Being the President of the United States means that you have responsibilities no one will ever understand. Responsibilities like deciding whether you should drop a newly created atomic weapon on two very populated cities because you want to avoid having the blood of your own troops spilled unnecessarily.
Responsibilities like deciding whether to place a country under a blockade or bomb it because it might bomb you any second. Responsibilities like deciding whether to strike at terrorists, understanding that there is a possibility that innocent civilians and volunteers will be killed in order to for you to do it.
Even so, the latest drone strike by the U.S. that killed two al-Qaida hostages — Warren Weinstein, an American citizen, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian citizen — is more than just the president having to make a hard decision, or authorizing his lieutenants to do so. This is more than just the president protecting American lives and interests abroad. This is a fundamental failure of policy, strategy and follow-through that needs to be re-evaluated by the Obama administration before more of the same incidents keep happening.
Let’s start with policy. The president has made it expressly clear that the only way that the use of force with be authorized in terms of drone strikes will be if capture is not feasible, if there is an imminent threat from the terrorists being targeted, and if there is a “near certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed.”
Yet since the Obama administration has taken the reins, there have been upwards of 307 civilians killed according to data compiled for the New America Foundation by Peter Bergen. Bergen wrote on Thursday about Weinstein in the context of his being a hostage, and the possibility that he might have been saved from his fate by negotiations.
But I think that this misses a crucial point. The drone was what killed Weinstein and Lo Porto, not necessarily the fact that the U.S. doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. The strategy of not negotiating with terrorists is not the flawed one, rather the strategy of targeted killings is. The amounts of civilians killed and the way it is affecting our relations with other countries proves that.
Pakistani citizens have said numerous times that they are tired of the U.S. violating the sovereignty of their country by prosecuting a war there that it has never declared. The war against terrorists and enemies of the U.S. is in Afghanistan and Iraq, they claim, not in Pakistan, and I would tend to agree on the surface.
If the U.S. is going to attack targets in Pakistan, it needs to publicly make clear that since Pakistan is harboring terrorists on its soil, it has become part of the war zone and that the U.S. is not violating Pakistani sovereignty, because there are terrorists that are continually targeting the U.S. residing and plotting there.
Besides being a failure of policy and strategy, this latest drone strike is also a failure of follow-through. According to CNN, the fact that the strike killed two Westerners was the result of “faulty intelligence.” If faulty intelligence caused this incident, what others has it caused that we don’t know about?
This is why the administration needs to take both its own advice and mine. Last week, I wrote on this very subject, but in a very different context. The administration had actually captured and placed an American citizen on trial for his alleged terrorist activity.
The administration should have taken the same action in this situation, instead placing the terrorists before military tribunals for trial. I realize the implications of having to capture (either through our troops or the ISI) every terrorist for trial. But if we are to follow correct policy, correct strategy and have good follow-through, this is what needs to happen.
I understand that President Barack Obama is genuinely sorry for what happened on Thursday. I, in turn, genuinely feel sorry for him, especially with everything that he has to go through as president, with all those responsibilities he has and hard decisions he must make. But I don’t want to keep hearing apologies from the leader of my country. Stop the behavior, and you stop the apologies. It’s as simple as that.
Reach the columnist at jbrunne2@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @JARBrunner4.
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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