Targeted killing

Based on Wikipedia: Targeted killing

In September 2011, a drone circling high above Yemen fired missiles at a convoy of vehicles. The strike killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric who had inspired terrorist attacks. What made this killing unprecedented wasn't the technology or the target—it was that Awlaki was an American citizen, and the President of the United States had personally approved his assassination without any judicial proceeding. No arrest. No trial. No jury. Just a name on a list, and then a missile from the sky.

This is targeted killing: the deliberate assassination of a specific person by a government, carried out outside any courtroom or traditional battlefield. It's a practice as old as statecraft itself, yet one that has transformed dramatically in the twenty-first century.

The Uncomfortable History

For most of modern Western history—at least since the mid-1700s—assassination was considered beyond the pale of legitimate government action. Kings might wage wars, but they weren't supposed to send assassins after one another. This wasn't mere etiquette; it reflected a belief that some methods of killing were simply too destabilizing, too corrosive to the international order.

That norm held, more or less, until it didn't.

The unraveling came gradually. During World War Two, the United States executed Operation Vengeance, shooting down a plane carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack. This was celebrated as a brilliant tactical strike, not condemned as assassination. The target was military, the context was total war, and Yamamoto was actively commanding enemy forces.

Then came Vietnam and the Phoenix Program, which systematically targeted Viet Cong political leaders for assassination. Thousands died. The program remained classified for years, and when it became public, it sparked fierce debate about whether such killings could ever be legitimate.

Between 1976 and 2001, the United States maintained an executive order banning political assassinations. The prohibition wasn't absolute—it had loopholes for military operations—but it represented an official stance that targeted killing was something America didn't do.

September 11, 2001, changed that calculus entirely.

The Drone Age

Within a week of the September 11th attacks, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, commonly known by its acronym AUMF. This single-page resolution gave the President power to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible for the attacks or anyone who harbored them.

Those fifty words became the legal foundation for a global assassination program that would span decades and multiple continents.

Under President George W. Bush, targeted killings emerged as a counterterrorism tactic. Under President Barack Obama, they became central strategy. The weapon of choice was the unmanned aerial vehicle—the drone—which could loiter over remote regions of Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, waiting for targets to emerge.

The numbers tell a stark story. In Pakistan alone, drone strikes killed between 2,000 and 3,500 militants, depending on which estimate you trust. The civilian death toll ranged from 158 to 965—a gap so wide it reveals how little anyone really knows about who dies in these strikes.

In one northeastern Afghanistan operation between January 2012 and February 2013, American special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. That's a miss rate of over 80 percent.

The drone program's defenders argue that these weapons are more precise than any alternative. Sending ground troops would mean more casualties on all sides. Conventional airstrikes are less accurate. At least drones can watch and wait, striking only when the target is isolated.

Critics counter that precision is meaningless when you're not sure who you're killing.

Signature Strikes and Kill Lists

Here's where targeted killing becomes something stranger than traditional assassination.

Early in the drone program, the rules required that targets be identified—known terrorist leaders whose locations could be confirmed, whose names appeared on secret lists maintained by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command. If you were going to kill someone, you at least had to know who they were.

Then came "signature strikes."

A signature strike doesn't target a specific person. Instead, it targets a pattern of behavior. Intelligence analysts watch a compound through satellite imagery. They intercept communications. They track movements. If armed men gather in ways that suggest terrorist activity—if their behavior matches a "signature" associated with militant groups—they become targets. No name required. No confirmation of identity. Just patterns that look suspicious from 10,000 feet up.

In April 2012, President Obama expanded signature strikes to Yemen, where a group called Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had established strongholds. Twenty-six members of Congress, mostly Democrats, wrote a letter expressing alarm. "Our drone campaigns already have virtually no transparency, accountability or oversight," they warned.

The process for selecting named targets became increasingly centralized in the White House. Each week, counterterrorism staff would compile potential names and run them past various agencies. The President himself reserved final approval on every strike in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. A New York Times investigation described Obama placing himself "at the helm of a top secret process to designate terrorists for kill or capture."

There was oversight, of a sort. Staff from the House and Senate intelligence committees would watch videos of recent strikes, review the intelligence used to justify them, and examine assessments of who had been hit. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who helped establish this monitoring process, insisted it was rigorous. "We receive notification with key details shortly after every strike," she wrote. Committee staff held 28 monthly in-depth meetings to review strike records.

But this oversight was retrospective. The committees could question strikes after they happened, but they couldn't prevent them. And the details remained classified, invisible to the public.

The Legal Tangle

Is any of this legal?

The answer depends entirely on which framework you apply.

