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This Chapter was published as a guest editorial in Anthropology Today, 29: 4, August 2013, under the title “Foregrounding the Muslim tribal periphery”. This book is arguably the finest of Professor Akbar Ahmed’s many publications, blending a literary and religious sensibility with political and historical analysis – a model for engaged anthropology. It can be read on two levels. It is a political indictment of the disproportionate victimization of Muslim tribespeople by remotely controlled military weapons – a policy which risks leading to a cycle of revenge. But the drone is also a metaphor for the current age of globalization, “something which comes from nowhere, destroys your life and goes away”, while the prickly, tenacious “thistle” is an image that captures the essence of tribal societies (an image borrowed from Tolstoy’s posthumous novel Hadji Murad).

Aiden Warren argues in Chapter Nine:The Changing Face of Interventions and the Deployment of New Technologies that the continual advancement of new technologies in theaters of conflict, and more specifically in the context of interventions, pose some very distinct challenges. These challenges are examined in relation to notions of regulation, associated moral, ethical and legal debates, as well as logistical dimensions. As the most topical form of new technology, the chapter looks at the increase in the use of drones as well as debates regarding their viability as an option in humanitarian contexts. Warren also considers the implications surrounding their utility and the ‘dehumanization of death,’ including those actors who are complicit in their science and construction. In the context of humanitarian interventions, the chapter interrogates the varying debates pertaining to the potential of drone usage and the security dilemmas that could arise should they continue to become a significant option in a states’ repertoire of intervention. Lastly, he argues, as technology rapidly advances and drones become wholly “off the loop” in the form of “killer robots,” additional complexities may arise in future security scenarios and the need for new regulations.

Barack Obama believed that Bush #43’s reliance on torture and preventive war had squandered America’s moral leadership. Rather than “rolling back” rogue states, the Obama administration cautiously pursued a strategy of “contagement”—containment plus engagement—first with China and later with Iran and the Arabs. Eager to embrace Muslim moderates and isolate Muslim extremists, Obama ramped down the war in Iraq and ramped up the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Implementing “contagement,” however, was a nightmare, especially after upheavals rocked Cairo and other Arab capitals. As “contagement” faltered, Obama relied on covert action conducted by Navy SEALs and remote control attacks carried out by CIA drones to combat Islamic radicals. Despite his attempt to reshape America’s relations with the Muslim world, by late 2015 Barack Obama would find himself back in the familiar world of “us versus them,” with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seemingly posing a danger as grave as anything since 1945.

We suggest light can be shed on the moral dilemmas by looking at drones as a type of preventive force that lies in the undefined security space between acts of war and acts of law-enforcement, what some scholars have been referring to as jus ad vim. Thus, ethical standards governing their use are more permissive than law enforcement, but more restrictive than war. This claim rests on the notion drone strikes against terrorist targets are typically an act of preventative force short of war, where opaque notions of imminence raise deep concerns about when such a strike is justified (in lieu of attempts to capture suspected terrorists or after such attempts have failed). In this paper, we focus on exploring what last resort means for a drone strike. We offer a moral framework that combines the standards of law enforcement – i.e. indictment (in abstention) of suspected terrorists - with a circumscribed notion of imminence to define the rare circumstances under which the preventive use of lethal drones may be legitimate. This framework speaks to the need to restrict the number of strikes to a minimum of isolated acts of preventive force, instead of pursuing the dangerous policy of a broader (preventive) drone war.

The period known as the “War on Terror” has prompted a revival of interest in the idea of moral dilemmas and the problem of “dirty hands” in public life. Some contend that a policy of targeted killing of terrorist actors is (under specified but not uncommon circumstances) an instance of a dirty-handed moral dilemma – morally required yet morally forbidden, the least evil choice available in the circumstances, but one that nevertheless leaves an indelible moral stain on the character of the person who makes the choice. In this chapter we argue that, while dirty hands situations do exist as a persistent problem of political life, it is generally a mistake to classify policies of target killing (such as the current US policy) as examples of dirty hands. Instead, we maintain, such policies, if justified at all, must ordinarily be justified under the more exacting standards of just war theory and its provisions for justified killing – in particular the requirement that (with limited and defined exceptions) non-combatants be immune from intentional violence. Understanding this distinction both clarifies the significance of dirty hands as a moral phenomenon and also forestalls a set of predictable and all-too-easy appropriations of the concept to domains it was never intended to address.

