Dirty Wars

Jeremy Scahill wrote Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield as a long piece of reporting on the covert side of American military power in the decade after the September 11 attacks. Published by Nation Books in 2013, it followed his earlier book on Blackwater and extended that project in a different direction: away from the privatised side of the “war on terror” and towards the uniformed one, specifically the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the Central Intelligence Agency’s paramilitary arm. Scahill is a national security correspondent — at the time with The Nation, later a co-founder of The Intercept — and the book draws on years of on-the-ground reporting in Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and Washington, interviews with soldiers, intelligence officers and the families of people killed in American operations, and a close read of leaked cables and court filings. It arrived at a point in the second Obama administration when the drone programme had become the public face of American counter-terrorism and the targeted killing of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, had moved from rumour to acknowledged fact. The book was published in parallel with a documentary of the same name directed by Rick Rowley, which drew on much of the same reporting.

The central argument is in the subtitle. Scahill contends that the United States, in the years after 2001, abandoned the geographic logic that had organised its earlier wars and treated the whole world as a single battlefield on which an open-ended list of enemies could be found and killed. JSOC and the CIA, which had operated at the margins of American statecraft, moved to the centre. The president acquired what the book describes as a kill list, maintained and iterated as a bureaucratic process rather than an exceptional one. Capture gave way to kill as the preferred outcome, both because detention had become legally and politically costly after Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and because the available tools — armed Predator and Reaper drones, forward-deployed special operations teams — made killing operationally easier than taking people alive. Scahill’s claim is not that this started under Obama; the apparatus was built under George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. His claim is that Obama inherited it, expanded it, routinised it, and gave it the appearance of a sustainable long-term policy.

The book moves roughly chronologically and geographically. It opens in the hours after the September 11 attacks and in the small office of Donald Rumsfeld, whose frustration with the CIA’s early dominance of the Afghan campaign leads him to push the Pentagon’s own clandestine units into the lead. The reader is introduced to JSOC — the force that includes the Army’s Delta Force, the Navy’s SEAL Team Six, and specialised aviation and intelligence units — and to the men who shaped it after 2001, among them Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal. McChrystal’s tenure running JSOC in Iraq, and his industrialisation of the find-fix-finish cycle against the Zarqawi network, is treated as the pivot: the moment when American special operations stopped being a boutique capability held in reserve for the most sensitive jobs and became a nightly machine running on signals intelligence, biometrics and raids. Chapters follow this machine out of Iraq and into Afghanistan, where the night raid becomes the signature operation and civilian casualties feed the insurgency Scahill is reporting on.

A long thread of the book runs through Yemen. Scahill travels repeatedly to a country most Western correspondents did not visit at that time, and he uses it to tell the story of Anwar al-Awlaki in detail. Al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric of Yemeni descent, moves across the book from a figure the FBI consulted after 9/11 to a target of a presidential kill order. Scahill lays out his trajectory from mosques in San Diego and Falls Church through Britain and back to Yemen, interviews his father Nasser al-Awlaki, and reconstructs the September 2011 drone strike that killed him alongside Samir Khan, the editor of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s magazine Inspire. Two weeks later, in a separate strike, Al-Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son Abdulrahman — also an American citizen, born in Denver — is killed in a strike on a group of people eating at an outdoor restaurant in southern Yemen. The administration offers no public rationale. Scahill devotes considerable space to the family’s attempt to find out what happened, to the parallel case of Samir Khan’s family in North Carolina, and to the legal arguments that preceded and followed the strikes. He treats the elder Al-Awlaki as a man who did radicalise and did help plan operations against Americans, while treating the son’s death as unexplained and the broader policy as consequential beyond any individual case.

Somalia is the book’s third major theatre. Scahill is one of the few American reporters to spend meaningful time there in this period, and his chapters describe the use of warlords as proxies, the role of Ethiopia as a client ground force in 2006, the subsequent rise of Al-Shabaab, and the quiet establishment of a drone and surveillance infrastructure anchored at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and at a facility near Mogadishu’s airport. Operations in Somalia tie together threads the book has pulled elsewhere: strikes conducted by JSOC and the CIA rather than conventional forces, a legal footing that rests on broad readings of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, and a target set that drifts from named individuals associated with the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings to anonymous young men identified by patterns of behaviour. The concept of the “signature strike” — a strike authorised not on a positive identification of a specific person but on observed patterns consistent with militant activity — is laid out and traced through its policy history. Scahill tracks the way the drone programme crept outward from Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it had been understood as a tool for a specific conflict, to Yemen and Somalia, where the conflict was less legible and the targets less documented.