The American government argues under a "war paradigm." We are at war with al-Qaeda and affiliated groups, the reasoning goes, and in war you're allowed to kill enemy combatants. There's nothing illegal about shooting an enemy soldier; drone strikes are simply a more technologically advanced version of that age-old practice. John Brennan, who ran the counterterrorism operation under Obama and later became CIA director, made this argument explicitly in 2012. "There is nothing in international law that bans the use of remotely piloted aircraft," he said, "or that prohibits us from using lethal force against our enemies outside of an active battlefield."

Critics reject this framing entirely. They argue that the "war on terror" is not a real war in any legal sense—it has no defined enemy nation, no possibility of surrender or peace treaty, no geographical limits, and no foreseeable end. Under this view, targeted killings are simply extrajudicial executions, prohibited by both American and international law.

The American Civil Liberties Union has fought the drone program in court. Robert Grenier, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, has called the strategy counterproductive. Legal scholars remain deeply divided.

The Constitution empowers the President to protect the nation from imminent threats. But what does "imminent" mean when the threat is from stateless actors who might strike tomorrow or might strike in five years? The traditional concept of imminence—tanks massing at the border, missiles fueling on launch pads—doesn't translate easily to a world of sleeper cells and encrypted communications.

The Effectiveness Question

Set aside the legal debates. Set aside the moral questions. There's a simpler question: Does targeted killing actually work?

The evidence is genuinely mixed.

A Reuters analysis of 500 "militants" killed by American drones between 2008 and 2010 found that only 8 percent were mid-to-top-tier organizers or leaders. The other 92 percent were foot soldiers—replaceable fighters whose deaths might create a temporary setback but wouldn't fundamentally damage the organizations they served.

This represents a significant shift from the Bush era, when a quarter of drone targets were identified al-Qaeda members. Under Obama, that dropped to 8 percent, while Taliban fighters accounted for more than half of targets. The program had evolved from decapitation strikes against leadership to something more like aerial warfare against ground troops.

Defenders point to high-profile successes: Osama bin Laden, killed by Navy SEALs in 2011. Ayman al-Zawahiri, killed by a drone strike in 2022. These were the men who planned September 11th; their deaths disrupted al-Qaeda's command structure.

Critics point to the collateral damage—not just civilian deaths, but the strategic blowback. In Yemen and Pakistan, drone strikes have generated fierce anti-American sentiment. Survivors and relatives of victims become prime recruits for the very groups America is trying to destroy. Each strike might kill a terrorist, but it might also create three more.

According to analysis by Reprieve, a human rights organization, 874 people were killed in Pakistan drone strikes targeting just 24 individuals. Some of those 24 were hit successfully. Some were not—they survived multiple assassination attempts while bystanders died. In the repeated attempts to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri before the successful 2022 strike, 76 children and 29 adults were killed.

Beyond America

The United States didn't invent targeted killing, and it certainly doesn't have a monopoly on the practice.

During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Hutu army units and militias carried out what observers called "targeted killings of political opponents"—a systematic effort to eliminate moderate Hutu politicians and Tutsi community leaders before the mass slaughter began. These weren't random killings; they were assassinations with lists of names, a prelude to the broader genocide that followed.

In Central America during the 1980s, death squads operated throughout El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. A 1986 report by Americas Watch documented 240 targeted killings by Salvadoran security forces in a single year. The victims included trade unionists, human rights activists, and suspected leftist sympathizers.

Operation Condor, a United States-backed campaign of political repression across South American dictatorships in the 1970s, used targeted killing as state policy. The victims included two former Uruguayan legislators, a former Bolivian president, a former Chilean interior minister, and a former Chilean ambassador who was killed by a car bomb in Washington, D.C., along with his 26-year-old American colleague.

In Colombia, the intersection of drug trafficking, left-wing guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitaries produced decades of targeted killings. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, and the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as AUC, carried out assassinations that claimed human rights workers, political activists, and often women and children caught in the crossfire.

The Semantic Game

There's something revealing about the phrase "targeted killing" itself.

When Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington D.C., faced criticism in 1989 for the city's murder rate, he pushed back with an odd distinction. "Washington should not be called the murder capital of the world," he said. "We are the targeted-killing capital of the world." His point was that D.C.'s murders weren't random violence—they were drug cartel hits, comparable to "Al Capone and Eliot Ness" in the Prohibition era.

Similarly, Russian media in the 1990s began describing Moscow's mob hits as "targeted killings"—a term that somehow made gangland executions sound more clinical, more purposeful, less like mere murder.

The phrase does important rhetorical work. "Assassination" carries moral weight; it implies illegality, conspiracy, the killing of someone who perhaps shouldn't have been killed. "Targeted killing" sounds almost surgical. It suggests precision, forethought, discrimination between legitimate targets and civilians. The very term frames the act as rational policy rather than political murder.

Yet the substance remains the same: a government deciding, outside any judicial process, that a particular human being should die, and then making it happen.