In this chapter, we reassert that preventive force can be understood in terms of a continuum, where the scope and severity of preventive force may vary, but the basic logic remains the same: using force in order to stop a suspected, potential threat from emerging at an undefined point in the future. We then attempt to synthesize the scholarship within the volume, in terms of current issues with preventive force. Here we review the authors’ contributions on the following themes: the costs and benefits of employing preventive force, the political causes and consequences of preventive force, and the legal and ethical implications of preventive actions. We then consider the future of preventive force in light of security challenges in the 21^st century.

Contemporary warfare has been significantly transformed by the promotion and implementation of unmanned aerial vehicles (or drones) into global military operations. Networked remote sensory vision and the drones’ capability to carry deadly missiles entail and facilitate increasingly individualised, racialised, and necropolitical military practices conceptualised as ‘surgical strikes’ or ‘targeted killings’, all in the name of ‘counterinsurgency’. In the absence of publicly accessible documentations of ‘drone vision’, images of drones themselves constitute what is arguably one of the most contested iconographies of the present. The ethical and legal problems engendered by the virtualisation of violence and the panoptical fantasies of persistent vision and continuous threat interfere with the commercial interests and the publicised ideas of ‘clean’ warfare of the military-industrial-media complex. Drones have become a fetishised icon of warfare running out of human measure and control and are henceforth challenged by activist strategies highlighting the blind spots and victims of their deployment.

This chapter is the first of two on air power. This chapter focuses on colonial bombing campaigns as an exercise of air power and examines the ways in which these campaigns were understood as police measures. The chapter then explores the ways in which contemporary air power, in the form of drones, might also be understood as a form of police power. In making this case the chapters also shows how the invention of air power meant the destruction of the civilian.

Taking up the argument from the previous chapter concerning air power as police power, this chapter looks at no-fly zones as the perfect accompaniment for drones. The chapter takes a long historical detour to explore the birth of the idea of ‘international police’. The chapter shows that for ‘international police’ to really take hold of the geopolitical imagination, air power was necessary. Once air power was invented then the leading states could discuss ‘policing the world’ by exercising violence. The chapter therefore picks up the threads of the previous chapter and argues that within the contemporary frame the use of drones as police power is inherently linked with the use of no-fly zones.

This chapter examines two facets of Obama’s military choices in Afghanistan, including the two troop surges in Afghanistan in 2009 and the evolution of his drone-strike policies. It focuses on how President Obama interacted with Congress over these aspects of his foreign- and military-policy decision-making process. The evidence indicates that Congress played a minimal role in shaping Obama’s military decisions for the United States, despite a steep increase in drone warfare. This war powers interplay followed the patterns established for previous U.S. military operations, when the commander in chief dominated the foreign-policy process and Congress deferred, offering only minimal oversight.

This chapter argues that preventive force is a security strategy defined along a continuum. While the scale of preventive force varies, the strategic aim is the same: to thwart the development of possible future threats from suspected ill-willed actors. At one end of the spectrum are extreme forms of preventive force, including preventive nuclear strikes and preventive wars. Closer to the other end of the spectrum are smaller scale applications of preventive force, including drone strikes outside of legally recognized war zones, which target and kill individuals regarded as potential security threats. Although preventive targeted killings entail a relatively more limited use of force compared to war, the dramatic expansion of the drone program is consistent with the United States’ enduring commitment to preventive action. Within this context, this chapter reviews historical trends in US preventive logic and its use of preventive force at the beginning of the 21^st century. It then provides an overview of the dilemmas that arise. Finally, it provides an overview of each of the chapters in the volume.

In September 2012, the author of this chapter co-authored a report documenting the inefficacy, unpopularity, and presumed illegality of the US drones program as it was carried out in northwest Pakistan. The main findings of the report have since been confirmed by subsequent investigations and official documents released to the public. In this chapter, however, the author reflects on the question that was not addressed in the report, namely whether—and, if so, how—drones are different from other weapons designed to kill people during times of conflict? The question is controversial, in that it pits traditional laws governing war against emerging popular notions of ethics in confusing and sometimes contradictory ways. But it is also an important question to address, both to understand the emotional reaction that the US drone program continues to engender at home and abroad, as well as to develop ethical policies to govern the use and further development of drones technology worldwide.

