ISLAMABAD, June 5: Nearly 14 years after being deposed in a military coup and forced into exile, Nawaz Sharif was sworn in as Pakistan’s prime minister for a record third term, as he vowed to revive the country’s ailing economy and called for an end to the controversial US drone strikes.
63-year-old Sharif was sworn in by President Asif Ali Zardari at a function at the presidency this evening after being formally elected as prime minister by an overwhelming majority in Pakistan’s 342-member National Assembly.
Sharif is the 27th prime minister of Pakistan, which has witnessed three military coups in its 66-year history.
He became the first person to serve as prime minister for a third term.
Sharif, served as premier during 1990-1993 and 1997-1999 but was ousted from office before he could complete his term — once on corruption charges and later because of a military coup led by Pervez Musharraf.
After spending the past five years in the opposition, Sharif led his PML-N party to victory in the May 11 general elections.
“The economic position is very bad and I will not present a fanciful image of heaven,” Sharif said while addressing the National Assembly after his formal election as the premier.
He pledged that he would not “sit easy” or allow his “team to sit easy”.
Foreign policy issues, including relations with India, did not figure in Sharif’s speech though he said that US drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal belt “must stop”.
Sharif was formally elected prime minister by the National Assembly after bagging 244 votes in the House.
Makhdoom Amin Fahim, the candidate of the Pakistan Peoples Party that led the previous government, got 42 votes.
Veteran politician Javed Hashmi, the candidate of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf party, got 31 votes.
The swearing in ceremony in an ornate hall in the presidency was attended by top leaders of the PML-N, several Pakistan Peoples Party leaders, including former premiers Yousuf Raza Gilani and Raja Pervez Ashraf, former ministers, parliamentarians, bureaucrats, and diplomats.
The president warmly shook hands with Sharif, clad in a dark sherwani, at the conclusion of the brief ceremony as the new premier’s daughter, Maryam Nawaz, looked on with a smile.
WHEN people in Washington talk about shrinking the drone program, as President Obama promised to do last week, they are mostly concerned with placating Pakistan, where members of the newly elected government have vowed to end violations of the country’s sovereignty. But the drone war is alive and well in the remote corners of Pakistan where the strikes have caused the greatest and most lasting damage.
Drone strikes like Wednesday’s, in Waziristan, are destroying already weak tribal structures and throwing communities into disarray throughout Pakistan’s tribal belt along the border with Afghanistan. The chaos and rage they produce endangers the Pakistani government and fuels anti-Americanism. And the damage isn’t limited to Pakistan. Similar destruction is occurring in other traditional tribal societies like Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen. The tribes on the periphery of these nations have long struggled for more autonomy from the central government, first under colonial rule and later against the modern state. The global war on terror has intensified that conflict.
These tribal societies are organized into clans defined by common descent; they maintain stability through similar structures of authority; and they have defined codes of honor revolving around hospitality to guests and revenge against enemies.
In recent decades, these societies have undergone huge disruptions as the traditional leadership has come under attack by violent groups like the Taliban, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia’s Al Shabab, not to mention full-scale military invasions. America has deployed drones into these power vacuums, causing ferocious backlashes against central governments while destroying any positive image of the United States that may have once existed.
American precision-guided missiles launched into Pakistan’s Pashtun tribal areas aim to eliminate what are called, with marvelous imprecision, the “bad guys.” Several decades ago I, too, faced the problem of catching a notorious “bad guy” in Waziristan.
It was 1979. Safar Khan, a Pashtun outlaw, had over the years terrorized the region with raids and kidnappings. He was always one step ahead of the law, disappearing into the undemarcated international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the very area where Osama bin Laden would later find shelter.
I was then the political agent of South Waziristan, a government administrator in charge of the area. When Mr. Khan kidnapped a Pakistani soldier, the commanding general threatened to launch military operations. I told him to hold off his troops, and took direct responsibility for Mr. Khan’s capture.
I mobilized tribal elders and religious leaders to persuade Mr. Khan to surrender, promising him a fair trial by jirga, a council of elders, according to tribal custom. Working through the Pashtun code of honor, Mr. Khan eventually surrendered unconditionally and the writ of the state was restored. The general who had argued for using force was delighted.
We were able to get Mr. Khan without firing a single shot by relying on the three pillars of authority that have traditionally provided stability in Pashtun tribal society: elders, religious leaders and the central government.
Over the past few decades, these pillars have weakened. And in 2004, with the Pakistani army’s unprecedented assault and American drones’ targeting suspected supporters of Al Qaeda in Waziristan, the pillars of authority began to crumble.
In the vacuum that followed, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or Pakistani Taliban, emerged. Its first targets were tribal authorities. Approximately 400 elders have been killed in Waziristan alone, a near-decapitation of traditional society.
Large segments of the tribal population were displaced to shantytowns surrounding large cities, bringing with them traditional tribal feuds and a desire for revenge against those they saw as responsible for their desperate situation.
As the pace of the violence in the tribal areas increased, the Pakistani Taliban sought to strike the central government. They kidnapped Pakistan’s ambassador to Afghanistan, stormed Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, and assaulted a naval base in Karachi. In 2009, fighters attacked a military mosque, killing 36 people, including 17 children. Taking hold of children’s hair and shooting them point-blank, they yelled “Now you know how it feels when other people are killed.”
For the first time tribesmen resorted to suicide strikes — in mosques, bazaars and offices in which women and children were often the victims — something categorically rejected by both Islam and the Pashtun tribal code.
The tribesmen of Waziristan have for years seen the Pakistani government as colluding on drone strikes with the Americans, against whom their tribal kin are fighting across the border in Afghanistan. Therefore, they take revenge against the military and other government targets for those killed by drones.
Their suspicions of Pakistan complicity proved correct. Former President Pervez Musharraf admitted to CNN last month that his government had secretly given permission to the United States to operate drones inside Pakistan.
Drone strikes have made Waziristan’s already turbulent conflict with the central government worse. Almost 3,500 people have been killed by drones in Waziristan, including many innocent civilians.
Those at the receiving end of the strikes see them as unjust, immoral and dishonorable — killing innocent people who have never themselves harmed Americans while the drone operators sit safely halfway across the world, terrorizing and killing by remote control.
Mr. Obama should not assume that his pledge to scale back the drone war will have an appreciable impact on America’s image or Pakistan’s security unless the strikes stop and the old pillars of tribal authority can gradually be rebuilt.
