Killing Machine (30 page)

A United States investigation determined that the NATO attack had been accidental and expressed condolences to the soldiers’ families. Ambassador Cameron Munter urged White House officials
to produce a video statement and express remorse for the deaths, as anger in Pakistan had reached a fever pitch and the United States needed to move quickly. Defense officials and political advisers both advised the president against the idea, however—a stance that conveyed not a little stubbornness and pique at Pakistan’s maneuvering, and worry about the 2012 election and Republican criticism. Obama did not call the Pakistani president for eight days after the incident, as the White House wanted to make sure that it separated regrets from accepting blame. The American attitude made matters worse. It seemed one more instance of Washington unilaterally setting the rules and making self-serving decisions. “Past investigations of similar attacks,” said Pakistani military officials, “have not been to our satisfaction and no one was punished.” According to those officials, the attacks were not accidental but “blatant aggression.”
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From later accounts, including those from Pakistan, the argument that it was a case of “blatant aggression” was hard to make. The incident triggered a debate inside the administration, however, about the value of the “signature strikes.” The most recent of these had occurred around the time of the air attack on Pakistani soldiers and were aimed at the Haqqani network, which both Washington and Kabul blamed for an attack on the American embassy in Afghanistan. State Department officials and some in the National Security Council said such attacks were counterproductive. Rank-and-file militants, the dissidents said, were easy to replace, and whether Pakistani claims of civilian casualties were exaggerated or not, they were destabilizing the government of a U.S. ally. One former intelligence official told a reporter for the Los
Angeles Times
that the CIA kept a list of its top twenty targets. “There have been times where they’ve struggled a little bit coming up with names to fill that list.”
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In an almost comic series of events a week later, an American RQ-170 surveillance drone came down, because of unknown causes, in eastern Iran near the city of Kashmar and was put on display. The Iranians boasted that they had brought the UAV to earth by one of their cyberwar units—thus trumping U.S. pride in one of its
technological specialties. The Pentagon responded that it had been shot down, but the condition of the drone as shown on films indicated no visible damage from rocket fire. Indeed, it looked almost pristine and ready to go again when refueled. Just as in 1960 when the first U-2 story was put out that a “weather” plane had strayed over the Soviet Union by accident, the first official response had been that American forces in Afghanistan had lost control of a UAV, and what had turned up in Iran looked like it might be the one. That story, like the U-2 story, crashed within days. In the earlier instance, Soviet officials put the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, on display in an ill-fitting suit that made him look almost clownish. U-2 pilots were supposed to commit suicide in the event of imminent capture, but Powers opted to disobey and spend a few years in Russian prisons instead. Eisenhower then revealed that Powers was part of an ongoing series of secret U-2 missions he defended as necessary because Russia’s “closed skies” prevented America from knowing about the Soviet missile program.

In the RQ-170 case, Pentagon officials quickly changed their story to turn an embarrassment into political advantage at a time when administration critics at home, and the conservative Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, were clamoring for real action to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Iran responded by lodging a formal complaint with the UN Security Council over violations of its airspace. But there was no question of an Obama apology in this instance. At a news conference with President Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq, he gave this response to a question: “We’ve asked for [the drone] back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond.” An Iranian general retorted, “No nation welcomes other countries’ spy drones in its territory, and no one sends back the spying equipment and its information back to the country of origin.”
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Tehran then announced that it had decoded the information the RQ-170 had obtained on its flight, bringing an outburst from former vice president Dick Cheney that once the aircraft went down, the president should have responded with an air strike to destroy it before the Iranians could have learned anything more, in the same way SEAL Team Six had destroyed a damaged helicopter
during the Osama bin Laden raid. “You can do that from the air . . . and in effect, make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone.” But instead, Cheney said, Obama “asked nicely for them to return it, and they aren’t going to.” An Iranian toy company said it planned to send a toy version to President Obama via the Swiss embassy, to fulfill the U.S. wish to have the drone returned.
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The comic aspects of the RQ-170 affair soon vanished. Officials acknowledged the dead seriousness of American determination to stay on top of the Iranian nuclear program, the overriding issue in Iranian-American relations since the 2002 “axis of evil” speech George W. Bush delivered to Congress during the run-up to Gulf War II. And in recent months the pressure to do more than employ sanctions against Iran had grown steadily, with more talk about all options on the table and lines that the Iranians must not cross. In March 2009, at the outset of his administration, Obama had attempted to engage the Iranian leadership.

The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right, but it comes with real responsibilities. And that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization. . . . We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community. This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek, instead, engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.

