On 'a terrorist, a president and the rise of the drone'

Anwar al-Awlaki was born in New Mexico in 1971.

He graduated with an engineering degree from Colorado State University in 1994.

He died in a drone strike in northern Yemen in 2011.

"He was the first U.S. citizen to be hunted, deliberately, and targeted for death by his own country, by his own government, on the order of the president, since the Civil War," said Scott Shane, the author of "Objective Troy."

"Objective Troy" tells the story of Awlaki and his transformation from a popular American imam to an al-Qaida propagandist. Shane charts the parallel rise of the American drone program, which expanded dramatically under President Obama's administration. The book explains the factors that led to Obama ultimately approving putting "a U.S. citizen on the kill list for the first time."

Shane joined MPR News host Kerri Miller to discuss "Objective Troy" and the complicated legacy of drones.

On Awlaki's power as a recruiter

Awlaki "turned out to be the most effective recruiter in English, for al-Qaida, for the whole cause of violent jihad. I think it was a combination of things: Part of it was just that he was equally at home in American English and Arabic. He had very good knowledge of the Quran and of Islam, but he also had good knowledge of the West. He'd spent half his life in the United States. He knew what buttons to push for an immigrant Muslim audience in the west, especially for young people who were confused about their identity and where their loyalty should lie."

On the drone program under Obama

"President Bush introduced the armed drone, but strikes were fairly sporadic until the last few months of his presidency, when they were stepped up a bit in Pakistan. But when President Obama took office in 2009, despite having rejected a lot of the Bush counterterrorism programs — the controversies over torture and secret detention and so on — he actually was quite enthusiastic about the drone."

"He thought the way to counterterrorism was certainly not to send 100,000 American troops to a Muslim country like Iraq or Afghanistan and leave them there for ten years. The costs were very high and the outcome of that were equivocal at best."

"The drone offered a way to kill small groups of terrorists without turning a country upside down and without putting Americans in harm's way, so he escalated the drone program in Pakistan and then expanded it to Yemen."

On the effect of drones overseas

"Both in Pakistan and Yemen, the drones have come to represent the heavy hand of America, the violation of sovereignty that's represented by another country flying its aircraft into your neighborhood and shooting missiles at people."

"In the tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen, where the al-Qaida branches have been active, a lot of people say good riddance to al-Qaida. They're not the friendliest of neighbors, and a lot of people are happy to see them go, but it causes tensions in these communities to have these drones ... Just to live under that week after week, month after month, can cause a kind of anxiety for everybody. That is another unintended consequence of this program."

For the full discussion with Scott Shane on "Objective Troy," Anwar al-Awlaki and drones, use the audio player above.

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