Until then, American policy makers would do well to heed a Pashto proverb: “The Pashtun who took revenge after a hundred years said, I took it quickly.”
Akbar Ahmed, the Islamic Studies chair at American University and the former Pakistani high commissioner to Britain, is the author of “The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam.”
At least six people were killed in a drone strike Wednesday in northwest Pakistan, reportedly including a top Pakistani Taliban official, in the first publicized US drone attack since President Barack Obama announced he was changing policy on such strikes.
According to multiple reports, Wali-ur-Rehman, the second in command of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, was killed in the attack in North Waziristan, a militant stronghold. The drone reportedly fired two missiles into a mud house in the village of Chashma, killing at least six and wounding four others. Reuters reports that Mr. Wali-ur-Rehman had been poised to succeed TTP leader Hakimullah Mehsud.
“This is a huge blow to militants and a win in the fight against insurgents,” one security official told Reuters, declining further comment.
The Pakistani Taliban are a separate entity allied to the Afghan Taliban. Known as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), they have launched devastating attacks against the Pakistani military and civilians.
Reuters reports that the Pakistani Foreign Office expressed concern over the attack, stating that “Any drone strike is against the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Pakistan and we condemn it.” Reuters notes, however that the comment was made before Wali-ur-Rehman had been identified as a casualty.
Pakistani newspaper The News International reports that the TTP denied that Wali-ur-Rehman was killed.
The drone strike comes at a precarious time for both Washington and Islamabad. Last week, President Obama announced that the White House had codified new policy guidance on the use of lethal force against terrorists, including the use of drones, The Christian Science Monitor reported.
Generally speaking, the US government has to determine that a potential drone target poses a “continuing and imminent threat to the American people,” the president said.
Drones can be used only if the US can’t capture individual terrorists.
“Our preference is always to detain, interrogate, and prosecute them,” Obama said.
And finally, before any strike occurs, there must be “near certainty” that no civilians will be killed or injured, according to the president.
Experts note, however, that at least rhetorically, the president’s guidelines match what has been said before about US drone policies, and it is unclear whether this announcement marks a change in process – particularly as most of the relevant information on drone policy remains classified.
At the same time, Pakistan is in an interim period between its recent presidential election and the formation of a new government led by Nawaz Sharif, who “has made it very clear through the election campaign that he wants all drone strikes to stop all together,” reports the BBC’s Richard Galpin.
“The plain fact here is that the drone strikes are extremely unpopular, the vast majority of the population opposed to them – recent research showing two-thirds of them, of the population were opposed to them. Nawaz Sharif, I think is pretty much obliged to bring this issue up in negotiations with the American government to see if he can persuade them to stop the strikes.”
But at the same time, says the BBC’s M Ilyas Khan, “any strike against the Pakistan Taliban would be welcomed by the Pakistani authorities because the group has for several years been exclusively focused on pursuing Pakistani – rather than Afghan – military and civilian targets.”
Our correspondent says it comes on the same day that the newly-elected parliament of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province – which adjoins North Waziristan – holds its first meeting.
The province is now being ruled by former cricketer Imran Khan’s PTI party, which has in recent months repeatedly spoken out against drone attacks, as has Prime Minister-elect Nawaz Sharif.
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday recommitted to his years-old vow to close the Guantánamo Bay prison following the arrival of “medical reinforcements” of nearly 40 Navy nurses, corpsmen and specialists amid a mass hunger strike by inmates who have been held for over a decade without trial.
“It’s not sustainable,” Mr. Obama said at a White House news conference. “The notion that we’re going to keep 100 individuals in no man’s land in perpetuity,” he added, made no sense. “All of us should reflect on why exactly are we doing this? Why are we doing this?”
Citing the high expense and the foreign policy costs of continuing to operate the prison, Mr. Obama said he would try again to persuade Congress to lift restrictions on transferring inmates to the federal court system. Mr. Obama was ambiguous, however, about the most difficult issue raised by the prospect of closing the prison: what to do with detainees who are deemed dangerous but could not be feasibly prosecuted.
Mr. Obama’s existing policy on that subject, which Congress has blocked, is to move detainees to maximum-security facilities inside the United States and continue holding them without trial as wartime prisoners; it is not clear whether such a change would ease the frustrations fueling the detainees’ hunger strike.
Yet at another point in the news conference, Mr. Obama appeared to question the policy of indefinite wartime detention at a time when the war in Iraq has ended, the one in Afghanistan is winding down and the original makeup of Al Qaeda has been decimated. “The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried,” he said, “that is contrary to who we are, contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.”
But in the short term, Mr. Obama indicated his support for the force-feeding of detainees who refused to eat.
“I don’t want these individuals to die,” he said.
As of Tuesday morning, 100 of the 166 prisoners at Guantánamo were officially deemed by the military to be participating in the hunger strike, with 21 “approved” to be fed the nutritional supplement Ensure through tubes inserted through their noses.
In a statement released earlier, a military spokesman said the deployment of additional medical personnel had been planned several weeks ago as more detainees joined the strike.
“We will not allow a detainee to starve themselves to death, and we will continue to treat each person humanely,” said Lt. Col. Samuel House, the prison spokesman.
The military’s response to the hunger strike has revived complaints by medical ethics groups that contend that doctors — and nurses under their direction — should not force-feed prisoners who are mentally competent to decide not to eat.
Last week, the president of the American Medical Association, Dr. Jeremy A. Lazarus, wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel saying that any doctor who participated in forcing a prisoner to eat against his will was violating “core ethical values of the medical profession.”
“Every competent patient has the right to refuse medical intervention, including life-sustaining interventions,” Dr. Lazarus wrote.
He also noted that the A.M.A. endorses the World Medical Association’s Tokyo Declaration, a 1975 statement forbidding doctors to use their medical knowledge to facilitate torture. It says that if a prisoner makes “an unimpaired and rational judgment” to refuse nourishment, “he or she shall not be fed artificially.”
The military’s policy, however, is that it can and should preserve the life of a detainee by forcing him to eat if necessary.
“In the case of a hunger strike, attempted suicide or other attempted serious self-harm, medical treatment or intervention may be directed without the consent of the detainee to prevent death or serious harm,” a military policy directive says. “Such action must be based on a medical determination that immediate treatment or intervention is necessary to prevent death or serious harm and, in addition, must be approved by the commanding officer of the detention facility or other designated senior officer responsible for detainee operations.”