Obama referred to the “Islamic Republic of Iran” in an effort to brush away his predecessor’s refusal to use that term—a supposed irritant in relations. But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threatened crippling sanctions against Iran if talks failed and it did not end its nuclear program. “We are also laying the groundwork for the
kind of very tough . . . crippling sanctions that might be necessary in the event that our offers are either rejected or the process is inconclusive or unsuccessful,” Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
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At various times during the first year of the Obama presidency, the president and secretary of state would refer to steps that might be taken should the Iranians refuse to talk about its nuclear enrichment program. There were new reports also that Iran was close to being able to produce a bomb warhead for its missiles. But American policy makers still believed that there would be ample time to take whatever action was needed. Secretary Clinton commented at one point that it would not make Iran any safer to possess nuclear arms, because the United States would extend a “defense umbrella” over friendly Middle Eastern states in addition to Israel, and increase weapons sales to those countries. Defense Secretary Panetta also spoke about a “wide range of military options” to be used if necessary to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. These included increased arms sales to Iran’s potential “rivals” (a very interesting formulation) as well as bellicose statements by U.S. officials. And there was a hint about “other covert efforts targeting Iran’s nuclear program.”
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This referred to the use of cyberweaponry—a practice begun during the Bush administration—to target Iranian computers at the Natanz nuclear plant. When computer experts picked up that attack, which they labeled the Stuxnet worm, after it escaped from Iranian computers and sped around the world, the president asked, “Should we shut this thing down?” The answer he got from CIA director Panetta was no, it was still causing havoc with Iran’s program, and so Obama authorized the continuation of the cyberattacks.
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The president was “acutely aware that with every attack [using cyberweapons] he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade.” Moreover, Obama was also acutely aware that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons, no
matter how well justified that use was, “could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks.”
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The comparison with “first use of atomic weapons” is particularly revealing, as well as sobering, because the initiation of atomic warfare was at the heart of Cold War fears that justified so many CIA activities. When the stakes were a nuclear holocaust, there was no question of not accepting the lesser evil of destabilizing a regime or removing a leader. In the current situation, the president told aides that if the cyberattacks failed and Iran developed a nuclear weapon, “there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.”
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American “control” of the Iranian situation—and its entire Middle Eastern policy—depended upon preempting an Israeli attack, then enlarging the area of secrecy.
New York Times
columnist Roger Cohen agreed that was the case but noted that it made him decidedly uneasy. Referring to a series of actions that began with the killing of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, Cohen said, “President Obama has gone undercover.” The president had remained silent about “a big explosion at a military base near Tehran” that killed a central figure in Iran’s nuclear program, nuclear scientists who had perished in the streets of the capital, and the Stuxnet computer worm. One day, Cohen worried, there might be payback. “There has seldom been so big a change in approach to U.S. strategic policy with so little explanation. . . . So why do I approve of all this? Because the alternative—the immense cost in blood and treasure and reputation of the Bush administration’s war on terror—was so appalling. In just the same way, the results of a conventional bombing war against Iran would be appalling, whether undertaken by Israel, the United States or a combination of the two.”
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Cohen’s assumption that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were the only alternatives to the silence was a measure of how far the country had traveled toward accepting the “lethal presidency” in less than four years. Cohen believed that the president did owe the nation “a speech that sets out why America will not embark again
on this kind of inconclusive war [Iraq and Afghanistan] and has instead adopted a new doctrine that has replaced fighting terror with killing terrorists.” He could also use that speech, Cohen ended, to explain why Guantánamo was still open.

Offshore Balancing

Peter Beinart, a thoughtful observer, put a name to Obama’s pivot toward drones: “offshore balancing.” Obama had come into office determined to eschew Bush unilateralism and to reinvigorate diplomacy. The drone policy made sense when one realized that the Obama administration had largely given up on trying to remake Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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“Instead of directly occupying Islamic lands,” Beinart wrote, “we’re trying to secure our interests from the sea, the air, and by equipping our allies.” It was also a policy for dealing with American interests in East Asia. “The strategy has deep roots in America, a nation rich in technology and naval power but highly sensitive to casualties.” Even in World War II, Franklin Roosevelt had hoped “to limit America’s participation in the European theater to air and naval support while the Russians and Brits fought Germany on land.” In this reading, Harry Truman’s Korean War (which led to Vietnam) and George W. Bush’s wars were the exception. Obama’s policy resembled Nixon’s “Vietnamization.” Some might call it a bit amoral, as it involved shirking the missionary call to remake societies and spread democracy, “but it offers a way for the U.S. to maintain influence at reduced cost, which is likely to be the central foreign policy challenge of the next few years.”
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In the future wars might resemble old-fashioned military campaigns at least in one respect, because they would not be about changing hearts and minds but instead would involve a technologically driven “realist” appraisal of the outside world. As Admiral James “Sandy” Winnefeld told a Strategic Command Cyber Space Conference, “We are not likely to have as our next fight a counter-insurgency.” While America had been teaching its troops Arabic and other regional languages to influence people at the village level,
the world had changed, and competitors were coming up with new asymmetric advantages. “They’ve been studying us closely.” There were no such things as borders anymore—at least so far as war was concerned. The border between public and private was fading, as countries were using individuals as “proxies.”
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A perfect example of the kind of war Beinart and Winnefeld imagined was the administration’s support for NATO forces as the struggle to depose Colonel Gaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, developed in the summer of 2011. Gaddafi’s opponents were on the ropes and outside observers feared a mass slaughter at the hands of his hired army when the United Nations authorized NATO to undertake the provision of humanitarian aid and the establishment of no-fly zones to protect the population. At first Obama was reluctant to become involved, even though he was criticized by both Republicans and Democrats for a failure to do more to remove Gaddafi. He would not pursue a regime change policy, he said. But as the NATO mission moved swiftly in that direction, its forces received significant aid. The American military destroyed Gaddafi’s air defense capabilities, then turned over day-to-day control to NATO, which would carry out further air strikes.