaders."


That was Sunday. On Monday, Pakistani officials met with the new head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, and urged him to call off the drones. A statement from Pakistan's president said, "Continuing drone attacks on our territory, which result in loss of precious lives and property, are counterproductive and difficult to explain by a democratically elected government." Pakistan's defense ministry said drone strikes "could generate anti-American sentiments" and "create outrage and uproar among the people."

Share this article on DiggBuzz up!Share this article on BuzzIf the drones really are alienating the people, that's a big problem. Petraeus wants to do in Afghanistan and Pakistan what he did in Iraq: co-opt the public and our local enemies in order to isolate our mortal enemies. That means collaborating with the tribes and some Taliban elements against al-Qaida. Obama seems to be on the same page.

The tricky question is whether the drone attacks are directly alienating too many people or whether the Pakistani government is asking to Petraeus to call off the drones for more complicated reasons. One reason would be that the government doesn't want more truck bombs aimed at its own troops. A more ominous reason would be that the government doesn't want more bombs aimed at its hotels. If suicide bombs in hotels can force us to call off the drones, then terrorism is trumping remote-control technology.

The most interesting possibility is that the leverage game is being played both ways. That is, the drones aren't really—or aren't only—a way to hunt our enemies. They're a way to pressure the Pakistani government to take care of the job itself. As Obama has repeatedly put it, if Pakistan knows where the bad guys are and "won't act, we will."

So now we're acting. Since ground raids aren't safe enough to be a credible threat to the insurgents, we're using drones. By all accounts, the drone attacks have been highly effective at killing high-value targets. If that's a problem for the Pakistani government, and they've got a better way to stamp out the insurgency, and they can show us that they're serious about doing it, then, as Obama might say, we're all ears.

The Robot Proxy War
Bush's man-hunting machines—and Obama's.
By William Saletan
Posted Monday, Oct. 27, 2008, at 7:50 AM ET
In less than three months, Barack Obama will be president of the United States. How will he change our border war in Pakistan? Not much. We'll keep fighting insurgents there the way we're fighting them today: with aerial killing machines.

Last year, Obama declared that under his presidency, "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." John McCain criticized Obama's policy as rash, suggesting it would undermine the Pakistani government. The United States should try covert action in Pakistan "before we declare that we're going to bomb the daylights out of them," said McCain. A month ago, in their first debate, McCain again condemned Obama's position, arguing that the next president should "work with the Pakistani government," not "attack them."

Today, the New York Times reports what's actually going on along the Pakistani border. The report, based on interviews with U.S. and Pakistani officials, exposes the Obama-McCain debate as a charade. We're already getting actionable intelligence about terrorist targets in Pakistan. We're already blasting them. And the Pakistani government is working with us to facilitate these attacks. The covert action, the cooperation, and the aerial assaults aren't competing options. They're the same thing.


Here's the crux of the Times story:

The White House has backed away from using American commandos for further ground raids into Pakistan after furious complaints from its government, relying instead on an intensifying campaign of airstrikes by the Central Intelligence Agency against militants in the Pakistani mountains. … [A]ttacks by remotely piloted Predator aircraft have increased sharply in frequency and scope in the past three months. Through Sunday, there were at least 18 Predator strikes since the beginning of August. … Once largely reserved for missions to kill senior Arab Qaeda operatives, the Predator is increasingly being used to strike Pakistani militants and even trucks carrying rockets to resupply fighters in Afghanistan. Many of the Predator strikes are taking place as deep as 25 miles into Pakistani territory. …

So forget McCain's feigned dismay that Obama would send missiles deep into Pakistan. President Bush is doing that already. Is Bush thereby jeopardizing the Pakistani government? Far from it. He's substituting missiles for ground troops to appease and protect the government. According to the Times,

A senior administration official said Sunday that no tacit agreement had been reached between the sides to allow increased Predator strikes in exchange for a backing off from additional American ground raids, an option the officials said remained on the table. But Pakistani officials have made clear in public statements that they regard the Predator attacks as a less objectionable violation of Pakistani sovereignty.