On Monday, Colonel House also said that some detainees on the “enteral feeding” list were drinking the supplement.
“Just because the detainees are approved for enteral feeding does not mean they don’t eat a regular meal,” he said. “Once the detainees leave their cell and are in the presence of medical personnel, most of the detainees who are approved for tube feeding will eat or drink without the peer pressure from inside the cellblock.”
Medical ethicists and the Pentagon also clashed during the Bush administration over hunger strikes at Guantánamo.
The current protest began in February and escalated after a raid this month in which guards confined protesting detainees to their cells. The impetus for it is disputed. The prisoners, through their lawyers, cite a search for contraband on Feb. 6, during which they say Korans were handled in a way they found offensive. The military says the Koran search followed routine procedures.
But both sides agree that the root cause is frustration over the collapse of President Obama’s effort to close the prison, which drew Congressional resistance, and the fact that no prisoners have been transferred because of restrictions on where they can be sent.
Congress has restricted the repatriation to countries with troubled security conditions, helping to jam up 86 low-level detainees who were designated for potential transfer three years ago; most are Yemeni. But since 2012, lawmakers have given the Pentagon the ability to waive most of those restrictions on a case-by-case basis, and it has not done so.
On Tuesday, Mr. Obama said he “I’ve asked my team to review everything that’s currently being done in Guantánamo, everything that we can do administratively.” It was not clear whether that was a signal that the administration may be considering using the waiver power to revive the transfer of low-level detainees.
Ramzi Kassem, a City University of New York law professor who represents several detainees, said he had talked to a Yemeni client, Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi, who said a guard had shot him with rubber-coated pellets at close range during the raid. Since then, Mr. Kassem was told, the prisoners have been denied soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste and their legal papers.
Mr. Alwi said he had not eaten in 80 days and stopped drinking after the raid, Mr. Kassem said. He also said he was being force-fed twice a day after being tied to a restraint chair.
Mr. Kassem also quoted Mr. Alwi as saying: “I do not want to kill myself. My religion prohibits suicide. But I will not eat or drink until I die, if necessary, to protest the injustice of this place. We want to get out of this place. It is as though this government wishes to smother us in this injustice, to kill us slowly here, indirectly, without trying us or executing us.”
In his statement on Monday, Colonel House said the prisoners would not be allowed to die.
“Detainees have the right to peacefully protest, but we have the responsibility to ensure that they conduct their protest safely and humanely,” he said. “Detainees are given a choice: eat the hot meal, drink the supplement or be enteral fed.”
As a weekly columnist for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, I’ve become adept at writing about bombings. Pakistan suffered 652 of these last year; terrorist attacks took down everything from girls’ schools to apartment buildings and felled members of Parliament, singers, and school children—each person sentenced by coincidence to be at a given location in the moment it became a bomber’s target. Through my columns, I have offered up fumbled expressions of grief and comfort to Pakistani readers whose stores of empathy are bled daily without any promise of replenishment. I believe that these rituals of caring, made so repetitious in Pakistan by the sheer frequency of terror attacks, are crucial; in preventing the normalization of violence and senseless evil, they keep a society human.
The bombings in Boston on April 15, 2013 pose their own conundrum to those like me who are in the habit of writing about bloodier conflicts with more frequent conflagrations. There is an inherent cruelty in every terror attack—an undeniable reverberation of evil in the destruction of an ordinary moment and the forced marriage of that moment to sudden violence. Boston is no different, no more or less tragic than the bombings that have razed the marketplaces of Karachi, the school in Khost, the mosque in Karbala.
American tragedies somehow seem to occur in a more poignant version of reality… within minutes American victims are lifted from the nameless to the remembered.
And yet it seems so. Attacks in America are far more indelible in the world’s memory than attacks in any other country. There may be fewer victims and less blood, but American tragedies somehow seem to occur in a more poignant version of reality, in a way that evokes a more sympathetic response. Within minutes American victims are lifted from the nameless to the remembered; their individual tragedies and the ugly unfairness of their ends are presented in a way that cannot but cause the watching world to cry, to consider them intimates, and to stand in their bloody shoes. Death is always unexpected in America and death by a terrorist attack more so than in any other place.
It is this greater poignancy of attacks in America that begs the question of whether the world’s allocations of sympathy are determined not by the magnitude of a tragedy—the numbers dead and injured—but by the contrast between a society’s normal and the cruel aftermath of a terrorist event. It is in America that the difference between the two is the greatest; the American normal is one of a near-perfect security that is unimaginable in many places, especially in countries at war. The very popularity of the Boston Marathon could be considered an expression of just this. America is so secure and free from suffering that people have the luxury of indulging in deliberate suffering in the form of excruciating physical exertion; this suffering in turn produces well-earned exhilaration, a singular sense of physical achievement and mental fortitude. The act of running a marathon is supposed to be simple, individual—a victory of the will over the body, celebrated by all and untouched by the complicated questions of who in the world can choose to suffer and who only bears suffering.
The innocence of marathon runners and their expectations of a finish line, a well-earned victory, are markers of an America that still believes in an uncomplicated morality even while it is at war.
When terror hits the site of such faith in human fortitude, the impact is large. The innocence of marathon runners and their expectations of a finish line, a well-earned victory, are markers of an America that still believes in an uncomplicated morality even while it is at war. The runner runs, sweats, suffers, and deserves the prize; the messiness of the world has no place in that vacuum of earned achievement where victory is straightforward in a way that it can never be in actual life. The rest of the world is a more complicated place; its people are forced to digest more complicated truths whose vast gray areas rob every tragedy of the pathos available to Americans living and mourning in a universe of black and white.
Chechen brothers identified in Boston massacre (Credit: sandrarose.com)
Boston, April 16: I WAS in the middle of having Chinese food with my wife and friends yesterday afternoon when we heard the dull and deathly reverb. The water in our plastic cups rippled. We looked at one another, and someone made a joke about that famous scene in “Jurassic Park.” We tried to drown the moment in humor. But then a rush of humanity descended upon us in the Prudential Center on Boylston Street, right across from where the second bomb blast had just occurred, near the marathon’s finish line.
