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Drone Attack: Avaliable options

But if you keep cutting off the heads then it easy to calm people down.

If you keep cutting off the heads, you'll create more fertilizer for the new heads that will need cutting (especially when it's innocent heads you cut off).

That is not a solution in the long run.
 
Doyle McManus
May 3, 2009

David Kilcullen is no soft-headed peacenik. He's a beefy, 41-year-old former Australian army officer who served in Iraq as a top advisor to U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus. He's one of the counter-insurgency warrior/theorists who designed Petraeus' successful "surge" of troops into the streets of Baghdad.

But a few days ago, when a congressman asked Kilcullen what the U.S. government should do in Pakistan, the Australian guerrilla fighter sounded like an antiwar protester.

"We need to call off the drones," Kilcullen said.

In the arid valleys of western Pakistan, the United States is fighting a strange, long-distance war against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their Pakistani allies. Unmanned "drone" airplanes take off from secret runways, seek out suspected terrorists and, with CIA employees at the remote controls, fire missiles to blow them up.

Officially, this is a covert program, and the CIA won't acknowledge that it's going on at all. Unofficially, intelligence officials say the Predator strikes are the most effective weapon they have against Al Qaeda.

President Obama has embraced an escalation in the raids that was approved by his predecessor, George W. Bush, last summer. The CIA has carried out at least 16 Predator strikes in Pakistan in the first four months of this year, compared with 36 strikes in all of 2008. The missile strikes have killed about 161 people since Obama's inauguration, according to news reports from Pakistan; there's no way of knowing how many of those were civilians.

Only one problem: Kilcullen says the missile strikes are backfiring.

Kilcullen's objection to the U.S. strategy isn't moral (he doesn't mind killing "bad guys") or legal (most legal scholars consider "targeted killing" acceptable under the law of war because Al Qaeda and the Taliban are at war with the United States). Kilcullen's objection is practical. He says the strikes are creating more enemies than they eliminate.

"I realize that they do damage to the Al Qaeda leadership," he told the House Armed Services Committee. But that, he said, was not enough to justify the program. "Since 2006, we've killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we've killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they've given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism. ... The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population."

Another problem, Kilcullen says, is that "using robots from the air ... looks both cowardly and weak."

In the Pashtun tribal culture of honor and revenge, face-to-face combat is seen as brave; shooting people with missiles from 20,000 feet is not. And besides, Kilcullen says, "There are other ways to do it."

Kilcullen didn't elaborate on those "other ways," but intelligence experts say they could include deploying covert teams of hit men on the ground (risky) and training Pakistani special operations units to do the job (time-consuming).

There's no sign yet that the Obama administration is taking his advice. The CIA, like any organization, is glad to take credit for a well-run operation that's fulfilling its mission: eliminating Al Qaeda leaders. Some even claim that the missile strikes have pushed Al Qaeda to the brink of extinction.

"Al Qaeda is on the ropes," the Bush administration's last terrorism czar, Juan Carlos Zarate, told me recently. "We are at the point where we can imagine an end to Al Qaeda as we know it."

There's an echo here of the debate over another CIA program, the "enhanced interrogation" of terrorist detainees. The agency declared the interrogations a success because they produced useful information. But that narrow accounting ignored the damage to other U.S. interests, such as diplomacy and the rule of law.

One legal scholar, Kenneth Anderson of American University, says there's another connection between the two issues: The controversy over how to detain, interrogate and try suspected terrorists has made it simpler just to shoot them. "The most powerful institutional incentive today is to kill rather than capture them," he wrote recently. From a legal perspective, he suggested, warfare is easier than "lawfare."

The problem in western Pakistan is that two U.S. interests are in conflict. We want to kill the leaders of Al Qaeda, but we also want to strengthen the government of Pakistan, which is under serious pressure from Islamist insurgents. At the moment, as Kilcullen points out, we are doing the first at the expense of the second.

The drone strikes play into the hands of insurgents, who cite them to stir up anti-Western and anti-government sentiment. And, according to some reports, the missile strikes have driven Al Qaeda and Taliban forces deeper into Pakistan.

