Vol. 77/No. 4      February 4, 2013

For at least the next year, however, the CIA’s drone operations in Pakistan will be exempt from the new rules, which will be submitted in coming weeks to President Obama for final approval, the Washington Post reported Jan. 19.

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan near the Afghan border have been the main target of U.S. drone strikes.

The announcement of the new guidelines and exemption of operations in Pakistan came as the CIA is carrying out a barrage of drone strikes in that Central Asia country, with seven attacks in the first 10 days of the year. At least 40 people were reportedly killed, including civilians.

The new “playbook,” the Post wrote, will spell out “the process for adding names to kill lists, the legal principles that govern when U.S. citizens can be targeted overseas and the sequence of approvals required when the CIA or U.S. military conducts drone strikes outside war zones.”

The principal author of the drone protocol is Obama’s counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, who has since been nominated to be the CIA’s next director.

U.S. drone targeted assassinations began in 2002 in Yemen under the George W. Bush administration. They have since been expanded to Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, with a sharp increase under the Obama administration.

According to various estimates, some 3,000 people have been killed by drone strikes over the past decade, including many civilians.

According to the U.K-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there have been 362 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004—310 of them under the Obama administration.

The CIA “is expected to give the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan advance notice on strikes. But in practice … the agency exercises near complete control over the names on its target list and decisions on strikes,” the Jan. 19 Post article said.

The surge of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan in the opening days of the year was seen as a response to “expectations that President Obama will soon order a drawdown that could leave Afghanistan with fewer than 6,000 troops after 2014,” the Post wrote Jan. 10.

The CIA has been using bases in Afghanistan to launch its drone strikes across the Pakistani border. The agency “has begun discussing plans to pare back its network of bases across the country to five from 15 or more because of the difficulty of providing security for its outposts after most U.S. forces have left,” the paper added.  
 
 
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