People gushed across the hallway like fish in white water rapids. It was a blur of bright clothes and shiny sneakers, everyone dressed up for Patriot’s Day weekend on what was moments ago a beautiful spring day. Instantly, images of the shootings in Aurora, Colo., Newtown, Conn., and Tucson came to mind. I felt my thoughts reduced to singular flashes. My life, all of it, was the first. My wife, sitting across me, was the second. I yelled out to her to run, and we did, not knowing what had happened, only that it had to be something terrible.
We ran out of the food court and onto the terrace overlooking Boylston Street. We could see people fleeing from the finish line even as, in the distance, other weary marathoners kept running unknowingly toward the devastation. What was left of the food court was a land frozen in an innocent time, forks still stuck in half-eaten pieces of steak, belongings littered unattended. I felt fear beyond words.
This was not my first experience with terror, having grown up in Pakistan. But for some reason, I didn’t think back to those experiences. Looking onto to the smoked, chaotic Boylston Street, I forgot about cowering in my childhood bedroom as bombs and gunfire rained over the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, close to our house. My mind did not go back to when I stood on the roof of my dormitory in Karachi as the streets were overrun with burning buses and angry protesters after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. None of the unfortunate experiences of growing up in the midst of thousands of victims of terror, personally knowing some of them, helped me in that moment. Nothing made it any easier.
Perhaps, if I had been thinking more clearly and hadn’t had my wife with me, I might have gone down to try to help the wounded. But at that moment all I could think about was getting us out of there. We lost our friends, then found them again. Our cellphones weren’t working. And then, as we worked our way through the dazed throngs in Back Bay, I realized that not only was I a victim of terror, but I was also a potential suspect.
As a 20-something Pakistani male with dark stubble (an ode more to my hectic schedule as a resident in the intensive-care unit than to any aesthetic or ideology), would I not fit the bill? I know I look like Hollywood’s favorite post-cold-war movie villain. I’ve had plenty of experience getting intimately frisked at airports. Was it advisable to go back to pick up my friend’s camera that he had forgotten in his child’s stroller in the mall? I remember feeling grateful that I wasn’t wearing a backpack, which I imagined might look suspicious. My mind wandered to when I would be working in the intensive care unit the next day, possibly taking care of victims of the blast. What would I tell them when they asked where I was from (a question I am often posed)? Wouldn’t it be easier to just tell people I was from India or Bangladesh?
As I walked down Commonwealth Avenue, I started receiving calls from family back home. They informed me about what was unfolding on television screens across the world. I was acutely conscious of what I spoke over the phone, feeling that someone was breathing over my shoulder, listening to every word I said. Careful to avoid Urdu, speaking exclusively in English, I relayed that I was safe, and all that I had seen. I continued to naïvely cling to the hope that it was a gas explosion, a subway accident, anything other than what it increasingly seemed to be: an act of brutality targeted at the highest density of both people and cameras.
The next step was to hope that the perpetrator was not a lunatic who would become the new face of a billion people. Not a murderer who would further fan the flames of Islamophobia. Not an animal who would obstruct the ability of thousands of students to complete their educations in the United States. Not an extremist who would maim and hurt the very people who were still recovering from the pain of Sept. 11. President Obama and Gov. Deval L. Patrick have shown great restraint in their words and have been careful not to accuse an entire people for what one madman may have done. But others might not be so kind.
Haider Javed Warraich is a resident in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Drone strikes in Pakistan (Credit miskweenworld.blogspot.com)On a hot day in June 2004, the Pashtun tribesman was lounging inside a mud compound in South Waziristan, speaking by satellite phone to one of the many reporters who regularly interviewed him on how he had fought and humbled Pakistan’s army in the country’s western mountains. He asked one of his followers about the strange, metallic bird hovering above him.
Less than 24 hours later, a missile tore through the compound, severing Mr. Muhammad’s left leg and killing him and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16. A Pakistani military spokesman was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, saying that Pakistani forces had fired at the compound.
That was a lie.
Mr. Muhammad and his followers had been killed by the C.I.A., the first time it had deployed a Predator drone in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state. In a secret deal, the C.I.A. had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.
That back-room bargain, described in detail for the first time in interviews with more than a dozen officials in Pakistan and the United States, is critical to understanding the origins of a covert drone war that began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Obama, and is now the subject of fierce debate. The deal, a month after a blistering internal report about abuses in the C.I.A.’s network of secret prisons, paved the way for the C.I.A. to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organization.
The C.I.A. has since conducted hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed thousands of people, Pakistanis and Arabs, militants and civilians alike. While it was not the first country where the United States used drones, it became the laboratory for the targeted killing operations that have come to define a new American way of fighting, blurring the line between soldiers and spies and short-circuiting the normal mechanisms by which the United States as a nation goes to war.
Neither American nor Pakistani officials have ever publicly acknowledged what really happened to Mr. Muhammad — details of the strike that killed him, along with those of other secret strikes, are still hidden in classified government databases. But in recent months, calls for transparency from members of Congress and critics on both the right and left have put pressure on Mr. Obama and his new C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, to offer a fuller explanation of the goals and operation of the drone program, and of the agency’s role.
Mr. Brennan, who began his career at the C.I.A. and over the past four years oversaw an escalation of drone strikes from his office at the White House, has signaled that he hopes to return the agency to its traditional role of intelligence collection and analysis. But with a generation of C.I.A. officers now fully engaged in a new mission, it is an effort that could take years.
Today, even some of the people who were present at the creation of the drone program think the agency should have long given up targeted killings.
Ross Newland, who was a senior official at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., when the agency was given the authority to kill Qaeda operatives, says he thinks that the agency had grown too comfortable with remote-control killing, and that drones have turned the C.I.A. into the villain in countries like Pakistan, where it should be nurturing relationships in order to gather intelligence.
As he puts it, “This is just not an intelligence mission.”
From Car Thief to Militant
By 2004, Mr. Muhammad had become the undisputed star of the tribal areas, the fierce mountain lands populated by the Wazirs, Mehsuds and other Pashtun tribes who for decades had lived independent of the writ of the central government in Islamabad. A brash member of the Wazir tribe, Mr. Muhammad had raised an army to fight government troops and had forced the government into negotiations. He saw no cause for loyalty to the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani military spy service that had given an earlier generation of Pashtuns support during the war against the Soviets.
