Double standards?: Obama eases rules for Pakistan drone strikes: report

Secret waiver allowed CIA to hit targets with more flexibility than anywhere else

NEW YORK:

US President Barack Obama “secretly” approved a waiver to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the rules for its drone programme allowing more flexibility to strike suspected militants in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world, a leading US newspaper reported Monday.

The Wall Street Journal report comes just days after US officials admitted that two Western hostages – American and Italian aid workers Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto – were killed in a January 15 drone strike targeting al Qaeda militants in Pakistan.

Citing current and former US officials, the newspaper said the rules were tightened in 2013 to reduce the risk of civilian casualties, requiring that the proposed targets must pose an imminent threat to the US. But the presidential waiver exempted the CIA from this standard in Pakistan.



“If the exemption had not been in place for Pakistan, the CIA might have been required to gather more intelligence before that strike,” the Journal said. According to the report, support for the drone programme remains strong across the US government, but the killings have renewed a debate within the administration over whether the CIA should now be reined in or asked to meet the tighter standards that apply to drone programmes outside of Pakistan.

Last week, President Obama apologised for the aid workers’ killings and took personal responsibility for the mistake. He called the operation “fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct counterterrorism efforts in the region”, without specifying what those guidelines were or how they differed from those applied in the rest of the world. Current and former officials say many of the changes President Obama called for in 2013 have not been implemented or remain works in progress.

On its part, Pakistan has long objected to drone strikes in its tribal areas. In a statement after the US announcement of aid workers’ death, the Pakistani foreign office said: “The deaths of Weinstein and Lo Porto in a drone strike demonstrate the risk and unintended consequences of the use of this technology that Pakistan has been highlighting for a long time.”

Details about the CIA drone programme have been shrouded in official secrecy since its inception because it is covert, the WSJ pointed out.



Seeking to maintain an effective national security weapon in the face of opposition from within his own party, Obama in a 2013 speech at the National Defence University had spelled out some rules governing drone strikes, which he codified in a “presidential policy guidance” directive. Among them were that the threat needed to be imminent and that the US had to have “near-certainty” no civilians would be killed or injured.

Officials said the directive also included language aimed at curbing and eventually eliminating a particular type of drone strike in which the US believed an individual was a militant, but did not know his identity.

These so-called “signature” strikes have been responsible for killing more al Qaeda leadership targets than strikes directly targeting high-value leaders, especially in Pakistan, the Journal said, citing current and former US officials. The strike that killed Weinstein and Lo Porto was a signature strike.

Under a classified addendum to the directive approved by President Obama, however, the CIA’s drone programme in Pakistan was exempted from the “imminent threat” requirement, at least until the US forces completed their pullout from Afghanistan, according to the report.


Published in The Express Tribune, April 28^th, 2015.