Tragic strike
Answers are needed on the Pakistan drone attack
The deaths of American aid contractor Warren Weinstein and Italian health worker Giovanni Lo Porto in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan in January should put the issue of the effectiveness and consistency of the drone program with America’s principles in new, sharp focus.
These two men — serving humanitarian roles in a difficult country — were the very last people who should have been taken captive by al-Qaida or killed by U.S. drones. Although their tragic deaths give rise to various questions that deserve answers, it’s unclear, given the Obama administration’s track record on the drone program, that satisfactory information will be forthcoming.
The first element worth clarification is how the men came to be at the the target of a drone attack. Presumably, they were killed inadvertently and not as part of some grisly calculation that would have intentionally made them collateral damage in an otherwise justifiable strike on al-Qaida personnel. Yet the CIA evidently had been conducting surveillance of the site near the Afghan border for hundreds of hours prior to the assault.
To the public’s knowledge, drone attacks are carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. Eight Americans, including Mr. Weinstein, have so far been acknowledged to have been killed by unmanned aerial assaults in the region.
The drone program in Pakistan and Yemen has killed between 2,449 and 3,949 people, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism; among them were 423 to 962 civilians. The CIA has disputed those numbers. Even so, the program has caused widespread anger among Pakistanis, and it is hard to gauge how many sworn enemies the attacks on noncombatants have made for America.
President Barack Obama said he intended to end the drone program at the end of 2014, when the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan was supposed to expire. Yet these two aid workers were killed in January. That could mean that the CIA is operating outside Mr. Obama’s control, or that he and his staff are not adhering to his promises.
Mr. Obama, in his televised apology on Thursday for the deaths, pledged to hold an investigation into what went wrong and why U.S. intelligence did not know the captives were being held there. He took full responsibility for the botched operation and offered his “deepest apologies” to the two families. But that’s not enough.
It is possible, given Mr. Weinstein’s and Mr. Lo Porto’s personal missions of providing help and not harm, that they would have been glad if something good came of their deaths. Perhaps the end of the U.S. drone program is the appropriate result.