Many Pakistanis in the tribal areas viewed with disdain the alliance that President Pervez Musharraf had forged with the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They regarded the Pakistani military that had entered the tribal areas as no different from the Americans — who they believed had begun a war of aggression in Afghanistan, just as the Soviets had years earlier.
Born near Wana, the bustling market hub of South Waziristan, Mr. Muhammad spent his adolescent years as a petty car thief and shopkeeper in the city’s bazaar. He found his calling in 1993, around the age of 18, when he was recruited to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and rose quickly through the group’s military hierarchy. He cut a striking figure on the battlefield with his long face and flowing jet black hair.
When the Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001, he seized an opportunity to host the Arab and Chechen fighters from Al Qaeda who crossed into Pakistan to escape the American bombing.
For Mr. Muhammad, it was partly a way to make money, but he also saw another use for the arriving fighters. With their help, over the next two years he launched a string of attacks on Pakistani military installations and on American firebases in Afghanistan.
C.I.A. officers in Islamabad urged Pakistani spies to lean on the Waziri tribesman to hand over the foreign fighters, but under Pashtun tribal customs that would be treachery. Reluctantly, Mr. Musharraf ordered his troops into the forbidding mountains to deliver rough justice to Mr. Muhammad and his fighters, hoping the operation might put a stop to the attacks on Pakistani soil, including two attempts on his life in December 2003.
But it was only the beginning. In March 2004, Pakistani helicopter gunships and artillery pounded Wana and its surrounding villages. Government troops shelled pickup trucks that were carrying civilians away from the fighting and destroyed the compounds of tribesmen suspected of harboring foreign fighters. The Pakistani commander declared the operation an unqualified success, but for Islamabad, it had not been worth the cost in casualties.
A cease-fire was negotiated in April during a hastily arranged meeting in South Waziristan, during which a senior Pakistani commander hung a garland of bright flowers around Mr. Muhammad’s neck. The two men sat together and sipped tea as photographers and television cameras recorded the event.
Both sides spoke of peace, but there was little doubt who was negotiating from strength. Mr. Muhammad would later brag that the government had agreed to meet inside a religious madrasa rather than in a public location where tribal meetings are traditionally held. “I did not go to them; they came to my place,” he said. “That should make it clear who surrendered to whom.”
The peace arrangement propelled Mr. Muhammad to new fame, and the truce was soon exposed as a sham. He resumed attacks against Pakistani troops, and Mr. Musharraf ordered his army back on the offensive in South Waziristan.
Pakistani officials had, for several years, balked at the idea of allowing armed C.I.A. Predators to roam their skies. They considered drone flights a violation of sovereignty, and worried that they would invite further criticism of Mr. Musharraf as being Washington’s lackey. But Mr. Muhammad’s rise to power forced them to reconsider.
The C.I.A. had been monitoring the rise of Mr. Muhammad, but officials considered him to be more Pakistan’s problem than America’s. In Washington, officials were watching with growing alarm the gathering of Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas, and George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director, authorized officers in the agency’s Islamabad station to push Pakistani officials to allow armed drones. Negotiations were handled primarily by the Islamabad station.
As the battles raged in South Waziristan, the station chief in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ehsan ul Haq, the ISI chief, and made an offer: If the C.I.A. killed Mr. Muhammad, would the ISI allow regular armed drone flights over the tribal areas?
In secret negotiations, the terms of the bargain were set. Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike, giving them tight control over the list of targets. And they insisted that drones fly only in narrow parts of the tribal areas — ensuring that they would not venture where Islamabad did not want the Americans going: Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, and the mountain camps where Kashmiri militants were trained for attacks in India.
The ISI and the C.I.A. agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the C.I.A.’s covert action authority — meaning that the United States would never acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take credit for the individual killings or remain silent.
Mr. Musharraf did not think that it would be difficult to keep up the ruse. As he told one C.I.A. officer: “In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time.”
A New Direction
As the negotiations were taking place, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, had just finished a searing report about the abuse of detainees in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons. The report kicked out the foundation upon which the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program had rested. It was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.
The greatest impact of Mr. Helgerson’s report was felt at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, which was at the vanguard of the agency’s global antiterrorism operation. The center had focused on capturing Qaeda operatives; questioning them in C.I.A. jails or outsourcing interrogations to the spy services of Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and other nations; and then using the information to hunt more terrorism suspects.
Mr. Helgerson raised questions about whether C.I.A. officers might face criminal prosecution for the interrogations carried out in the secret prisons, and he suggested that interrogation methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the exploiting of the phobias of prisoners — like confining them in a small box with live bugs — violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
“The agency faces potentially serious long-term political and legal challenges as a result of the CTC detention and interrogation program,” the report concluded, given the brutality of the interrogation techniques and the “inability of the U.S. government to decide what it will ultimately do with the terrorists detained by the agency.”
The report was the beginning of the end for the program. The prisons would stay open for several more years, and new detainees were occasionally picked up and taken to secret sites, but at Langley, senior C.I.A. officers began looking for an endgame to the prison program. One C.I.A. operative told Mr. Helgerson’s team that officers from the agency might one day wind up on a “wanted list” and be tried for war crimes in an international court.
The ground had shifted, and counterterrorism officials began to rethink the strategy for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killings in general, offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. Targeted killings were cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike, and using drones flown by pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away made the whole strategy seem risk-free.
Before long the C.I.A. would go from being the long-term jailer of America’s enemies to a military organization that erased them.
Not long before, the agency had been deeply ambivalent about drone warfare.
The Predator had been considered a blunt and unsophisticated killing tool, and many at the C.I.A. were glad that the agency had gotten out of the assassination business long ago. Three years before Mr. Muhammad’s death, and one year before the C.I.A. carried out its first targeted killing outside a war zone — in Yemen in 2002 — a debate raged over the legality and morality of using drones to kill suspected terrorists.
A new generation of C.I.A. officers had ascended to leadership positions, having joined the agency after the 1975 Congressional committee led by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, which revealed extensive C.I.A. plots to kill foreign leaders, and President Gerald Ford’s subsequent ban on assassinations. The rise to power of this post-Church generation had a direct impact on the type of clandestine operations the C.I.A. chose to conduct.
