The Drone War Crosses Another Line

[rug]

America took an unprecedented step over the weekend.



A car fire at the site of a drone strike believed to have killed the Afghan Taliban leader (Reuters)

KATHY GILSINAN
12:00 PM ET

Following the death of Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour in an American drone strike in Pakistan on Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry remarked that “Peace is what we want” in Afghanistan. “Mansour,” he said, “was a threat to that effort.” Confirming Mansour’s death on Monday, President Barack Obama said the Taliban’s chief, who had held the position officially for less than a year, had “rejected efforts by the Afghan government to seriously engage in peace talks and end the violence that has taken the lives of countless innocent Afghan men, women and children.”

The strike that killed Mansour crossed numerous lines that have constrained America’s fight with the Taliban, and its drone war in Pakistan, up to this point. It was remarkable for its location and timing, as well as the public acknowledgment that accompanied it. Mansour was reportedly killed while traveling in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, where much of the Taliban’s leadership has been based since being driven out of Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion in 2001. Yet despite the well-publicized Taliban presence there—the group’s leadership council, the Quetta Shura, is named after the province’s capital city—the U.S. drone war in Pakistan hadn’t targeted the insurgent leadership at its home base prior to Saturday. It has stuck to alleged militants in safe havens in the tribal areas farther north. As Bill Roggio noted in Long War Journal over the weekend, “A strike in Baluchistan is unprecedented.”

Even in the tribal areas, the American drone campaign in Pakistan has been decelerating in recent years as the Obama administration has sought to facilitate peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Kerry and Obama both suggested that Mansour’s death could remove an obstacle to those talks; as Ali Latifi and Shashank Bengali noted in the Los Angeles Times, Mansour, having earlier signaled support for reconciliation, “presided over a resurgence of the Taliban’s fighting capabilities and made a public statement last year calling for ‘jihad until we bring Islamic rule’ to Afghanistan.”

And Saturday’s strike was carried out not by the CIA, which runs and doesn’t acknowledge the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan, but by the military—which means that unlike the supposedly covert strikes carried out by the intelligence agency, this one was publicized by the Pentagon spokesman, on Twitter. And it means that, like the 2011 commando raid into Pakistan that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Saturday’s strike involved public celebration of an attack in a country with which the United States is not, technically, at war—and which, in theory, is an ally in the war on terrorism.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/05/drone-mullah-akhtar-taliban/483863/