Is Pakistan outraged by the missiles? Hardly. The Times reports:

As part of the intensified attacks in recent months, the C.I.A. has expanded its list of targets inside Pakistan and has gained approval from the government in Islamabad to bolster eavesdropping operations in the border region, according to United States officials. … Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, told the Council on Foreign Relations this month that there was cooperation between the two countries in deploying "strategic equipment that is used against specific targets."

Maybe this explains how our drones have nailed a series of enemy nests over the past four weeks. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. And that's not even counting all the hits we scored in early September. (Update: While I was writing this, the drones struck again, this time nailing a Taliban commander who was paying his respects to the families of people killed in a previous drone strike.) What, exactly, is our mysterious upgraded surveillance capability? Nobody's telling, but I have my theories.

Many things will change when Obama is elected. Other things will stay the same. And then there's a third category: things that are profoundly changing, and will continue to change, regardless of who's president. One of these things is anti-terrorist warfare. The war on terror is becoming a war between madmen and machines. A few years ago, jihadis had the upper hand because they didn't mind killing or dying. Now they're being blown away by remote-control pilots who can't be killed. The machines in the sky don't bleed, and they spare us the difficulties of an official troop presence. Pakistan has become the world's first robot proxy war.

There was a Democratic president before Bush. Acting on intelligence, Bill Clinton sent missiles into Afghanistan to kill Osama Bin Laden, and he didn't ask permission first. Under similar circumstances in Pakistan, Obama would do the same thing. The difference is that Clinton had to fire his missiles from thousands of miles away. Obama can do it from overhead.

The point of this thread is that our forces have been attacking in countries that we are not at war with. To me this seemed like a bit of a problem.

You never know if what we get to read is the truth or propaganda that someone wants us to believe. I try to read as much as I can and make sense of what is happening. As Zap pointed out in another thread the US is not very good at FOTP under this admin. Still, we get lots of info, but how do you filter it?

Here is a NYT story that explains how our forces got the ok to attack in countries we are not at war with...

Doug

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/washi ... ry.html?hp

Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda in Many Countries
By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON — The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.

These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.

In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.

Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations.

But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence.

More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature. Spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and the military declined to comment.

Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the American officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries. They made clear that there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they suggested that American forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using other classified directives.

According to a senior administration official, the new authority was spelled out in a classified document called “Al Qaeda Network Exord,” or execute order, that streamlined the approval process for the military to act outside officially declared war zones. Where in the past the Pentagon needed to get approval for missions on a case-by-case basis, which could take days when there were only hours to act, the new order specified a way for Pentagon planners to get the green light for a mission far more quickly, the official said.

It also allowed senior officials to think through how the United States would respond if a mission went badly. “If that helicopter goes down in Syria en route to a target,” a former senior military official said, “the American response would not have to be worked out on the fly.”

The 2004 order was a step in the evolution of how the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda terrorists around the world. It was issued after the Bush administration had already granted America’s intelligence agencies sweeping power to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons and to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications.

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda militants around the globe. By 2003, American intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al Qaeda’s extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash the military’s vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 2004 order identifies 15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said.

Even with the order, each specific mission requires high-level government approval. Targets in Somalia, for instance, need at least the approval of the defense secretary, the administration official said, while targets in a handful of countries, including Pakistan and Syria, require presidential approval.

The Pentagon has exercised its authority frequently, dispatching commandos to countries including Pakistan and Somalia. Details of a few of these strikes have previously been reported.

For example, shortly after Ethiopian troops crossed into Somalia in late 2006 to dislodge an Islamist regime in Mogadishu, the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command quietly sent operatives and AC-130 gunships to an airstrip near the Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa. From there, members of a classified unit called Task Force 88 crossed repeatedly into Somalia to hunt senior members of a Qaeda cell believed to be responsible for the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

At the time, American officials said Special Operations troops were operating under a classified directive authorizing the military to kill or capture Qaeda operatives if failure to act quickly would mean the United States had lost a “fleeting opportunity” to neutralize the enemy.

Occasionally, the officials said, Special Operations troops would land in Somalia to assess the strikes’ results. On Jan. 7, 2007, an AC-130 struck an isolated fishing village near the Kenyan border, and within hours, American commandos and Ethiopian troops were examining the rubble to determine whether any Qaeda operatives had been killed.

