With CIA pick, a light on drone strikes' hazards

Sana, Yemen: In late August, a 40-year-old cleric named Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber stood up to deliver a speech denouncing al-Qaida in a village mosque in far eastern Yemen.

It was a brave gesture by a father of seven who commanded great respect in the community, and it did not go unnoticed. Two days later, three members of al-Qaida came to the mosque in the tiny village of Khashamir after 9 p.m., saying they merely wanted to talk. Jaber agreed to meet them, bringing his cousin Waleed Abdullah, a police officer, for protection.

As the five men stood arguing by a cluster of palm trees, a volley of remotely operated U.S. missiles shot down from the night sky and incinerated them all, along with a camel that was tied up nearby.

The killing of Jaber, just the kind of leader most crucial to U.S. efforts to eradicate al-Qaida, was a reminder of the inherent hazards of the quasi-secret campaign of targeted killings that the United States is waging against suspected militants not just in Yemen but also in Pakistan and Somalia. Individual strikes by the Predator and Reaper drones are almost never discussed publicly by Obama administration officials. But the clandestine war will receive a rare moment of public scrutiny Thursday, when its chief architect, John O. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser, faces a Senate confirmation hearing as President Barack Obama's nominee for CIA director.

From his basement office in the White House, Brennan has served as the principal coordinator of a "kill list" of al-Qaida operatives marked for death, overseeing drone strikes by the military and the CIA, and advising Obama on which strikes he should approve.

"He's probably had more power and influence than anyone in a comparable position in the last 20 years," said Daniel Benjamin, who recently stepped down as the State Department's top counterterrorism official and now teaches at Dartmouth. "He's had enormous sway over the intelligence community. He's had a profound impact on how the military does counterterrorism."

Brennan, a former CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has taken a particular interest in Yemen, sounding early alarms within the administration about the threat developing there, working closely with neighboring Saudi Arabia to gain approval for a secret CIA drone base there that is used for U.S. strikes, and making the impoverished desert nation a test case for U.S. counterterrorism strategy.

In recent years, both CIA and Pentagon counterterrorism officials have pressed for greater freedom to attack suspected militants, and colleagues say Brennan has often been a restraining voice. The strikes have killed a number of operatives of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network's affiliate in Yemen, including Said Ali al-Shihri, a deputy leader of the group, and the U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

But they have also claimed civilians like Jaber and have raised troubling questions that apply to Pakistan and Somalia as well: Could the targeted killing campaign be creating more militants in Yemen than it is killing? And is it in America's long-term interest to be waging war against a self-renewing insurgency inside a country about which Washington has at best a hazy understanding?

Several former top military and intelligence officials - including Stanley A. McChrystal, the retired general who led the Joint Special Operations Command, which has responsibility for the military's drone strikes, and Michael V. Hayden, the former CIA director - have raised concerns that the drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen are increasingly targeting low-level militants who do not pose a direct threat to the United States.

In an interview with Reuters, McChrystal said drones could be a useful tool but were "hated on a visceral level" in some of the places where they were used and contributed to a "perception of American arrogance."

A parallel campaign

U.S. officials have never explained in public why the CIA and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command are carrying out parallel drone campaigns in Yemen. Privately, however, they describe an arrangement that has evolved since the frantic, ad hoc early days of America's war there.

The first strike in Yemen ordered by the Obama administration, in December 2009, was by all accounts a disaster. U.S. cruise missiles carrying cluster munitions killed dozens of civilians, including many women and children. Another strike, six months later, killed a popular deputy governor, inciting angry demonstrations and an attack that shut down a critical oil pipeline.

Not long afterward, the CIA began quietly building a drone base in Saudi Arabia to carry out strikes in Yemen. U.S. officials said that the first time the CIA used the Saudi base was to kill Awlaki in September 2011.

Since then, officials said, the CIA has been given the mission of hunting and killing "high-value targets" in Yemen - the leaders of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula who Obama administration lawyers have determined pose a direct threat to the United States. When the CIA obtains specific intelligence on the whereabouts of someone on its kill list, a U.S. drone can carry out a strike without the permission of Yemen's government.

There is, however, a tighter leash on the Pentagon's drones. According to U.S. officials, the Joint Special Operations Command must get the Yemeni government's approval before launching a drone strike. This restriction is in place, officials said, because the military's drone campaign is closely tied to counterterrorism operations conducted by Yemeni special operations troops.

Yemen's military is fighting its own counterinsurgency battle against Islamic militants, who gained and then lost control over large swaths of the country last year. Often, U.S. military strikes in Yemen are masked as Yemeni government operations.

Moreover, Obama demanded early on that each U.S. military strike in Yemen be approved by a committee in Washington representing the national security agencies. The CIA strikes, by contrast, resulted from a far more closed process inside the agency. Brennan plays a role in overseeing all the strikes.

Complex ties

Although most Yemenis are reluctant to admit it publicly, there does appear to be widespread support for the U.S. drone strikes that hit substantial al-Qaida figures like Shihri, a Saudi and the affiliate's deputy leader, who died in January of wounds received in a drone strike late last year.

Yet even as both Brennan and Hadi, the Yemeni president, praise the drone technology for its accuracy, other Yemenis often point out that it can be very difficult to isolate members of al-Qaida, thanks to the group's complex ties and long history in Yemen.

Innocents aside, even members of al-Qaida invariably belong to a tribe, and when they are killed in drone strikes, their relatives - whatever their feelings about al-Qaida - often swear to exact revenge on America.

"Al-Qaida always gives money to the family," said Hussein Ahmed Othman al Arwali, a tribal sheik from an area south of the capital called Mudhia, where al-Qaida militants fought pitched battles with Yemeni soldiers last year. "Al-Qaida's leaders may be killed by drones, but the group still has its money, and people are still joining. For young men who are poor, the incentives are very strong: They offer you marriage, or money, and the ideological part works for some people."

Robert F. Worth reported from Sana, and Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane from Washington.