The Drone's Shadow

What distinguishes modern targeted killing from historical assassination is less the legal framework than the technology.

A Predator or Reaper drone can fly for more than 24 hours continuously, watching a compound, tracking a vehicle, waiting for the moment when a target emerges. The operator sits in a climate-controlled trailer in Nevada, piloting the aircraft via satellite link, pressing a button to release a Hellfire missile that arrives at its target 10,000 miles away about eight seconds later.

This creates what military ethicists call "asymmetric warfare" in its purest form. The target has no warning, no chance to surrender, no way to fight back. The operator faces no physical risk. The killing is antiseptic, mediated through cameras and screens.

Proponents argue this asymmetry is precisely what makes drone strikes ethical—or at least more ethical than alternatives. An airstrike from a manned fighter jet might hit the wrong building. A raid by special operations forces puts American lives at risk and often causes more collateral damage than a precision missile. The drone minimizes harm on all sides.

Critics see the asymmetry differently. They worry about what happens to a society that can kill without risk, without even requiring its citizens to know about the killing. When death becomes cheap and distant, the temptation to use it grows. The bar for lethal force drops lower and lower.

There's also the matter of proliferation. The United States pioneered armed drones, but dozens of countries now possess them. China and Iran export them widely. The technology that enables American strikes in Yemen today will enable other nations' strikes elsewhere tomorrow. The norms the United States establishes—or fails to establish—will shape how the entire world uses this technology.

The Expanding War

One of the strangest features of America's targeted killing program is how far it has stretched the original legal justification.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force was passed to authorize action against those responsible for September 11th. Al-Qaeda planned those attacks; the Taliban harbored al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The legal connection was clear.

But within a decade, American drones were striking targets in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere—countries that had nothing to do with September 11th, against groups that didn't exist in 2001. The legal theory evolved to include "associated forces," a phrase that appears nowhere in the original authorization.

Who counts as an "associated force"? That determination is made in secret, by executive branch officials, without judicial review. The list keeps expanding. Groups that have no operational connection to what remains of al-Qaeda, groups that emerged years after September 11th, groups whose primary focus is local rather than global—all have been deemed targetable under a law written in response to a specific attack by a specific organization.

This isn't a Democratic or Republican phenomenon. The expansion happened under both Bush and Obama, and continued under Trump and Biden. Each administration has found the tools of targeted killing too useful to abandon.

Living Under Drones

What does it feel like to live in a place where drones circle overhead?

Researchers who have interviewed residents of Pakistan's tribal areas describe a pervasive psychological toll. People hear the buzzing of drone engines constantly—a sound they've learned to associate with sudden death. Children are afraid to go to school. Funerals become dangerous, since drone operators have been known to target the gatherings that follow an initial strike. Community meetings, weddings, any large gathering becomes a potential target.

The uncertainty is perhaps the worst part. No one knows who is on the list. Associating with the wrong person, being in the wrong place, driving in a convoy that fits a suspicious pattern—any of these might be fatal. The fear is rational: many of the people killed in drone strikes were not the intended targets.

This psychological reality rarely enters American debates about targeted killing. The discussion focuses on legality, on effectiveness, on whether specific individuals deserved to die. The lived experience of populations subjected to drone surveillance—the constant ambient terror—remains largely invisible.

Where It Ends

There is no end in sight.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force has never been repealed or revised. Multiple presidential administrations have found it useful exactly as written—a blank check for global military action that requires no further congressional approval. Efforts to update or limit the authorization have repeatedly failed.

The technology continues to advance. Drones become smaller, cheaper, more autonomous. The next generation may require no human operator at all—algorithms identifying targets and executing strikes without a finger on any trigger.

The legal framework remains unsettled. Courts have been reluctant to second-guess executive branch targeting decisions, treating them as "political questions" outside judicial competence. Congress maintains its oversight, but that oversight is secret and retrospective. The American public knows that their government kills people in their name, in countries with which America is not at war, but the details remain classified.

Perhaps most troubling is the precedent being set. If the United States claims the right to kill anyone, anywhere, whom it deems a terrorist threat, other nations will claim the same right. Russia has assassinated dissidents abroad. China might target Uyghur activists in exile. Iran might go after critics who've fled. Each of these actors can point to American practice as justification.

Targeted killing raises questions that don't have easy answers. When is a country at war, and when is it simply murdering inconvenient people? What process is due before a government kills someone? How do you hold anyone accountable for secret decisions made behind closed doors?

The Awlaki case distills these questions to their essence. An American citizen, accused of terrorism but never charged or tried, approved for death by his own government, killed by a missile in a country his country wasn't at war with. His sixteen-year-old son, also American, was killed in a separate drone strike two weeks later—a death the government has never fully explained.

This is targeted killing in the twenty-first century: ancient as political murder, new as the technology that enables it, and troubling in ways we're only beginning to understand.