But even with the new authority, proposed Pentagon missions were sometimes scrubbed because of bad intelligence or bureaucratic entanglements, senior administration officials said.

The details of one of those aborted operations, in early 2005, were reported by The New York Times last June. In that case, an operation to send a team of the Navy Seals and the Army Rangers into Pakistan to capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, was aborted at the last minute.

Mr. Zawahri was believed by intelligence officials to be attending a meeting in Bajaur, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command hastily put together a plan to capture him. There were strong disagreements inside the Pentagon and the C.I.A. about the quality of the intelligence, however, and some in the military expressed concern that the mission was unnecessarily risky.

Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director at the time, urged the military to carry out the mission, and some in the C.I.A. even wanted to execute it without informing Ryan C. Crocker, then the American ambassador to Pakistan. Mr. Rumsfeld ultimately refused to authorize the mission.

Former military and intelligence officials said that Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who recently completed his tour as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, had pressed for years to win approval for commando missions into Pakistan. But the missions were frequently rejected because officials in Washington determined that the risks to American troops and the alliance with Pakistan were too great.

Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for General McChrystal, who is now director of the military’s Joint Staff, declined to comment.

The recent raid into Syria was not the first time that Special Operations forces had operated in that country, according to a senior military official and an outside adviser to the Pentagon.

Since the Iraq war began, the official and the outside adviser said, Special Operations forces have several times made cross-border raids aimed at militants and infrastructure aiding the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.

The raid in late October, however, was much more noticeable than the previous raids, military officials said, which helps explain why it drew a sharp protest from the Syrian government.

Negotiations to hammer out the 2004 order took place over nearly a year and involved wrangling between the Pentagon and the C.I.A. and the State Department about the military’s proper role around the world, several administration officials said.

American officials said there had been debate over whether to include Iran in the 2004 order, but ultimately Iran was set aside, possibly to be dealt with under a separate authorization.

Senior officials of the State Department and the C.I.A. voiced fears that military commandos would encroach on their turf, conducting operations that historically the C.I.A. had carried out, and running missions without an ambassador’s knowledge or approval.

Mr. Rumsfeld had pushed in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks to expand the mission of Special Operations troops to include intelligence gathering and counterterrorism operations in countries where American commandos had not operated before.

Bush administration officials have shown a determination to operate under an expansive definition of self-defense that provides a legal rationale for strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries’ consent.

Several officials said the negotiations over the 2004 order resulted in closer coordination among the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A., and set a very high standard for the quality of intelligence necessary to gain approval for an attack.

The 2004 order also provided a foundation for the orders that Mr. Bush approved in July allowing the military to conduct raids into the Pakistani tribal areas, including the Sept. 3 operation by Special Operations forces that killed about 20 militants, American officials said.

Administration officials said that Mr. Bush’s approval had paved the way for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to sign an order — separate from the 2004 order — that specifically directed the military to plan a series of operations, in cooperation with the C.I.A., on the Qaeda network and other militant groups linked to it in Pakistan.

Unlike the 2004 order, in which Special Operations commanders nominated targets for approval by senior government officials, the order in July was more of a top-down approach, directing the military to work with the C.I.A. to find targets in the tribal areas, administration officials said. They said each target still needed to be approved by the group of Mr. Bush’s top national security and foreign policy advisers, called the Principals Committee.

Lots of Christian, love-thy-neighbor-type values there. It's why we NEED religion to be in charge. I'm just devastated that we're getting a new administration that won't use Jesus for a model in its every move like the Bush one has.

I was talking to Jesus just the other day. He said he was tired of being used!

Good thing this thread is a long read. Otherwise the pundit of pixley would be all over you both. Ha.

Wheather it's Jesus or George Bush, I'd rather hear from and listen to them as opposed to hearing and listening to their press secretaries and spin doctors. I mean in the first case, it's kinda getting it from the horses mouth, in the second case, more like from the horses ass. But in either case, I'd rather hear from the horse than the horsefly. I sense we will get more Obama and less spokespeople when he takes over.

Ha, today with Barak visiting the whitehouse, the horses ass and the smarter part are reunited.

I can see this coming on Letterman tonight...Horses ass, horses head. Horses head, horses ass.