So what happens next? The Obama administration is unlikely to abandon one of the few strategies that has produced results against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Instead, it has requested a new $400-million fund to train and equip counterinsurgency forces in Pakistan's police and Frontier Corps, which are more enthusiastic about this fight than the regular army.

Counterinsurgency is neither sanitary nor bloodless. It may end up a measure of success if we can stop killing people with air-to-ground missiles and go back to killing them the old-fashioned way.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commen...,7133284.column
 
‘My experience is that knocking them hard (the Pakistani government and military) isn’t going to work,’ Admiral Mullen said. ‘The harder we push, the further away they get.

WASHINGTON: The Obama administration may announce a new public formula for dual control of the drones that attack suspected terrorist target inside Fata, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.

The newspaper said that US officials were exploring ways to reduce the political strain on the Zardari government caused by US drone attacks on Al Qaeda sanctuaries in the tribal areas. The drone attacks, however, would continue.

Pakistanis protest these attacks as violations of sovereignty, ‘even though they have been blessed in secret by President Zardari’s government,’ the reported noted.

‘This tension could be eased by some public formula for dual control,’ the Post reported. ‘We’re looking at how we might find some common way ahead where utilisation of the asset could benefit the Pakistanis,’ a senior Obama official told the Post.

Besides offering a formula for dual control of the drones, the Obama administration also plans to give $1.5 billion to Pakistan to beef up its ailing economy.

On Monday, when President Asif Ali Zardari arrives in Washington to attend a trilateral summit, US lawmakers also plan to present a new bill in the Senate, seeking to triple US assistance to Pakistan to $1.5 billion a year for five years.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the media earlier this week that President Barack Obama plans to ‘have some very intense sessions’ with Mr Zardari and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai during this summit.

Prominent Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported on Sunday that President Obama held ‘a crisis meeting’ at the White House on last Monday.

At this meeting, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had just returned from Islamabad, read a report on the situation in Pakistan.

‘The situation in Pakistan had gotten significantly worse than I expected as the Swat deal unravelled,’ Admiral Mullen explained in an interview after the crisis meeting.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates and special envoy Richard Holbrooke also attended the briefing where Admiral Mullen read his report.

The two policy veterans ‘made the argument that it’s worth studying the Iran model,’ a senior official who took part in the White House meeting told the Post.

The Americans fear that if not curbed now, the militants can actually topple the current setup in Islamabad, as religious activists did in Iran in 1979.

The US media reported that this was ‘Pakistan week’ for the Obama administration’s foreign-policy team, which focused on two major points: the increasing influence of the Taliban and the inherent weakness of the Zardari government. The American policy planners believe that the Zardari regime was in a self-destructive mode and it’s only a matter of time before it destroys itself.

Ignatius reported that the situation in Pakistan was ‘eerily similar’ to what the Carter administration faced with Iran: ‘how to encourage the military to take decisive action against a Muslim insurgency without destroying the country’s nascent democracy.’

The Obama administration, he said, faced a deeper psychological factor, too: ‘how to exercise US power effectively without triggering a backlash from a proud and prickly Muslim population that is scarred by what it sees as a history of American meddling.’

The issue was also discussed at the White House crisis meeting. ‘My experience is that knocking them hard (the Pakistani government and military) isn’t going to work,’ Admiral Mullen said. ‘The harder we push, the further away they get.’ For the crackdown on the Taliban to be successful, he said, ‘It has to be their will, not ours.’

Admiral Mullen also appeared worried about the Pakistani government’s ability to sustain the current offensive against the militants. ‘My biggest concern is whether they will sustain it,’ he said. During his latest visit to Islamabad, the admiral reportedly told his Pakistani counterpart, Gen Ashfaq Kiyani, that ‘we are prepared to assist whenever they want.’

Admiral Mullen said he hoped the Pakistanis will adopt a classic three-part counter insurgency strategy – clearing areas of Taliban control, holding those areas with enough troops so that the local population feels secure, and then building through economic development, with US help.