Drones have many positive attributes, including the theoretical ability to distinguish between legitimate military targets and protected civilian persons and objects than piloted aircraft. But that said, the legality of any specific drone attack depends on a number of factors, including the existence of an actual armed conflict, the validity of the target under both international and U.S. domestic law, and the compliance with law of war rules in carrying out the strike. Although U.S. domestic law authorizes the CIA to engage in covert action, international law only privileges the use of force by actual military personnel and platforms. There is no requirement for any “due process” during an armed conflict other than the application of careful judgment and the taking of feasible precautions by a reasonable commander. No amount of procedural safeguards, or even a judicial finding, on the other hand, can justify deliberate killing outside of an actual armed conflict except in situations where an imminent threat calls for immediate actions in self-defense. But the fact there is time to engage in structured deliberations would seem to prove the lack of immediacy required to justify an attack under a self-defense rubric. Most U.S. drone attacks are thus quite problematic as a matter of law.

Is the United States’ secret use of drones to conduct so-called “targeted killings” outside the active war zone of Afghanistan legal? Although the war may not have easily definable geographic boundaries, a war between a state and an armed group such as this one must have limits, for political, ethical and legal reasons. International law provides those limits, and the United States, to be seen as respecting international law – which is importantly politically and strategically -- must publicly acknowledge them. This chapter will focus on the requirements of human rights law, which the US still does not recognize as binding on it outside the US. In particular, it will argue there is a need for the US to provide information about civilian casualties after a strike in order to demonstrate its compliance with IHL and/or IHRL, depending on the operation. Without such after-the-fact reporting, it is impossible for U.S. citizens, allies or potential enemies to have faith that the United States is acting within the confines of international law. To operate without that public trust not only undermines core principles of American democracy, but undermines U.S. counterterrorism efforts as well.

Much of the critique of the US drone program in Pakistan relies upon heroic assumptions about the program, who it targets and with what outcomes, and the degree to which the Pakistani government has been complicit in the program. In this chapter, I first provide important contextual information that should foreground any study of RPV usage in Pakistan. Next, I discuss some of the problems with popular notions of “Pakistani sovereignty” that undergird commentary about the RPV program there. I then evaluate Pakistan’s willingness and ability to do more to protect the international community from the terrorist groups ensconced in its territory. Following this, I critique recent advocacy-driven reports, highlighting the methodological, and even ethical, problems that undermine them. I conclude with a number of thoughts on how scholars can improve the quality and thus reliability of their work to understand the impact of the RPV program in Pakistan and perhaps other low information environments.

Preventive use of force by the United States over the last decade, most notably in Iraq and currently by means of armed drones operating far from conventional battlefields, is bound to have huge consequences for the international legal regime and particularly the Ius ad Bellum. Yet these consequences need not, as many commentators and scholars have worried, be all bad. Indeed, we argue in this chapter that they may have some unintended positive effects on the law of self-defense and particularly on the interpretation of Article 51 of the UN Charter. This chapter begins by briefly reviewing the famously contentious debates over the meaning of self-defense under Article 51 in the era before 2001, and then sketches an interpretation of how US uses of force, and increasingly those of other states like Israel, Turkey and Colombia, are re-shaping those debates and creating the basis for a new compromise permitting limited, episodic exercises of force in response to sustained patterns of attack by non-state actors. The integration of such a compromise into the customary practice of states has the potential both to resolve inconclusive and sterile debates over the meaning of Article 51.

Barack Obama responded to the financial crisis by working with Congress and the Federal Reserve to stabilize the economy. He adjusted existing precedents about dealing with terrorists, setting new baselines for the terror war. He bombed Libya without congressional authorization. He did seek authorization to deal with Syria. He unilaterally engaged in drone and cyber warfare, and used special forces to kill bin Laden. He used the National Security Agency to search for terror plots. Constitutional law is underdeveloped regarding these national security matters. He protected state secrets and prosecuted leaks aggressively. He sponsored health care reform and successfully defended the constitutionality of Obamacare in the Supreme Court. He struggled with Congress over the budget and the debt ceiling, leading to a government shutdown. He eventually supported gay rights. He used executive orders when Congress would not provide new authority.