May 22, 2013 | Quote
Debate Aside, Number of Drone Strikes Drops Sharply
President Obama embraced drone strikes in his first term, and the targeted killing of suspected terrorists has come to define his presidency.
But lost in the contentious debate over the legality, morality and effectiveness of a novel weapon is the fact that the number of strikes has actually been in decline. Strikes in Pakistan peaked in 2010 and have fallen sharply since then; their pace in Yemen has slowed to half of last year’s rate; and no strike has been reported in Somalia for more than a year.
In a long-awaited address on Thursday at the National Defense University, Mr. Obama will make his most ambitious attempt to date to lay out his justification for the strikes and what they have achieved. He may follow up on public promises, including one he made in his State of the Union speech in February to define a “legal architecture” for choosing targets, possibly shifting more strikes from the C.I.A. to the military; explain how he believes that presidents should be “reined in” in their exercise of lethal power; and take steps to make a program veiled in secrecy more transparent.
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Tracing the rise and decline of strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, it is possible to correlate some of the numbers with shifting political conditions. In Pakistan, for instance, the C.I.A. has cut back on strikes as relations have grown strained — after the arrest of a C.I.A. contractor, Raymond Davis, in January 2011, for example, and after the incursion of a SEAL team to kill Osama bin Laden in May 2011. A recent hiatus in strikes in Pakistan may have been prompted by the desire not to fuel anti-American sentiments during the campaign before the May 11 general elections.
Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. analyst and Brookings Institution scholar, said there were many reasons for the declining number of strikes in Pakistan.
“But a growing awareness of the cost of drone strikes in U.S.-Pakistan relations is probably at the top of the list,” Mr. Riedel said. “They are deadly to any hope of reversing the downward slide in ties with the fastest growing nuclear weapons state in the world.”
In Yemen, strikes rose sharply last year as the United States supported efforts by Yemeni authorities to reclaim territory taken over by the local Al Qaeda branch and its supporters in the tumultuous aftermath of the Arab Spring, said Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal, a Web site that tracks the strikes. The numbers have declined since, and there were no strikes at all in Yemen in February or March.
Mr. Roggio said a growing chorus of criticism — including a young Yemeni journalist who passionately criticized the strikes at a recent Senate hearing — may be influencing American policy. “I get the sense that the microscope on the program is leading to greater selectivity in ordering strikes,” he said.