WASHINGTON - As Somalia undergoes its worst famine in six decades and Yemen
slides into civil war, the administration of President Barack Obama is
expanding its network of bases to carry out drone strikes against suspected
terrorists in both countries, according to reports published in two major
United States newspapers on Thursday.
Based in part on newly disclosed US diplomatic cables recently posted by
WikiLeaks, the Washington Post reported that the US military had been flying
armed drones over both countries from a base in Djibouti and was planning to
build a second base in Ethiopia.
The Post and the Wall Street Journal also reported that a base in the
Seychelles that the US military has previously used to fly
surveillance drones will now host armed drones capable of flying their lethal
payloads the more than 1,500 kilometers that separate the Indian Ocean island
chain from Somalia and the African mainland and back.
The "constellation" of drone bases will also include a secret new Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) base that the administration announced earlier this
year would be situated somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula.
That facility will be hosted by Saudi Arabia, according to an unnamed "senior
US military official" quoted in a FoxNews.com report also published on
Thursday.
"Operations in Saudi [Arabia] are [the] only new expansion to this plan," the
official was quoted as saying. "The rest has been working for over a year when
we long ago realized danger from AQAP [al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula]," a
Yemen-based affiliate which, according to recent statements by US intelligence
officials, has been consolidating links with al-Shabaab, the Somali group which
Washington claims also has ties to al-Qaeda.
Inter Press Service (IPS) calls to the Pentagon press office for confirmation
that Saudi Arabia was hosting the new base were not returned. But a former US
ambassador to Riyadh who has retained good ties with its government, Admiral
Chas Freeman (retired), said the report was "highly plausible" given both the
"close and robust" cooperation on counter-terrorism between the US and the
kingdom and its geographical proximity to Yemen.
According to one of the authors of the Post report, the expanding network is
designed to "avoid the mistakes of the past".
"When al-Qaeda fled Afghanistan into Pakistan in 2001 and 2002, it took years
before the CIA had assembled a drone program capable of putting the terrorist
network under pressure," wrote Greg Miller on the Post's website. "That delay,
and costly deals for air-basing access in neighboring countries, allowed
al-Qaeda to flourish."
The reports come amid considerable controversy about the increased use by the
Obama administration of armed drones, ominously named Predators, and the
longer-range Reapers, in its counter-terrorism campaign.
In Pakistan, where the CIA greatly sharply increased unilateral drone strikes -
to nearly 200 - against "high-value" al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in the first
two years of the Obama administration, the tactic has contributed heavily to an
increase in anti-Americanism. An overwhelming 97% of respondents in a recent
Pew Research Center poll in Pakistan, where anti-Americanism is at an all-time
high, said they viewed drone attacks negatively.
Indeed, none other than Obama's first top intelligence chief, Admiral Dennis
Blair (retired), told an elite gathering of foreign policy and national
security wonks in July that it was a mistake "to have [an air-only] campaign
dominate our overall relations" with Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
"Because we're alienating the countries concerned, because we're treating
countries just as places where we go attack groups that threaten us, we are
threatening the prospects of long-term reform," he said. Such strikes should
only be carried out with the consent of the host government.
But Obama's new Pentagon chief and former CIA director Leon Panetta rejected
that criticism, insisting that the tactic had been and would continue to be
"effective at undermining al-Qaeda and their ability to plan attacks [against
the US]".
Panetta and the Pentagon have also reportedly led the charge in an ongoing
debate within the administration to broaden the current target list in Yemen
and Somalia from high-level leaders of AQAP and al-Shabaab, who are presumed to
share al-Qaeda's global aims, to include low-level foot soldiers, whose
motivation for joining such groups may be more parochial and less ambitious.
The drone has increasingly become the administration's "weapon of choice" in
its efforts to subdue al-Qaeda and its affiliates, although it has been used
far less frequently against targets in Yemen and Somalia than in Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Iraq.
At least six drone strikes targeted alleged militants in Yemen in 2010 and
2011, but that number may have risen recently due to the collapse amid the
ongoing political turmoil of the central government's authority over various
parts of the country. Militias that Washington believes are tied to AQAP have
taken control of towns near the Gulf of Aden.
"There's an assumption that the US has used a lot of aerial strikes in recent
months, but it's difficult to get verification," said Gregory Johnson, a Yemen
expert at Princeton University.
In Somalia, where Washington has also used cruise missiles and heliborne
Special Operations Forces (SOF) against senior al-Shabaab leaders, there are
believed to have been only two drones strikes since 2007.
According to the Post and Journal accounts, Washington used a base in the
Seychelles in 2009 and 2010 to fly drones for surveillance of both Somalia and
Somali piracy activity in the Indian Ocean. According to the WikiLeaks cables
cited by the Post, Seychelles President James Michel has concurred with the
idea of arming the drones.
Somalia's Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali told the Journal that he did not
object to armed drone attacks on members of al-Shabaab, provided that such
operations were coordinated with his government, but that he opposed attacks on
pirates.
The Post reported that the US had negotiated with Ethiopia, with which
Washington also cooperates closely on counter-terrorism activities, for four
years over building a base for armed drones on its territory. Fox News reported
that the US had flown surveillance drones from several Ethiopian bases.
"There could certainly be a lot of internal discussion before they would agree
to authorize the use of a base [for armed drones]," said David Shinn, a former
US ambassador to Addis Ababa. "They don't want to be seen as a pawn of anyone."
Shinn, who teaches at George Washington University, said the use of armed
drones should be highly constrained and warned against its becoming "the
default policy for dealing with Somalia".
"I don't see a problem with using an aerial strike with a couple of huge
caveats," he told IPS. "First, that you have intelligence which is 95% accurate
or better on a high value target - which is a pretty tough standard - and,
second, that there's little or no likelihood of collateral damage. If you're
using these things willy-nilly on the basis of not very good intelligence, then
it will be counter-productive."
Johnson voiced similar caution, noting that "Washington has drifted into this
tactic, because it can't seem to find any other good options in Yemen".
"But it runs the very real risk of actually exacerbating the situation," he
noted. "The problem with drones is that the US doesn't have a very good track
record on killing who it's aiming at in Yemen. So it often ends up killing
civilians, which drives their brothers, fathers, sons, nephews, etc into the
hands of al-Qaeda and makes it easier for al-Qaeda to argue that Yemen is an
active theater of jihad, no different from Iraq or Afghanistan."
He also expressed concern about the CIA building a base in Saudi Arabia. "One
of the primary motivations for Osama bin Laden's jihad against the US were
military bases housing US troops in Saudi Arabia after the end of the Gulf War
[in 1991]," he wrote on his blog, Waq al-Waq. "Does the US think this current
of thought no longer holds sway in Arabia?
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.
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