Former U.S. intelligence chief Dennis Blair said Friday the U.S.
should stop its drone campaign in Pakistan, and reconsider the $80
billion a year it spends to fight terrorism.
Speaking at the
Aspen Security Forum, Blair said the CIA's unmanned aircraft operation
aimed at al-Qaida is backfiring by damaging the U.S.-Pakistan
relationship. The former director of national intelligence suggests
giving Pakistan more say in what gets hit by drone strikes and when,
despite Pakistan's record of tipping off militants when it gets advance
word of U.S. action.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who
previously headed the CIA, has lauded the drone campaign as a key tool
to take out al-Qaida and other militants in Pakistan's tribal areas.
Strikes, which have more than tripled year-to-year under the Obama
administration, are done with tacit Pakistani assent, though publicly,
Pakistani officials decry the hits. That tension has grown worse after
the U.S. unilateral raid into Pakistan May 2 to kill al-Qaida leader
Osama bin Laden, and an earlier incident in January, when a CIA
contractor was held for killing two Pakistani men in Lahore that he
said were trying to rob him.
Blair said the continuing drone
strikes are more of a nuisance than a real threat to al-Qaida, and that
only a ground campaign by Pakistan would truly threaten it and other
militant organizations. The U.S. had been training forces for that
purpose until the program was canceled by Pakistan in retaliation for
the raid to kill Osama bin Laden.
Al Qaida "can sustain its level
of resistance to an air-only campaign," he said. "I just see us with
that strategy walking out on a thinner and thinner ledge and if even we
get to the far end of it, we are not going to lower the fundamental
threat to the U.S. any lower than we have it now."
Other
conference speakers disagreed with his analysis, including Bush
administration veteran Fran Townsend, the former chief counterterrorism
adviser in the White House.
"This has been the key tool in
degrading the Al Qaida leadership," Townsend said Friday, saying that
without it, al-Qaida would be a far greater threat to the homeland.
Stephen
Hadley, former national security adviser to President George W. Bush,
said the Pakistani government in the past had assented to the strikes,
if they were used against major targets.
"The line they
drew...was boots on the ground, special (ops) forces in Pakistan,"
Hadley said. "We did a limited cross-border operation and it caused a
huge outcry to the point where we said we're not going to do that
anymore" unless it was to get bin Laden or his then-deputy Ayman
al-Zawahri, "knowing you're going to pay in Pakistan public opinion.
And we did," after bin Laden was killed.
Blair also suggested
cutting the cost of hunting terrorists by relying more on local forces,
especially in Yemen and Somalia. "Pull back on unilateral actions by
the United States, except in extraordinary circumstances," he said.
The
U.S. is already also working with indigenous forces in Yemen and
Somalia, but also sustains a large and expensive offshore presence
aboard a ship off the Yemeni coast, as well as flying armed and
observation drones from Djibouti and other sites in the region.
Blair
estimated that there are some 4,000 terrorists worldwide, and a budget
of some $80 billion devoted to fighting them — a figure he said did not
include the wars of Afghanistan or Iraq.
"That's $20 million for
each of these people ... Is that proportionate?" he asked. He pointed
out that 17 Americans have been killed inside the U.S. by terrorists in
the decade since Sept. 11, including the 14 killed in the Ft. Hood
massacre, while car accidents and daily crime combined have killed some
1.5 million people during the same 10 years.
"What is it that justifies this amount of money on this narrow problem?" he asked.
Blair,
who was forced to resign by the Obama administration, says the White
House undermined his authority as director of national intelligence by
siding with the CIA, instead of telling it to listen to him.
"They sided enough with the CIA in ways that were public enough that it undercut my position," Blair said. AP