DAWN.COM | World | US to offer dual control of drones, says report

-------------------------------------

Now, this is a very interesting development.:sniper:

Now i have a felling about what US wants from us, so here it goes: "I don't want you(PAK) to die, I want you(PAK) to bleed to death"!
 
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Oh great, now pakistani's can kill their own people even easier and quicker! we need to get a bloody grip rather then being sheep all the time
 
I think that USA is trying to lure Pakistani government to agree to the formula. Already, we have a very corrupt government at the centre who would be willing to selling the country at all costs. For that they will have to make the country unstable first. That is why they will first pitch in this idea and then ensure that all the people in tribal areas get frustrated. So far, the tribal people of Pakistan have shown great endurance and resilience and have never demanaded seperation. Therefore, this is just another USA tactic to split Pakistan. However, I think Pakistan will disagree to this notion and work another way out to acquire the drones.
 
Pakistan is presently under attack by so called friends of Pakistan.

Present government is acting like puppet in hand of US.

PA and real friends of Pakistan(China) know US game plan in region.

Let see who will be win the match.
 
Ever thought that the US administration is realising it needs to do a serious rethink on policy and actually help Pakistan instead of the current help but not help policies.

Tricky lot the US.:disagree:

But heck we sold them the Sydney Harbour Bridge at least 20 times and we still have it.:rofl:
 
Admiral Mullen said he hoped the Pakistanis will adopt a classic three-part counter insurgency strategy – clearing areas of Taliban control, holding those areas with enough troops so that the local population feels secure, and then building through economic development, with US help.

only part that makes sense!
 
Doyle McManus
May 3, 2009
David Kilcullen is no soft-headed peacenik.

He's a beefy, 41-year-old former Australian army officer who served in Iraq as a top advisor to U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus. He's one of the counter-insurgency warrior/theorists who designed Petraeus' successful "surge" of troops into the streets of Baghdad.

But a few days ago, when a congressman asked Kilcullen what the U.S. government should do in Pakistan, the Australian guerrilla fighter sounded like an antiwar protester.

"We need to call off the drones," Kilcullen said.

In the arid valleys of western Pakistan, the United States is fighting a strange, long-distance war against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their Pakistani allies. Unmanned "drone" airplanes take off from secret runways, seek out suspected terrorists and, with CIA employees at the remote controls, fire missiles to blow them up.

Officially, this is a covert program, and the CIA won't acknowledge that it's going on at all. Unofficially, intelligence officials say the Predator strikes are the most effective weapon they have against Al Qaeda.

President Obama has embraced an escalation in the raids that was approved by his predecessor, George W. Bush, last summer. The CIA has carried out at least 16 Predator strikes in Pakistan in the first four months of this year, compared with 36 strikes in all of 2008. The missile strikes have killed about 161 people since Obama's inauguration, according to news reports from Pakistan; there's no way of knowing how many of those were civilians.

Only one problem: Kilcullen says the missile strikes are backfiring.

Kilcullen's objection to the U.S. strategy isn't moral (he doesn't mind killing "bad guys") or legal (most legal scholars consider "targeted killing" acceptable under the law of war because Al Qaeda and the Taliban are at war with the United States). Kilcullen's objection is practical. He says the strikes are creating more enemies than they eliminate.

"I realize that they do damage to the Al Qaeda leadership," he told the House Armed Services Committee. But that, he said, was not enough to justify the program. "Since 2006, we've killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we've killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they've given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism. ... The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population."

Another problem, Kilcullen says, is that "using robots from the air ... looks both cowardly and weak."

In the Pashtun tribal culture of honor and revenge, face-to-face combat is seen as brave; shooting people with missiles from 20,000 feet is not. And besides, Kilcullen says, "There are other ways to do it."

Kilcullen didn't elaborate on those "other ways," but intelligence experts say they could include deploying covert teams of hit men on the ground (risky) and training Pakistani special operations units to do the job (time-consuming).

There's no sign yet that the Obama administration is taking his advice. The CIA, like any organization, is glad to take credit for a well-run operation that's fulfilling its mission: eliminating Al Qaeda leaders. Some even claim that the missile strikes have pushed Al Qaeda to the brink of extinction.

