Biden rules tighten limits on drone strikes

U.S. military personnel and CIA drone operators generally must obtain pre-clearance from President Biden to attack a suspected militant outside a conventional war zone, and they must have “near certainty” at the time of an attack that civilians will not be injured will hit, according to newly released rules. .

The 15-page rules, signed by Mr Biden last October, also restrict such drone strikes to situations where the operators deem any option to capture the targeted person alive in a commando strike “impracticable”. And if national security officials suggest targeting an American, that leads to a more comprehensive assessment.

The rules tightened restrictions on drone strikes and commando raids that President Donald J. Trump relaxed in 2017. The Biden administration partially declassified and made public the document, along with an 18-page national security memo outlining its international counter-terrorism strategy, after The New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

A senior government official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues, said the government currently considers only two countries — Iraq and Syria, where operations against the remnants of the Islamic State continue — as areas of active hostilities, where military operators have more latitude to command airstrikes.

That means the rules apply wherever the United States has conducted drone strikes in recent years, including Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and a semi-tribal controlled region of Pakistan. In contrast, when the military carried out a failed drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan in August 2021, which killed 10 civilians, including seven children, US troops were still on the ground, turning it into a conventional war zone.

The international counter-terrorism strategy — a counterpart to that of the Biden administration national strategy against domestic terrorismwhich made it public in June 2021 takes a more measured tone in assessing various terrorist threats than has at times been the case since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Both emerged from a comprehensive review of government policy that the Biden administration began when it took office. The strategy paper calls for a calibrated approach to international terrorist threats in light of how they have changed over time – focusing on addressing immediate terrorist threats to the country and its overseas installations, but saying that risks should be prioritized amid competing national security threats and limited resources.

Citing the need to avoid repeating “mistakes of the past,” the strategy says, “In particular, we must avoid engaging in large-scale US-led nation-building efforts “in the name of counter-terrorism and instead” tailor-made approaches” such as helping local governments ensure domestic security by building local partner strengths.

Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School who criticized the Biden administration for failing to make the documents public last fallsaid it was significant that the strategy, while depicting international terrorism as a persistent and varied threat, recognized that there were other, competing national security priorities.

“The call for ‘realistic and achievable goals’ is a rare admission by the US government that it is impossible to rule out all possible terrorism risks,” said Professor Hathaway. “I think that’s a step in the right direction.”

Luke Hartig, a former senior counter-terrorism assistant in the Obama White House, said the document “outlines quite a different counter-terrorism strategy than we’ve seen in recent years.” He pointed out how it emphasized offensive strikes in favor of defensive measures, not suggesting a grand ambition to defeat terrorism everywhere.

“This is really good for where we are now in the fight against terrorism,” he added.

While the rules allow operators to seek approval for exceptions, the requirement for individual presidential approval means that Mr Biden has banned a disputed drone tactic, known as signature strikes, that targets groups of suspected militants whose individual identity is unknown. Such strikes carry a greater risk of error and have resulted in civilian deaths.

However, the special procedures exclude strikes conducted in defense of U.S. troops stationed abroad or in the “collective self-defense” of partner troops trained and equipped by the United States. Such attacks are allowed in the case of “foreign partners and allies who are attacked or threatened with imminent attack,” the document said.

That split is important because most U.S. drone strikes in Somalia in recent years have been in the name of partner defending forces against Al Shabab, the Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militant group. The United States Africa Command revealed Nine airstrikes in Somalia this year have killed an estimated 64 militants.

“With such a broad definition for the defense of foreign partners, including those who are ‘threatened with imminent attack,’ it is little wonder that Africa Command’s collective self-defense strikes in Somalia sometimes resemble close air support to the Somali army,” he said. Sarah Harrison. , a former Pentagon attorney from 2017 to 2021 who conducts research into counter-terrorism policies in Somalia.

The government has censored certain rules in the version of the rules it has released. For example, while The Times reported last fall that the State Department’s chief of mission in a given country must sign before operators there can carry out a drone strike or commando raid – a check on military operators – that rule is not visible .

Also left censored was the degree of confidence an operator must have that a person who clears Mr Biden for murder is the same person in the operator’s crosshairs. However, the length of the editorial strongly suggests that the words omitted are “reasonable certainty”, one level below “near certainty”.

If so, that’s “remarkably high-profile misidentification incidents of targets like Kabul,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department national security attorney who worked with the Obama administration’s drone rules. and Trump. “Ongoing problem during 20 years of war on terror,” he added.

Counter-terrorism drone strikes in remote and poorly governed regions — neither battlefield zones where U.S. ground troops fight, nor normal countries where police officers can apprehend terrorists plotting attacks — have become a new style of warfare in the 21st century, creating legal and policy dilemmas it now included four presidencies.

As the number of attacks increased, so did the failed attacks where military or CIA operators accidentally killed civilians, leading to human rights controversies and backlash against the United States. The 2011 drone assassination of a US citizen — Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born radical Muslim cleric who joined a Qaeda-affiliated party in Yemen — sparked further controversy.

In 2013, President Barack Obama first established a comprehensive set of rules and restrictions for “direct action” operations outside war zones, imposing a centralized control system in selecting potential targets. In 2017, President Donald J. Trump replaced that system with a looser system in which the White House set broad rules for specific countries, giving operators more leeway to choose targets. Mr. Biden’s system is more like Mr. Obama’s.

But over the years, the global terrorist threat has evolved. In particular, the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria acted as a magnet for jihadist-minded extremists, who flocked to what the United States considered a conventional war zone where ground troops were fighting. restrictions do not apply.

According to data collected by The Diary of the Long War, the last known US airstrike in Pakistan was in 2018; that year there was one, down from a peak of 117 in 2011. The last known attack or incursion into Libya — where there were 497 in 2016 — came in 2019. The last airstrike in Yemen — where there were 125 in 2017 – was in 2020.

But the decline of the Islamic State could lead to a return to a more geographically dispersed terrorist threat. And there have been some operations targeting valuable individuals in the Biden administration.

A drone strike in Afghanistan last summer killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, and US Special Operations commandos killed a senior Islamic State leader in a helicopter attack in a remote area of ​​northern Somalia in January. US officials said. On May 20, a senior Shabab leader was apparently wounded in an American attack, but is believed to have survived.

The direct action rules also cover capture operations. Among other things, Mr Biden demanded that the government tell the International Committee of the Red Cross that it has taken a prisoner, and banned it from taking any new prisoners to the Guantánamo Bay war prison, Cuba. No new detainee has arrived there since the Bush administration.