Washington is present throughout. The book spends time inside the Obama White House’s weekly “terror Tuesday” meetings, the National Counterterrorism Center and the Pentagon, drawing on named and anonymous sources to describe the “disposition matrix” — the database maintained to track potential targets and the options for dealing with them. John Brennan, the counter-terrorism adviser who later becomes CIA director, is a recurring figure, as is Michael Vickers at the Pentagon. The CIA under Leon Panetta and David Petraeus is shown absorbing more of the drone programme while JSOC retains its own authorities. Scahill treats the migration of authority from the CIA to JSOC and back as a bureaucratic story with real consequences: the Pentagon’s special operations arm operates under Title 10 of the US Code, the CIA under Title 50, and the distinction shapes what can be disclosed, which committees of Congress are briefed, and what the lawyers write down. The book argues that this architecture was built fast, under extreme pressure, and that its procedures have hardened into something that will outlast any particular president.

Alongside the operations, Scahill reports in detail on specific units and events. The Haditha killings in Iraq and the SEAL Team Six operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in May 2011 both appear; so does the Gardez raid in Afghanistan in February 2010, in which American special operations forces killed, among others, two pregnant women and a district attorney, and in which the initial military account diverged sharply from what the reporter Jerome Starkey reconstructed from Afghan witnesses. The strike on the Al-Majalah encampment in Yemen in December 2009, in which cruise missiles tipped with cluster munitions killed a large number of women and children, is reconstructed from Yemeni sources and from a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks that recorded Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh telling David Petraeus “we’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours”. The Raymond Davis incident in Lahore in 2011, in which a CIA contractor shot two Pakistanis and precipitated a crisis in the US-Pakistan relationship, is used to open up the question of how large and how exposed the CIA’s covert presence had become.

The book is not neutral and does not try to be. Scahill writes from a sceptical position on the legality and the strategic wisdom of what he describes, and he quotes officers and officials — not all of them left of centre — who share pieces of that scepticism. He is more interested in showing the architecture than in prosecuting it, and he gives sympathetic attention to the operators themselves, to the ambition and competence of the special-mission units and to the belief inside them that they are doing necessary work. The complaint he returns to is political rather than military: that the civilian oversight of this apparatus has thinned to a handful of lawyers and committee chairs, that the public rationale given for strikes has drifted from the first principles asserted after 9/11, and that an open-ended conflict run largely in secret is a bad fit for a constitutional system.

Reception split along familiar lines. Reviews on the left in the United States and in Britain treated the book as a definitive piece of long-form accountability journalism; outlets more sympathetic to the administration argued that Scahill underplayed the operational necessity of the strikes and the quality of the intelligence behind them. Within the national-security press, Dirty Wars was read next to Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife, published the same spring, and Daniel Klaidman’s Kill or Capture, published in 2012. The three books cover overlapping ground from different angles — Mazzetti more inside the CIA, Klaidman more inside the Obama White House, Scahill more on the ground in the countries where the strikes land — and together they shaped the public understanding of what the drone programme had become. The debate the book joined, over the legality of killing American citizens without trial and over the civilian cost of signature strikes, moved after publication into the Department of Justice white paper on targeted killings, the Stimson Center task force report of 2014, and President Obama’s own May 2013 speech at the National Defense University, in which he announced an attempt to tighten the standards for lethal strikes and move more of the programme from the CIA back to the Pentagon.

For a reader working through the modern literature on how states fight at a distance, Dirty Wars functions as the political history of the decade that produced today’s drone and special-operations ecosystem. It pairs well with Mazzetti and Klaidman, with the Columbia and NYU/Stanford studies on civilian casualties in the Pakistan strikes, with Steve Coll’s two volumes on the CIA in Afghanistan, and with the later generation of books that look at autonomy and artificial intelligence in weapons systems — Paul Scharre’s Army of None, Shashank Joshi and Audrey Kurth Cronin on the diffusion of drones — because the policy choices those later books trace back to a point of origin are the choices Scahill is documenting as they are being made. The book does not cover the industrial side of unmanned systems, the engineering of autonomy, or the state-on-state use of drones that has since become routine from Nagorno-Karabakh to Ukraine; it is a book about an American apparatus doing American things, and its lens is narrower than that of the field as it looks today.

What has aged well is the architectural reporting. The institutions Scahill describes — JSOC’s command structure, the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre, the forward sites in Djibouti and the Gulf, the legal construction around the AUMF — are still in place, and most of the operational practices he documents remain in use with incremental changes. The targeted killing of American citizens abroad, treated as a rupture at the time, has been normalised. What has dated is the geographic frame. The book assumes a world in which the United States conducts dirty wars and other states mostly do not; in the decade since publication, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Israel, Ukraine and a lengthening list of smaller powers have put armed drones and special-mission raiding into their own doctrines, and the technology at the sharp end has moved from a few expensive Predators to swarms of small, cheap, increasingly autonomous systems. Read today, Dirty Wars is less the end of a story than the first act of one, and its enduring value is less as a verdict on American policy than as a careful account of how the current way of fighting at distance came to be.