Steve Coll’s ‘Unblinking Stare’ highlights contradictions in U.S. drone campaign

By Bailey Cahall

Best Defense office of drone affairs

North Waziristan, a remote Pakistani tribal region and one of the hardest hit by U.S. drone strikes, has long been a place where access is restricted and Western journalists cannot go. Yet in his latest New Yorker piece, "The Unblinking Stare," which details the United States’ drone war in Pakistan, Steve Coll brings it to us by highlighting the work of Noor Behram, a local journalist who drives around on a motorcycle documenting the aftermath of CIA drone strikes. (Full disclosure: Coll is the former president of New America, where I work as a policy analyst, and is still a member of the organization’s International Security Advisory Council, though we have never met. Tom is also affiliated with New America. And he used to work for Steve at the Washington Post. They also share a prize-winning book publisher, Penguin Press. But we digress.)

Coll begins by describing photographs that Behram has taken, which clearly show that civilians, particularly children, have been wounded and killed in the strikes. But despite Behram’s valiant efforts and this seemingly indisputable proof that not everyone who has been killed in a strike has been a militant, many of the issues surrounding the controversial program remain the same as they did five years ago, when I first started following the U.S. drone campaign.

Officials at the CIA, which operates the unmanned platforms, still argue that the agency is well aware of the laws of armed conflict and follows those guidelines — necessity, distinction, and proportionality — when determining targets. Human rights groups and U.N. lawyers continue to push back and say that the strikes are, in fact, not lawful. And though no one denies the program’s success in dismantling al Qaeda core, no one can seem to agree on how many civilians have been killed in such strikes either.

For instance, during CIA Director John Brennan’s confirmation hearing in February 2013, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that the number of civilian deaths caused by CIA drone strikes each year was "typically in the single digits." New America’s International Security Program has recorded between 258 and 307 civilian deaths since 2004, while the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s high estimate is close to one thousand.

But the fact that so much has remained the same also highlights the importance of Coll’s piece, because the CIA’s drone program is still shrouded in secrecy, leaving questions about the agency’s use of the weapons unanswered. For though the agency says its actions are legal, it has never explained its targeting criteria or how its counts whether a victim is a militant or a civilian. It has also never described what sort of investigation occurs when something goes wrong. While I certainly understand the need to keep parts of the operations classified, I’m finding it harder to take the agency at its word that all is well, there’s nothing to see here, and to keep moving along.

Bailey Cahall is a policy analyst with New America’s International Security Program. She is also an associate editor for ForeignPolicy.com’s South Asia Channel.