"Al Qaeda is on the ropes," the Bush administration's last terrorism czar, Juan Carlos Zarate, told me recently. "We are at the point where we can imagine an end to Al Qaeda as we know it."

There's an echo here of the debate over another CIA program, the "enhanced interrogation" of terrorist detainees. The agency declared the interrogations a success because they produced useful information. But that narrow accounting ignored the damage to other U.S. interests, such as diplomacy and the rule of law.

One legal scholar, Kenneth Anderson of American University, says there's another connection between the two issues: The controversy over how to detain, interrogate and try suspected terrorists has made it simpler just to shoot them. "The most powerful institutional incentive today is to kill rather than capture them," he wrote recently. From a legal perspective, he suggested, warfare is easier than "lawfare."

The problem in western Pakistan is that two U.S. interests are in conflict. We want to kill the leaders of Al Qaeda, but we also want to strengthen the government of Pakistan, which is under serious pressure from Islamist insurgents. At the moment, as Kilcullen points out, we are doing the first at the expense of the second.

The drone strikes play into the hands of insurgents, who cite them to stir up anti-Western and anti-government sentiment. And, according to some reports, the missile strikes have driven Al Qaeda and Taliban forces deeper into Pakistan.

So what happens next? The Obama administration is unlikely to abandon one of the few strategies that has produced results against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Instead, it has requested a new $400-million fund to train and equip counterinsurgency forces in Pakistan's police and Frontier Corps, which are more enthusiastic about this fight than the regular army.

Counterinsurgency is neither sanitary nor bloodless. It may end up a measure of success if we can stop killing people with air-to-ground missiles and go back to killing them the old-fashioned way.
 
Doyle McManus
May 3, 2009
David Kilcullen is no soft-headed peacenik.

He's a beefy, 41-year-old former Australian army officer who served in Iraq as a top advisor to U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus. He's one of the counter-insurgency warrior/theorists who designed Petraeus' successful "surge" of troops into the streets of Baghdad.

But a few days ago, when a congressman asked Kilcullen what the U.S. government should do in Pakistan, the Australian guerrilla fighter sounded like an antiwar protester.

"We need to call off the drones," Kilcullen said.

In the arid valleys of western Pakistan, the United States is fighting a strange, long-distance war against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their Pakistani allies. Unmanned "drone" airplanes take off from secret runways, seek out suspected terrorists and, with CIA employees at the remote controls, fire missiles to blow them up.

Officially, this is a covert program, and the CIA won't acknowledge that it's going on at all. Unofficially, intelligence officials say the Predator strikes are the most effective weapon they have against Al Qaeda.

President Obama has embraced an escalation in the raids that was approved by his predecessor, George W. Bush, last summer. The CIA has carried out at least 16 Predator strikes in Pakistan in the first four months of this year, compared with 36 strikes in all of 2008. The missile strikes have killed about 161 people since Obama's inauguration, according to news reports from Pakistan; there's no way of knowing how many of those were civilians.

Only one problem: Kilcullen says the missile strikes are backfiring.

Kilcullen's objection to the U.S. strategy isn't moral (he doesn't mind killing "bad guys") or legal (most legal scholars consider "targeted killing" acceptable under the law of war because Al Qaeda and the Taliban are at war with the United States). Kilcullen's objection is practical. He says the strikes are creating more enemies than they eliminate.

"I realize that they do damage to the Al Qaeda leadership," he told the House Armed Services Committee. But that, he said, was not enough to justify the program. "Since 2006, we've killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we've killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they've given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism. ... The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population."

Another problem, Kilcullen says, is that "using robots from the air ... looks both cowardly and weak."

In the Pashtun tribal culture of honor and revenge, face-to-face combat is seen as brave; shooting people with missiles from 20,000 feet is not. And besides, Kilcullen says, "There are other ways to do it."

Kilcullen didn't elaborate on those "other ways," but intelligence experts say they could include deploying covert teams of hit men on the ground (risky) and training Pakistani special operations units to do the job (time-consuming).

