President Obama has admitted that a US counterterrorism operation in January accidentally killed two hostages who were being held by Al-Qaeda. The raid was indeed a fatal mistake which necessitates a reassessment of the US government's policies and procedures for securing the release of hostages held abroad. In the incident announced on Thursday by Obama, US intelligence seems to have been unaware that two Western hostages - US doctor Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto - were being held in the very same compound that was to be targeted in an unmanned aerial drone strike in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Despite the fact that US officials believed with near certainty there were no hostages at the target site and that the strike was carried out after hundreds of hours of surveillance on the Al-Qaeda compound and near continuous surveillance in the days leading up to the operation, that assessment was not correct and the operation led to tragic consequence. Not only did American officials believe neither hostage was present when the operation was launched but they also did not know that two other Americans thought to be Al-Qaeda members were also killed. Thus, the US apparently and embarrassingly did not know who it was killing. This was not the first time a special operations mission has ended up inadvertently killing Western hostages. In 2010, British aid worker Linda Norgrove, kidnapped by the Afghan Taliban, was killed by a grenade thrown by one of her would-be rescuers. Last December, a US commando raid in Yemen resulted in the deaths of an American photojournalist and a South African teacher, both shot by their Al-Qaeda captors. But Obama still stands by US counterterrorism efforts in the region, though they have been criticized for their heavy reliance on drone strikes and resulting civilian casualties. There are of course the extraordinary difficulties of operating in remote, mountainous, and often forested terrain where there is little government presence or control. While drones offer the advantage of minimizing risk to US servicemen who might otherwise be put on the ground in a combat role, that must be weighed against some significant drawbacks, the chief being innocent civilians who are killed by drone strikes. The governments of targeted populations also sometimes view drone attacks as violations of their sovereignty every bit as much as manned raids. A drone attack also destroys the critical intelligence that is needed to ensure strategic advantage. A drone attack by definition is aimed at killing rather than capturing the target, so it has no ability to conduct sensitive site exploitation, to vacuum up clues and litter and seize laptops and cell phones that are all vital to the high-tech tracking of terrorist and enemy networks. Though Obama described the drone incident as a painful loss he profoundly regretted and that what sets America apart was facing up squarely to its mistakes, there is the unexplained reason why, while the strike was launched in January, its tragic consequences were not officially announced until late April. It's a “bitter truth in the fog of war” that mistakes occur, Obama said, but if security professionals diligently follow national security protocols, and yet they still result in unintended but very tragic consequence, there must be a review to see if there are lessons learned and reforms that can be implemented to the process. The death of the hostages raises legitimate questions about whether additional changes need to be made to the US protocol for launching counterterrorism operations. Thursday's new disclosures raise troubling questions about the reliability of the intelligence that the US government is relying on to justify drone strikes.
