#6: Foreign policy = drones + ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal will make drones the focal point of Western military activity in the region.
There is widespread uncertainty about the US’s impending withdrawal from Afghanistan. Even before the withdrawal is complete, the Taliban have already expanded beyond the south of the country and are continuing to make big territorial gains. On July 20th, three rockets hit a mosque near the Afghan president’s compound. Although the Taliban have not claimed responsibility for the attack, the group has not declared a ceasefire for Eid, as was the case in previous years.
The US withdrawal from Afghanistan has left a huge power vacuum that extremists are rushing to fill. It also removes one of the rhetorical pillars of the US drone programme: that unmanned weapons work alongside fighter planes and ground forces to create a proportionate but robust counter-insurgency strategy. Having no US soldiers to ‘protect’ with drones means the justification for their continued use may become even flimsier.
The withdrawal makes it logical that Afghanistan’s official designation as a “theatre of combat operations” should change. With no US troops left on the ground, it stands to reason that Afghanistan should shift to a similar state as (for example) Somalia and Yemen. These countries do harbour terrorist organisations, and the US can take military action in these countries under certain conditions, per the wide-ranging Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) signed in the aftermath of 9/11 and that still remains in place nearly 20 years on, despite recent congressional votes to repeal the legislation.
But don’t let that get you thinking the US will simply dial down its use of drones in Afghanistan. Indeed, the opposite may well be true. Even while CNN reports that “the Biden administration is also still debating whether to remove the combat zone designation for Afghanistan”, the same report says that the US “will retain authority to carry out strikes against the Taliban in support of Afghan forces”.
This apparent paradox exists because of how useful drones are to military leaders. Daniel Brunstetter and Megan Braun have observed that drones “may be seen as a level of force short of war to which the principle of last resort does not apply”. This tenet, as well as the sweeping scope of the AUMF, gives US military forces – and intelligence agencies like the CIA – the latitude to use drones in countries with which the US is not at war.
Granted, it will be more expensive to use drones if the US does not have an Afghan base. Per the New York Times, writing in June:
Some officials are wary of […] drones [flying] as many as nine hours each way for a mission in Afghanistan, which would make the operations more expensive because they require more drones and fuel, and also riskier because reinforcements needed for commando raids could not arrive swiftly during a crisis.
But these worries should be put in context: drones remain far cheaper than other warfighting technologies, which are vulnerable to their own failures and inefficiencies. Take General Dynamics’ Ajax reconnaissance vehicles, touted by the UK for years as a central component of future conflicts. A UK minister said in July that the Ajax programme may have terminal problems, most notably with vehicle design issues. The FT reported that the UK has already spent £3bn on the programme.
The UK army’s solution? More drones, of course:
Lieutenant General Ralph Wooddisse, commander of the field army, said he was making contingency plans — such as using unmanned drones for reconnaissance — in case Ajax is still not in service by the middle of this decade.
The situation in Afghanistan and surrounding countries is only going to become more complex and more deadly as the US withdraws its forces. As military commanders seek to know more about territories where there is no longer a permanent military presence, drones will become even more important to Western activities in the region. Your regular reminder: drones are imprecise and unreliable. In Afghanistan alone, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism attributes a minimum of 300 and a maximum of over 900 civilian deaths to drones between the start of 2015 and today.
With everything we know about the dangers of drones, the US withdrawal should be cause for further concern rather than celebration.