There's no sign yet that the Obama administration is taking his advice. The CIA, like any organization, is glad to take credit for a well-run operation that's fulfilling its mission: eliminating Al Qaeda leaders. Some even claim that the missile strikes have pushed Al Qaeda to the brink of extinction.

"Al Qaeda is on the ropes," the Bush administration's last terrorism czar, Juan Carlos Zarate, told me recently. "We are at the point where we can imagine an end to Al Qaeda as we know it."

There's an echo here of the debate over another CIA program, the "enhanced interrogation" of terrorist detainees. The agency declared the interrogations a success because they produced useful information. But that narrow accounting ignored the damage to other U.S. interests, such as diplomacy and the rule of law.

One legal scholar, Kenneth Anderson of American University, says there's another connection between the two issues: The controversy over how to detain, interrogate and try suspected terrorists has made it simpler just to shoot them. "The most powerful institutional incentive today is to kill rather than capture them," he wrote recently. From a legal perspective, he suggested, warfare is easier than "lawfare."

The problem in western Pakistan is that two U.S. interests are in conflict. We want to kill the leaders of Al Qaeda, but we also want to strengthen the government of Pakistan, which is under serious pressure from Islamist insurgents. At the moment, as Kilcullen points out, we are doing the first at the expense of the second.

The drone strikes play into the hands of insurgents, who cite them to stir up anti-Western and anti-government sentiment. And, according to some reports, the missile strikes have driven Al Qaeda and Taliban forces deeper into Pakistan.

So what happens next? The Obama administration is unlikely to abandon one of the few strategies that has produced results against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Instead, it has requested a new $400-million fund to train and equip counterinsurgency forces in Pakistan's police and Frontier Corps, which are more enthusiastic about this fight than the regular army.

Counterinsurgency is neither sanitary nor bloodless. It may end up a measure of success if we can stop killing people with air-to-ground missiles and go back to killing them the old-fashioned way.

Funny how slow Americans are, though I'd say such open ended indiscriminate bombing would not go down well in any culture.

It's like waiting for an hour glass to filter sand through before realization takes place.
 
Kilcullen's objection to the U.S. strategy isn't moral (he doesn't mind killing "bad guys") or legal (most legal scholars consider "targeted killing" acceptable under the law of war because Al Qaeda and the Taliban are at war with the United States). Kilcullen's objection is practical. He says the strikes are creating more enemies than they eliminate.

Wow. Really..............
 
Drone attacks have actually created political problems for the government. These should be stopped.

Drones should be provided to Pakistan to fight extremists.
 
So, three options.
1. Increase army
2.Further advance training and good salaries.
3.Better training and constant updating anti-terror equipment.

Because if Pakistan army in army restive zone, then need to create balance on Pak-India border. Mullen or US guarantee, that India would stay calm along border can't be trusted. Indian are basically sneaky by nature. What Pakistan learn from Siachin and so many other minor adventure of Indian army.
 
Admiral Mullen said he hoped the Pakistanis will adopt a classic three-part counter insurgency strategy – clearing areas of Taliban control, holding those areas with enough troops so that the local population feels secure, and then building through economic development.

Indeed. For a country with our economic and political situation, this is impossible to do without financial and political support. I finally see some sense from the Americans.

The US must also take a three-pronged approach to the situation. Firstly, consistent and unconditional financial, military and political support of Army and ISI efforts to control and defeat the militancy. Secondly, the US must do its part on the international stage and counter the campaign to malign Pakistan undertaken by certain "international elements". Thirdly, the US must stop the constant change of strategy, one week the secretary of state says one thing, next week the military chief says another. Stop sending mixed-signals, this is not a teenaged relationship, its an international partnership.
 
Drone attacks have actually created political problems for the government. These should be stopped.

Drones should be provided to Pakistan to fight extremists.

Joint control is a pretty good compromise from the Pakistan point of view, I think, since the US is not going to stop these attacks. At least you have influence on them now.

It's not an ideal situation, but it's time to put egos aside. Pakistan is in a not so great situation economically or politically at the moment and needs help - and nothing is ever free.
 
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