Trump seeks to ease rules on drone strikes, raids
Change would allow attacks in countries in which U.S. has yet to engage in operations
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing to dismantle key Obama-era limits on drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional battlefields, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations. The changes would lay the groundwork for possible counterterrorism missions in countries where Islamic militants are active but the United States has not previously tried to kill or capture them.
President Donald Trump’s top national security advisers have proposed relaxing two rules, the officials said. First, the targets of proposed drone strikes and raids, now generally limited to high-level militants deemed to pose a “continuing and imminent threat” to Americans, would be expanded to include foot-soldier jihadis with no unique skills or leadership roles. And second, such attacks by the military and CIA would no longer go through highlevel vetting.
But administration officials have also agreed that they should keep in place one important constraint for such attacks: a requirement of “near certainty” that no civilian bystanders be killed.
The proposal to overhaul the rules has quietly taken shape over months of debate among administration officials and awaits Trump’s expected signature. It prompted an outcry from human rights groups, which had objected even to the more rigorous Obama administration standards.
The policy would pave the way for broader and more frequent operations against al-Qaida, the Islamic State and other jihadis. It would also apply in countries where the U.S. has targeted Islamist militants outside of regular combat for years, including Yemen, Somalia and Libya, and would ease the
way to expanding such grayzone acts of sporadic warfare to elsewhere in Africa, Asia and the Middle East where terrorists operate.
The policy, while containing significant changes, also preserves a key structure of President Barack Obama’s approach to counterterrorism — dividing the world into war zones and places where higher protections for civilians apply. The elements of continuity suggest that as the war on terrorism drifts toward its 17th year, political, legal, diplomatic and practical hurdles constrain the Trump administration from making more radical policy shifts.
Last month, when he delivered a speech outlining his security policies for Afghanistan and the rest of South Asia, Trump vowed to loosen restrictions on hunting down terrorists.
“The killers need to know they have nowhere to hide, that no place is beyond the reach of American might and American arms,” he said. “Retribution will be fast and powerful.”
In May 2013, Obama imposed the rules on kill-or-capture operations by the military or the CIA outside war theaters like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The plan before Trump would extend his pattern of giving broader day-to-day authority to the Pentagon and the CIA — authorizing the agencies to decide when and how to conduct high-risk counterterrorism operations that Obama had insisted be used sparingly and only after top officials across the government reviewed them.
The move would also grant a CIA push for permission to expand its program of covert drone strikes, which has included occasional attacks in Yemen and Syria but has largely centered on the tribal region of Pakistan, to Afghanistan — until now the exclusive purview of the military.
A Cabinet-level committee of the top leaders of nationalsecurity agencies and departments approved the proposed new rules — called the PSP, for “Principles, Standards and Procedures” — at a meeting Sept. 14 and sent the document to Trump, the officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions about a policy that was not yet final or public. A spokesman for the National Security Council did not contest their account but declined to comment.
One senior administration official described the proposed changes as primarily aimed at making much of the “bureaucracy” created by Obama’s 2013 rules, the Presidential Policy Guidance, or PPG, “disappear.”
The official argued that the replacement rules should be seen as similar to Obama’s but clearer and less bureaucratic — meaning drone operators and commanders would face fewer internal hurdles to launching specific strikes or raids.
By clearing the way to target rank-and-file Islamist insurgents even without the presence of a high-level leader focused on attacking Americans, the new approach would appear to remove some obstacles for possible strikes in countries where al-Qaida- or Islamic State-linked militants are operating, from Nigeria to the Philippines.
However, the new plan would still require higher-level approval to start conducting strikes or raids in new countries under “country plans” that would be reviewed every 12 months. And under international law, the United States probably would also still need to obtain consent from a country’s leaders to use force on their soil to strike at lower-level militants who posed no direct threat to the U.S., weakening any self-defense argument.
Even before Obama left office, the limits he imposed in 2013 had come under increasing pressure as the terrorism threat to the U.S. evolved. At the time, al-Qaida was still reeling from the killing of Osama bin Laden, combat troops had left Iraq and were being reduced in Afghanistan, and operations outside war theaters seemed destined to be limited to occasional airstrikes aimed at individual “high-value targets” in Pakistan and Yemen, such as al-Qaida leaders.
But the Islamic State has arisen and spread in the years since, and military operators have found ways to target groups of militants outside of Obama’s rules while partnering with local governments — winning temporary exemptions to strike in various regions or justifying airstrikes on groups of lowerlevel militants as a matter of selfdefense.
Several Obama administration counterterrorism officials had been bracing for a more complete dismantling of their handiwork, and they offered tentative praise for the prospect that their successors will keep in place heightened standards to protect civilians outside war zones. They had argued that avoiding bystander deaths was crucial not just for humanitarian reasons but also to maintain support among allied governments and local populations and to keep from fueling terrorist propaganda and recruiting.
“If the near-certainty standard is going to remain in place, that’s a real testament to the fact that it was not political or Obama being overly concerned about human rights; preventing civilian casualties is something our operators have seen as really important,” said Luke Hartig, a senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council during the Obama administration.
It remains to be seen whether Trump will sign off on keeping in place the standard of nearcertainty that civilian deaths will be minimized. During deliberations, some officials had argued for more leniency, but administration officials decided the risks outweighed the benefits.
International law governing war or self-defense allows countries to knowingly kill some civilians as an incidental consequence of attacking a legitimate military target, so long as the bystander deaths are deemed necessary and proportionate.
But some international law scholars, European allies and human rights groups disagree with the U.S. position that warzone rules apply to counterterrorism strikes outside conventional battlefields.
Human rights groups decried the prospect of Trump’s eliminating the requirement that individual targets each pose a threat to Americans.
“The Obama administration’s policy guidance on the use of lethal force was a positive step but fell far short on human rights protections,” said Zeke Johnson, Amnesty International USA senior director of programs. “Any decision to weaken those standards would be a grave mistake.”
The updated rules would continue to limit such strikes to members of groups that the executive branch has deemed to be covered by the aging congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks, including al-Qaida, the Islamic State and their associated forces.