Two Afghan families awaiting safe passage to start a new life in America became the latest victims of America’s 20-year “war on terror”. The US drone strike conducted against Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) last month in retaliation for a terror attack on Kabul airport resulted in the deaths of ten civilians, including seven children. The Pentagon has retracted its initial claims that the victims were terrorists presenting an imminent threat, now describing the strike as “a tragic mistake”.

The media outrage sparked by the incident has drawn attention to a practice which has been consistently quietly brushed under the carpet by successive US administrations. In the last five years alone, there have been 3,977 Afghan civilian casualties from airstrikes, 40% of which were children. Amid the Biden administration’s review of its counterterrorism program, there have been calls to ensure greater civilian protections, transparency, and oversight of the use of drones.

DRONE WARFARE

Since 9/11, drone warfare has become a central tenet of US counterterrorism strategy offering successive presidents a low-risk alternative to “boots on the ground’. In addition to minimising risks to military personnel, drone advocates contend that the precise nature of the weapon avoids unnecessary civilian casualties making it potentially “more lawful and more consistent with human rights and humanitarian law than the alternatives”. The discourse around this false conviction and moral justification has concealed what some scholars have called “ethical slippage” in which drone operators have relaxed their operational practices making decisions under greater uncertainty.

According to a recent analysis by Airwars, at least 22,679, and potentially as many as 48,308, civilians have been killed by US airstrikes since 9/11. These strikes occurred across seven major conflict zones with deadly attacks peaking during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the campaign against the so-called Islamic State from 2015-2017. Whilst the Pentagon’s Central Command (CENTCOM) has admitted to a fraction of these civilian killings, it has failed to publish its own estimates for the number of civilians killed by its actions claiming the data is not readily available.

A LACK OF OVERSIGHT

The legal basis for the conduct of US counter-terrorism direct action operations (involving kill or capture) remains the 2001 Authorisation for Use of Military Force (AUMF) granted to President Bush by Congress. The malleable scope of this statute (with no termination date or geographic boundaries) has facilitated the expansion of the “war on terror” and justified presidential discretion over lethal operations including drone strikes. The introduction of the “Presidential Policy Guidance” (PPG) by President Obama was framed as a constraint on direct action operations by requiring “near certainty” that both the individuals were lawful targets, and the action could be conducted without injuring or killing non-combatants. However, critics argue the PPG institutionalised the global war on terror, normalising the use of drones beyond the conventional battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq, and later Syria.

A new framework adopted by the Trump Administration dispensed with several of the disruptive safeguards of the PPG, including the threshold of “near certainty” to avoid civilian casualties, bureaucratic procedures for approving lethal operations, and the requirement to publicly share information such as the groups targeted and the number of civilians killed by drone strikes. This led to an uptick in both the operational intensity of drone strikes and the number of civilian casualties in the last five years. This was particularly evident in Afghanistan, where following the loosening of the Rules of Engagement for airstrikes against the Taliban in 2017 the airstrike casualty rate for Afghan civilians more than doubled in the next year and tripled by the end of 2019.

As President Biden pursues an end to America’s “forever wars” it remains to be seen whether this includes the unrestrained and unaccountable use of drone warfare. In a joint letter, more than 100 human rights and anti-war organisations have urged Biden to end the “unlawful program of lethal strikes outside any recognized battlefield”. Since taking office in January 2021, the Biden Administration has paused direct action strikes outside of Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan whilst it reviews the policy framework. However, US officials believe the review will endorse practices somewhere between the Obama and Trump approaches and therefore more civilian casualties are inevitable. The intrinsically covert and light footprint nature of America’s drone warfare has largely shielded it from public and congressional scrutiny likely enabling its continuance indefinitely.

Archie has a MA in Conflict, Security, and Development from the University of Exeter, and a BA in International Relations. He is particularly interested in ethno-sectarian conflict in the Middle East, Islamist movements and the language of political violence. Archie has aspirations to work as a political risk analyst or as a civil servant.

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