The debate pitted a group of senior officers at the Counterterrorism Center against James L. Pavitt, the head of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, and others who worried about the repercussions of the agency’s getting back into assassinations. Mr. Tenet told the 9/11 commission that he was not sure that a spy agency should be flying armed drones.
John E. McLaughlin, then the C.I.A.’s deputy director, who the 9/11 commission reported had raised concerns about the C.I.A.’s being in charge of the Predator, said: “You can’t underestimate the cultural change that comes with gaining lethal authority.
“When people say to me, ‘It’s not a big deal,’ ” he said, “I say to them, ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’
“It is a big deal. You start thinking about things differently,” he added. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, these concerns about the use of the C.I.A. to kill were quickly swept side.
The Account at the Time
After Mr. Muhammad was killed, his dirt grave in South Waziristan became a site of pilgrimage. A Pakistani journalist, Zahid Hussain, visited it days after the drone strike and saw a makeshift sign displayed on the grave: “He lived and died like a true Pashtun.”
Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s top military spokesman, told reporters at the time that “Al Qaeda facilitator” Nek Muhammad and four other “militants” had been killed in a rocket attack by Pakistani troops.
Any suggestion that Mr. Muhammad was killed by the Americans, or with American assistance, he said, was “absolutely absurd.”
This article is adapted from “The Way of the Knife: The C.I.A., a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” to be published by Penguin Press on Tuesday.
KABUL (Reuters) – Afghan President Hamid Karzai ratcheted up his criticism of the United States on Sunday, marring a debut visit by the new U.S. defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, and highlighting tensions that could undermine Washington’s strategy to wind down the unpopular war.
A day after two Taliban bombings killed 17 people, Karzai accused the United States and the Taliban of colluding to convince Afghans that foreign forces were needed beyond 2014, when NATO is set to wrap up its combat mission and most troops withdraw.
“Those bombs that went off in Kabul and Khost were not a show of force to America. They were in service of America. It was in the service of the 2014 slogan to warn us if they (Americans) are not here then Taliban will come,” Karzai said in a speech.
“In fact those bombs, set off yesterday in the name of the Taliban, were in the service of Americans to keep foreigners longer in Afghanistan.”
It was one of several inflammatory comments by Karzai and his government on Sunday and follow weeks of efforts by the Afghan leader to curtail U.S. military activity in Afghanistan, including a call to kick American special forces out of an important province. U.S. commanders see special operations forces as key to the end-phase of the conflict.
Hours after Karzai’s speech, Hagel said he spoke “clearly and directly” about the comments during his first meeting with the Afghan leader since becoming U.S. defense secretary on February 27.
Hagel appeared at pains to be respectful of Karzai and avoid sharp criticism, but he told reporters that any collusion between the U.S. and the Taliban “wouldn’t make a lot of sense.”
The U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Joseph Dunford, was more categorical.
“We have fought too hard over the past 12 years, we have shed too much blood over the past 12 years, we have done too much to help the Afghan security forces grow over the last 12 years to ever think that violence or instability would be to our advantage,” Dunford told reporters travelling with Hagel.
Of Karzai’s remarks, he added: “I’ll let others judge whether that’s particularly helpful or not at the political level.”
Still, politics will be key over the next several months, as the United States and NATO allies work to carry out their strategy of pulling out their troops and decide how large a residual force to leave behind after 2014.
NATO defense chiefs meeting in Brussels last month discussed keeping a combined U.S. and allied force of 8,000-12,000 in Afghanistan, focusing on training Afghan troops and countering the remnants of al Qaeda, the Pentagon has said.
Any deal for a follow-on force, which Washington says must include immunity for U.S. troops, would need Karzai’s blessing.
ABUSING STUDENTS? TALIBAN TALKS?
Karzai has a history of making incendiary statements that exasperate Washington but the nature and awkward timing of his latest remarks about the United States were exceptional.
He also alleged on Sunday that the Taliban and the United States had been holding talks in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar on a “daily basis,” further fuelling his suggestion that Washington and the militants were working at common purposes.
“I told the president that it was not true,” Hagel said. “The fact is any prospect for peace or political settlements – that has to be led by the Afghans.”
The Taliban spokesman in Afghanistan, Zabihullah Mujahid, denied that negotiations with the United States had resumed.
Karzai’s government also alleged that U.S.-led forces and Afghans working with them were abusing and arresting university students. Karzai issued an executive order banning foreign troops from entering all education institutions.
Hagel and Karzai were meant to have appeared together at a joint news conference on Sunday evening. But, in a reminder of the threats posed by the resilient insurgency, U.S. officials said it was canceled because of security concerns.
Hagel was about a kilometer away and within earshot of a Saturday morning suicide attack outside the defense ministry that killed nine people. He was meant to have met his Afghan counterpart there this weekend but the venue was later changed.
Hagel’s visit coincided with the passing of a deadline imposed by Karzai for U.S. special forces to leave Wardak province accusing them of overseeing torture and killings.
U.S. forces have denied involvement in any abuses.
Hagel has sounded hopeful that a deal could be reached on their continued deployment but acknowledged no breakthroughs were made in his talks with Karzai.
It was unclear how Hagel’s trip would be viewed by U.S. Republicans who bitterly fought his nomination to become defense chief, portraying him as soft on Iran and questioning his judgment.
Hagel at times appeared sympathetic to the stresses of political life that Karzai must endure.
“I know these are difficult issues for President Karzai and the Afghan people. And I was once a politician,” Hagel said. “So I can understand the kind of pressures – especially leaders of countries – are always under.”
(Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi; Writing by Phil Stewart, Michael Georgy and Jeremy Laurence; Editing by Christopher Wilson and Peter Graff)
Drone strikes on display (Credit: thenewstribe.com)
The Obama administration is nearing completion of a detailed counterterrorism manual that is designed to establish clear rules for targeted-killing operations but leaves open a major exemption for the CIA’s campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan, U.S. officials said.
The carve-out would allow the CIA to continue pounding al-Qaeda and Taliban targets for a year or more before the agency is forced to comply with more stringent rules spelled out in a classified document that officials have described as a counterterrorism “playbook.”
The document, which is expected to be submitted to President Obama for final approval within weeks, marks the culmination of a year-long effort by the White House to codify its counterterrorism policies and create a guide for lethal operations through Obama’s second term.
A senior U.S. official involved in drafting the document said that a few issues remain unresolved but described them as minor. The senior U.S. official said the playbook “will be done shortly.”
