Kill Chain

"Cockburn is a muck-raking journalist but he has a strong intellect. Fair, balanced and objective are not his strong suits, but making a very strong polemical case is. In this book he describes drone strikes as part of a particular military predilection for identifying enemy forces as networks, trying to find nodal people in these networks and knocking them out. According to him, this is a military strategy that goes back to WW2 where people in the Allies said if only we could get to senior Nazi officers – by, for example, killing Hitler – then everything would collapse. But Cockburn shows that this line of thinking never actually seems to have worked. When you identify someone in a senior position and you kill them, they get replaced pretty quickly, and often by someone even nastier. Sometimes the organisation learns to adapt, so it has more of an ability to disperse and embed itself. So he sees drones as the latest instantiation of a particular strategy that has always been bankrupt. If you read the media accounts, the Obama administration keeps saying we killed the second-in-command or third-in-command, things are going really well and we expect Al-Qaeda to be gone or in ruins by the end of the year, but they seem to get stronger. It doesn’t work that way. At the beginning of our conversation, we talked about the political science on whether drone strikes show a net gain or loss, and I expressed my scepticism that we can’t clearly know. If I had a sixth book to recommend, I would have picked something by the journalist Jeremy Scahill, as if anyone has done the dangerous journalistic field work to try and find out the answer it would be him. One of the things that Scahill demonstrates is that the more people drones kill, the longer the kill list becomes – which is a very striking paradox. You would expect the military to have a fixed list of people that had to be killed, then as you cross people off it the end is in sight. But actually the kill list gets longer and longer. I think the onus is on those who support drones to give us the evidence that they are working in the way they claim. One of the things that drone technology enables is distributed command, so the footage from a drone can be piped simultaneously into lots of different command centres. You can have people in Doha looking at it while someone in Washington D.C. is looking at it. That often produces collective decisions where people are frantically talking to people in command centres hundreds of thousands of miles away. And often by the time they make a decision, the chance to take a shot is gone. But your question touches on something else about the US president, who authorises putting senior insurgent figures on the kill list. He weighs the evidence that has been collected about them, and he makes the decision whether what they’ve done is grave enough to get them put on the kill list. Once they’re on that list, then the drones go hunting for them, and if they find them they are authorised to kill them. Those are called ‘personality strikes’, against celebrity targets of the insurgent world, if you like. But often drones will just be patrolling around an area and they will come across someone unidentified who appears to be planting an IED or something like that, then they request permission to kill them. That is made on the basis of their behaviour rather than any knowledge about their identity. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Ha. I imagine striking someone within the US would be a problem."