A Question of Civilian Casualties

The U.S withdrawal from Afghanistan was said to have been the end of America’s fight in the Middle East. As with many endings however, no matter how unclear or dramatic, there always comes a need for reflection and a moment to assess where those involved fell short. America's use of drones are no exception to this.

Air Force technicians prepare a MQ-9 Reaper for flight

When a state engages in drone warfare, it opens a family sized can of worms relating to problems of international law and waging a just war. Another problem to consider however, is the question of civilian casualties.

Drones hold the allure of removing boots on the ground in the immediate moment; thereby creating a safer and more remote war. When you remove in-person involvement however, and wage your war from behind a screen, the ability to assess and accurately identify who is a threat is minimised. Pentagon documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, revealed that drone strikes conducted in Afghanistan killed a much higher number of civilians than the 188 initially reported by the Defense Department, and it seems this trend continued with U.S operations in both Iraq and Syria.

The report identifies that targeting decisions often fell victim to confirmation bias. Sitting behind a computer screen, drone pilots often see what they want to see. Consequently, they see civilians, often acting in a humanitarian manner by aiding those injured, and believe them to be further terrorists and carry out follow up strikes. Evidently, this is a departure from every established principle of international law of war which demands that civilians should not suffer unnecessary or avoidable harm. Despite this break, America has always maintained that it has done the most to ensure that civilians were not put in excessive or unnecessary harm.

A bold claim, and one that needs examining.

During the course of the war on terror from 2002 to 2020, U.S drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen have said to have killed between 10,000 and 17,000 people. Within that number, between 800 and 1,750 are thought to have been civilians, with Pakistan suffering the worst from this number.

Whilst Bush’s legacy is not one that is habitually connected to drone strikes, the Obama administration became notorious for it. After 4 year of ramping up the use of drone strikes, with data from 2009 showing three civilian deaths per strike, Obama tightened his targeting requirements after considerable pressure from the United Nations and other NGOs. The administration officially shifted its standard from requiring a ‘reasonable certainty’ of zero casualties to demanding a ‘near certainty.’

This policy change demanded stricter targeting procedures. For example, it delegated fewer strike decisions to commanders in the field, who had been noted to misidentify combatants due to a sense of cognitive bias. This policy shift was implemented with the explicit intention to create a sense of “effective and discriminate use of force”, so as to overcome the undesirable effects of this bias – which often appeared as a result of pressures felt on the battlefield, such as anxiety and a desire to protect friendly forces, even at the risk of sacrificing civilians.

An analysis of this policy change not only showed that it was successful in reducing civilian casualties, with a result of 12 civilian casualties per month or two civilian casualties per strike, but also that it did not give terrorists any sizeable advantage. Suggesting therefore, that applying much stricter targeting standards in other theatres of conflict, such as Iraq and Syria, could be successful in saving innocent lives.

Of course, as with any decision taken during conflict, there is often a trade-off. 

A stricter standard of targeting also means moving targeting decisions up the chain of command, resulting in longer approval times for strikes. There was an expressed fear that such delay results in missed opportunities to remove terrorists. It should be noted however, that the rate at which the Obama administration began to remove targets was rapidly increasing – thanks to the ‘Terror Tuesdays', the weekly meetings conducted to assess who was next on the list to meet their fate as the receiving end of a drone strike. 

The act of remote targeting is an ongoing process, a missed opportunity on a Wednesday does not mean that there won’t be a chance on the Thursday. Furthermore, the fact that there were no major terrorist attacks on U.S soil during his Presidency, it can be suggested that perhaps Obama’s stricter strike policy did not come at a cost to national security.

Reducing civilian casualties should be at the top of the list for any President engaging in a remote conflict. How can you justify these new weapons of as a safer, more controlled, method of war if civilian lives are continuously being put at risk? Not only should America adhere to this idea due to its commitment to international law, but also because civilian casualties only make it easier for the enemy to recruit new followers – “help us fight against the enemy who make it unsafe for our children to live”. 

If Obama’s policy has shown anything, it is that restricting the threat to civilian casualties, and taking more time to assess whether a strike is necessary and proportionate, does not actually cost America the war – and could, in fact, help to win it.