The adoption of a formal guide to targeted killing marks a significant — and to some uncomfortable — milestone: the institutionalization of a practice that would have seemed anathema to many before the Sept. 11 , 2001, terrorist attacks.
Among the subjects covered in the playbook are 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 conduct drone strikes outside war zones.
U.S. officials said the effort to draft the playbook was nearly derailed late last year by disagreements among the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon on the criteria for lethal strikes and other issues. Granting the CIA a temporary exemption for its Pakistan operations was described as a compromise that allowed officials to move forward with other parts of the playbook.
The decision to allow the CIA strikes to continue was driven in part by concern that the window for weakening al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan is beginning to close, with plans to pull most U.S. troops out of neighboring Afghanistan over the next two years. CIA drones are flown out of bases in Afghanistan.
“There’s a sense that you put the pedal to the metal now, especially given the impending” withdrawal, said a former U.S. official involved in discussions of the playbook. The CIA exception is expected to be in effect for “less than two years but more than one,” the former official said, although he noted that any decision to close the carve-out “will undoubtedly be predicated on facts on the ground.”
The former official and other current and former officials interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were talking about ongoing sensitive matters.
Obama’s national security team agreed to the CIA compromise late last month during a meeting of the “principals committee,” comprising top national security officials, that was led by White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan, who has since been nominated to serve as CIA director.
White House officials said the committee will review the document again before it is presented to the president. They stressed that it will not be in force until Obama has signed off on it. The CIA declined requests for comment.
The outcome reflects the administration’s struggle to resolve a fundamental conflict in its counterterrorism approach. Senior administration officials have expressed unease with the scale and autonomy of the CIA’s lethal mission in Pakistan. But they have been reluctant to alter the rules because of the drone campaign’s results.
The effort to create a playbook was initially disclosed last year by The Washington Post. Brennan’s aim in developing it, officials said at the time, was to impose more consistent and rigorous controls on counterterrorism programs that were largely ad-hoc in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Critics see the manual as a symbol of the extent to which the targeted killing program has become institutionalized, part of an apparatus being assembled by the Obama administration to sustain a seemingly permanent war.
The playbook is “a step in exactly the wrong direction, a further bureaucratization of the CIA’s paramilitary killing program” over the legal and moral objections of civil liberties groups, said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberty Union’s National Security Project.
Some administration officials have also voiced concern about the duration of the drone campaign, which has spread from Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia where it involves both CIA and military strikes. In a recent speech before he stepped down as Pentagon general counsel, Jeh Johnson warned that “we must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the ‘new normal.’ ”
The discussions surrounding the development of the playbook were centered on practical considerations, officials said. One of the main points of contention, they said, was the issue of “signature strikes.”
The term refers to the CIA’s practice of approving strikes in Pakistan based on patterns of suspicious behavior — moving stockpiles of weapons, for example — even when the agency does not have clear intelligence about the identities of the targets.
CIA officials have credited the approach with decimating al-Qaeda’s upper ranks there, paradoxically accounting for the deaths of more senior terrorist operatives than in the strikes carried out when the agency knew the identity and location of a target in advance.
Signature strikes contributed to a surge in the drone campaign in 2010, when the agency carried out a record 117 strikes in Pakistan. The pace tapered off over the past two years before quickening again in recent weeks.
Despite CIA assertions about the effectiveness of signature strikes, Obama has not granted similar authority to the CIA or military in Yemen, Somalia or other countries patrolled by armed U.S. drones. The restraint has not mollified some critics, who say the secrecy surrounding the strikes in Yemen and Somalia means there is no way to assess who is being killed.
In Yemen, officials said, strikes have been permitted only in cases in which intelligence indicates a specific threat to Americans. That could include “individuals who are personally involved in trying to kill Americans,” a senior administration official said, or “intelligence that . . . [for example] a truck has been configured in order to go after our embassy in Sanaa.”
The playbook has adopted that tighter standard and imposes other more stringent rules. Among them are requirements for White House approval of drone strikes and the involvement of multiple agencies — including the State Department — in nominating new names for kill lists.
None of those rules applies to the CIA drone campaign in Pakistan, which began under President George W. Bush. The agency is expected to give the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan advance notice on strikes. But in practice, officials said, the agency exercises near complete control over the names on its target list and decisions on strikes.
Imposing the playbook standards on the CIA campaign in Pakistan would probably lead to a sharp reduction in the number of strikes at a time when Obama is preparing to announce a drawdown of U.S. forces from Afghanistan that could leave as few as 2,500 troops in place after 2014.
Officials said concerns about the CIA exemption were allayed to some extent by Obama’s decision to nominate Brennan, the principal author of the playbook, to run the CIA.
Brennan spent 25 years at the agency before serving as chief counterterrorism adviser to Obama for the past four years. During his White House tenure, he led efforts to impose a more rigorous review of targeted killing operations. But he also presided over a major expansion in the number of strikes.
CIA officials are likely to be “quite willing, quite eager to embrace” the playbook developed by their presumed future director, the former administration official said. “It’s his handiwork.”
Brennan’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled for Feb. 7.
Barack Obama’s election as America’s first black president in 2008 was historic on many levels, but the truth may be that Obama’s re-election in 2012 was a much bigger feat.
Visiting his young campaign staffers the morning after his re-election at his campaign headquarters in Chicago, a tearful Obama told the staffers that they had been part of the best campaign team in history.
“You’re smarter, you’re better organised, you’re more effective,” he said. “So I’m absolutely confident that all of you are going to do just amazing things in your lives.”
With a sluggish economy, unemployment teetering at around the eight per cent mark, and growing anti-Obama sentiment in some parts of the country, a second term seemed an uphill task for Obama and it was going to take an extraordinary campaign to make it happen.
Things were different in 2008. Back then he had the fortune of an electorate grown weary of the Bush presidency looking for change and with no real record to defend. His mercurial rise and the zeitgeist of the country at the time seemed to have coincided at the right time.
This time it was going to be harder, with a first term that had left some of his more ardent supporters with a tinge of disappointment given the promise of his first campaign, and the Republicans growing even more strident in their opposition. America hadn’t been so politically polarized in a long time.
But in a presidential campaign, the incumbent enjoys a few advantages and one of them is a strong organisational setup.
