Biden Rules Tighten Limits on Drone Strikes
Oona Hathaway, a Yale Law School professor who criticized the Biden administration for not making the documents public last fall, said it was significant that the strategy, while portraying international terrorism as a persistent and varied threat, recognized that there were other, competing national security priorities.
“Its call for ‘realistic and achievable goals’ is a rare U.S. government acknowledgment that eliminating all possible terrorism risk is not really possible,” Professor Hathaway said. “That seems to me a step in the right direction.”
Luke Hartig, a former senior counterterrorism aide in the Obama White House, said the document “lays out a pretty different counterterrorism strategy than we have seen in years past.” He pointed to how it de-emphasized offensive strikes in favor of defensive measures, and did not suggest a grandiose ambition to defeat terrorism everywhere.
“This is really sound for where we are now in the struggle against terrorism,” he added.
While the rules allow operators to seek approval for exceptions, the requirement for individualized presidential approval means Mr. Biden has banned a disputed drone tactic known as signature strikes, which target groups of suspected militants whose individual identities are not known. Such strikes carry a greater risk of mistakes and have led to civilian deaths.
Still, exempted from the special procedures are strikes carried out in defense of American forces stationed abroad or in the “collective self-defense” of partner forces trained and equipped by the United States. Such strikes are permitted in the cases of “foreign partners and allies who are under attack or are threatened with an imminent attack,” the document says.
That carve-out is significant because in recent years, the majority of American drone strikes have taken place in Somalia in the name of defending partner forces against Al Shabab, the Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militant group. The United States Africa Command has disclosed nine airstrikes so far this year in Somalia, which it estimated killed about 64 militants.
“With such a broad definition for defense of foreign partners, to include those who are ‘threatened with imminent attack,’ it’s no wonder Africa Command’s collective self-defense strikes in Somalia sometimes resemble close air support to the Somali military,” said Sarah Harrison, a former Pentagon lawyer from 2017 to 2021 who studies counterterrorism policy in Somalia.
Source: The New York Times
