WASHINGTON – The Biden government has quietly imposed temporary limits on counterterrorism drone attacks and commando attacks outside conventional battlefield zones like Afghanistan and Syria, and began a comprehensive review of whether Trump-era rules should be enforced for such operations. , according to authorities.
The military and the CIA must now obtain permission from the White House to attack suspected terrorists in poorly governed locations, where there are few American ground troops, such as Somalia and Yemen. Under the Trump administration, they were able to decide for themselves whether the circumstances on the ground met certain conditions and an attack was justified.
Authorities characterized the stricter controls as a stopgap, while the Biden government reviewed how targeting worked – both on paper and in practice – under former President Donald J. Trump and developed its own policy and procedures for killing operations or capture counterterrorism outside war zones, including how to minimize the risk of civilian casualties.
The Biden government did not announce the new limits. But national security adviser Jake Sullivan issued the order on January 20, the day of President Biden’s inauguration, officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Any changes resulting from the review would be the latest turning point in a long-term evolution of the rules for drone attacks outside conventional battlefield zones, an intermittent gray-area combat action that has become central to long-term counterterrorism wars. America that took root with the response to the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The counterterrorism drone war reached its fourth administration with Biden. As vice president of President Barack Obama, Biden was part of a previous government that oversaw a massive escalation in targeted assassinations using remotely piloted aircraft in his first term and then imposed significant new restrictions on practice in the second.
While the Biden administration still allows counterterrorism attacks outside active war zones, the additional review and bureaucratic obstacles it has imposed may explain a recent lull in such operations. The United States Army Africa Command carried out about half a dozen air strikes this year in Somalia targeting Shabab, a terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda – but all were before January 20.
Emily Horne, a spokesman for the National Security Council, acknowledged that Biden has issued “provisional guidance” on the use of military force and related national security operations.
“The purpose of the interim guidance is to ensure that the president has full visibility on the significant actions proposed in these areas, while the National Security Council team conducts a thorough review among the existing authorization agencies and delegations of the presidential authority regarding these issues. ”Said Mrs Horne said.
Although Trump has significantly relaxed the limits of counterterrorism attacks outside the war zones, they occurred less during his term than under Obama. This is largely because the nature of the war against Al Qaeda and its fragmented and mutated progeny continues to change.
In particular, during Obama’s first term, there was a sharp escalation of drone attacks targeting al Qaeda suspects in Pakistan’s tribal region and rural Yemen. Obama broke new ground by deciding to approve the deliberate killing in 2011 of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was part of Al Qaeda’s arm in Yemen.
Then, after the Islamic State emerged in Iraq and Syria, its “caliphate” became a magnet for jihadists during Obama’s final years and much of the Trump presidency. But the ISIS-controlled region was considered a conventional war zone, so the air strikes did not raise the same new legal and political issues as the murders directed away from the so-called hot battlefields.
The Biden government’s review of the legal and political structures that govern targeting is still in preliminary stages. Authorities are collecting data, such as official estimates of civilian casualties in military and CIA attacks outside the battlefield zones during the Trump era. No decision has been made on what the new rules will be, said Horne.
“This review includes an examination of previous approaches in the context of the evolution of counterterrorism threats, in order to refine our approach going forward,” she said. “In addition, the review will seek to ensure appropriate transparency measures.”
Among the issues that are under consideration is the possibility of tightening a limit in order to prevent civilian casualties in such operations. Current rules generally require “almost certainty” that no women or children are present in the attack zone, but the Trump team apparently allowed operators to use a lower standard of “reasonable certainty” that no adult civilian man was likely to be killed , officials said.
Allowing this increased risk of killing civilians has made it easier for the military and the CIA to meet missile firing standards. But it is also routine for civilians to be armed in the types of lawless arid lands and failed states for which the rules were written.
Among the tradeoffs under discussion, officials said, is that intelligence collection resources are finite. For example, keeping surveillance drones over a potential attack zone for a longer period of time to watch who comes and goes means making them less available for other operations.
Biden government officials are also debating whether to write general rules that are applied more strictly than the Trump era system was sometimes in practice. They found that the Trump system was very flexible and allowed employees to devise procedures for strikes in specific countries, using lower standards than those set in general policy, so the administration’s safeguards were sometimes stronger on paper than in reality.
Authorities are also facing a broader philosophical question: whether they should return to the Obama-era approach, which was characterized by centralized oversight and high-level intelligence verification on individual terrorist suspects, or maintain something closer to the Trump-era approach, that was more flexible and decentralized.
According to previous rules, which Obama codified in a 2013 order known as PPG, an acronym for Presidential Political Guidance, a suspect had to pose an “ongoing and imminent threat” to Americans to be targeted outside a war zone. The system resulted in several interagency meetings to discuss whether certain suspects met this standard.
Obama imposed his rules after the frequency of counterterrorism attacks soared in tribal Pakistan and rural Yemen, generating recurring controversies over civilian deaths and an increasing impression that armed drones – a new technology that made it easier to fire missiles at alleged enemies in regions that were difficult to reach – were getting out of control.
But military and intelligence operators were irritated by the limits of the 2013 rules, complaining that the process had become subject to a lot of advocacy and endless meetings. In October 2017, Mr. Trump dismissed this system and imposed a different set of policy standards and procedures for the use of lethal force outside war zones.
Its replacement focused instead on developing general standards for attacks and attacks in certain countries. It allowed the military and the CIA to target suspects based on their status as members of a terrorist group, even if they were just jihadist soldiers with no special skills or leadership roles. And it allowed operators to decide whether to take specific actions.
During the presidential transition, Sullivan and Avril D. Haines, who oversaw the development of Obama’s drone attack manual and is now Biden’s director of national intelligence, raised the prospect of tightening Trump-era rules and procedures to reduce the risk of civilian casualties and hitting from overuse of drone attacks, but not necessarily tracing back to the Obama-era system, an official said.
Since Biden took office, the inter-agency review that followed has been overseen primarily by Elizabeth D. Sherwood-Randall, her homeland security advisor, and Clare Linkins, the senior director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council.
Biden’s team is also evaluating the possibility of restoring an Obama-era order that required the government to annually disclose estimates of how many suspected terrorists and civilian passersby it had killed in air strikes outside the war zones. Obama invoked this requirement in 2016, but Trump removed it in 2019. The military separately publishes some information about its attacks in places like Somalia, but the CIA does not.
Although the New York Times reported on Trump’s replacement rules in 2017, the Trump administration never publicized its drone policy or publicly discussed the parameters and principles that framed it, noted Luke Hartig, who worked as a counterterrorism adviser at Obama’s White House .
Affirming that there were good reasons to believe that the government did not publicly recognize the full range of attacks carried out under Mr. Trump, Mr. Hartig said it was appropriate for the Biden team to gather more information about that period before deciding whether and how change the system that governed it.
“There is a lot that the government needs to do to restore the highest standards after the Trump administration, but they shouldn’t just go back to Obama’s rules,” he said. “The world changed. The fight against terrorism has evolved. “