From the get-go David Axelrod, the brain behind the Obama campaign, recognised the role that data and information could play in the election. The process had been initiated in 2008 but databases were scattered and it wasn’t until the 2010 midterm elections that the Democratic Party, despite heavy losses, was able to streamline the data to accurately forecast results in a meaningful way.
Enter Rayid Ghani.
At first impression Ghani comes across as an affable person, who speaks in short, clipped sentences that don’t give away any more than he intends to. Right away you get the feeling that he knows what he’s talking about. But his unassuming manner belies the fact that he is one of the leading experts in the growing field of analytics and data mining.
An alum of Karachi Grammar School, he moved to the Unites States for college where he attended a small liberal arts school in Tennessee called Sewanee: University of the South.
There he studied computer science and mathematics, but as with many undergraduate experiences, he used his time there to find his true calling.
“What I really did there was explore and figure out what I wanted to do, which ended up being a research career in some form of artificial intelligence and machine learning,” Ghani said. “I was motivated by two goals: One was to study and understand how we (humans) learn and two: I wanted to solve large practical problems by making computers smarter though the use of data.”
That eventually led him to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for graduate school where he studied Machine Learning and Data Mining.
It was during this period that he started working at Accenture Technology labs as chief scientist, before joining Obama For America.
At Accenture, Ghani mined mountains of private data of given corporations to find statistical patterns that could forecast consumer behavior.
“We were a small group of people who were kind of looking at the next generation of tools that would be beneficial for businesses,” he said. “We were trying to find new approaches to analysing data and see how we could apply it to businesses.”
In today’s data-centric world, the one-size-fits-all model is no longer an efficient use of a company’s resources. More and more, corporations are looking for increasingly targeted approaches to attract consumers.
Similar to how Facebook uses information from user profiles to target its advertising, Ghani helped businesses find patterns in consumer behavior so that his clients could develop different strategies that suit individual preferences. It’s what’s known as customer-relationship management or CRM in the corporate sector.
Having spent 10 years at Accenture, Ghani said he was looking for a move into the non-profit sector, which, serendipitously, is when the Obama campaign came knocking.
“I was always interested in politics,” he said. “Living in the US for 17 years, you tend to follow the politics of the country, because it does affect every person. You read about it, discuss it with co-workers and friends. So [the campaign] wasn’t a completely impossible direction to take.”
Jumping aboard the Obama campaign as chief scientist, Ghani’s job was essentially similar to what he’d done at Accenture — to make sense of huge amounts of information.
“The core of the work I was doing was looking at a large amount of data and making sense of it to help other people make better decisions,” he said.
The basic idea was to merge digital information with details gathered from voting records and interaction in order to provide a blueprint for efficient spending.
“Most of the data we had was from data that we collected either from interacting with people, which might mean either we called someone, someone donated money to us, or if they volunteered, or from voter registration records,” he said.
There’s a common misconception among people that among the data used was voters’ magazine subscriptions, shopping habits, and other specific behavioral data.
“A lot of the things you might have read on the internet are mostly not correct,” he said with a wry laugh. “We don’t care about what car you drive, or what magazines you read. For one thing we don’t have that data, and it’s not very useful. What car you drive doesn’t tell us which way you’ll be voting.”
The real advantage of data is that it helps in using the resources at your disposal as efficiently as you can, which in the case of political campaigns is money.
“How data helps you, is it makes you more efficient and it helps you spend your money carefully and in the right way,” Ghani said. “You could pick up the phonebook and just start calling everyone, but you’ll either waste calls on people who are already going to vote, or on people who can’t be persuaded to vote your way. But with a data-driven approach, you can target those voters who are much more likely be affected by that call and pick up voters you didn’t have.”
By discerning which voters are the most likely to be swayed, the campaign can then design its ad campaigns and alter its strategy for maximum effectiveness. It’s the smart-bomb method to political campaigning.
But the truth is that we’re still in the infancy of this data-based approach to political campaigns.
“My personal hope is that as campaigns get mature in the use of data,” he said. “Data isn’t a secret weapon but an enabler of better democracy and more public participation. I see the future use of data as enabling more personalised and relevant interactions with voters, to get them more education about issues, more involved in political discussions, and have them even participate in creating public policies.”
And it’s an approach that can be applied anywhere if tailored to the circumstances and realities of any given place — even Pakistan.
“A lot of this is certainly applicable in Pakistan but things have to start small,” Ghani said. “First, there is a lack of data, so political parties need to start collecting this data themselves. Then they need to use it to understand the voters and allocate resources more efficiently. Parties that focus more on grassroots organising are the ones most likely to collect and make more effective use of this data and as this process gets more mature and democratic, I hope it leads to a better educated public making informed voting decisions that are good for the country and its people.”
Being of Pakistani origin, it’s not a stretch to wonder what role Ghani’s own politics play in this, especially given the ups and downs the relationship between America and Pakistan has taken over the years. But for Ghani, whose family lives in London, while he works in the US, it’s a lot simpler.
“At this point I really don’t know what I am,” he said. “It’s less about country than about the larger world. For me it was a really easy decision, ‘Is Obama better for the world than (Mitt) Romney?’ Absolutely.”
What attracted Ghani to the campaign was Obama himself as a candidate.
“He is great at emotionally connecting with, motivating, and energising people but what was more important to me was what he had done in his first term and how much still remained to be done,” he said.
In addition to that, it was the diversity of the people on the campaign that was one of the great things about working for the Obama campaign Ghani said.
“There were so many people with different backgrounds and experiences, but they were all there for the same reason,” he said.
The campaign itself was an understandably grueling and exhausting experience.
“It’s unlike any other workplace,” he said. “We were, spending 15, 16, 18 hours a day together, with no weekends. It’s something you enjoy when it’s over, because when you’re in it, it’s not easy.”
So after a long and grueling, albeit rewarding, campaign, what’s next for him?
“Well the campaign’s over now,” Ghani said. “I’m looking at different things and trying to stay connected with the non-profit world, and trying to help non-profits use data to become more efficient and better.”
Ghani is one of a small number of tech wizards in a world that is becoming increasingly data oriented. If the 2008 campaign was about charisma and hope, the 2012 campaign was about science and data. Gone are the days when political campaigns were an art form run by people who played by gut instinct.
Now it’s run by people like Rayid Ghani.
The author is an assistant multimedia producer at Dawn.com.
