Analysis

Judgments divided: US President Barack Obama. Photo: AP

What is extraordinary about this brutal CIA report into assassination operations is how the spy agency failed to anticipate the devastating cost to US prestige from extrajudicial killing.

The report sets out to judge the effectiveness of what is euphemistically called "high value targeting" - operations radically expanded as deadly drone attacks under Barack Obama.

The CIA study was no doubt commissioned as part of fierce debates within the US administration in 2009 over plans for an Afghanistan "surge" and send in thousands of extra ground troops.

But the authors seemingly ignored the reputational cost America would pay for unmanned and secretly commissioned strikes in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

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Attacks that have killed Australian residents without trial as well as an American citizen - not to forget as many as 1000 civilian bystanders.

Granted, this is but one report among thousands the public is unlikely to ever see, but to ignore the risk of "blow back" when assessing such operations is remarkable.

Especially when you consider how the leaking of this report - with its warning that assassination can create a "vacuum" for even more radical groups to take hold - will go down in Pakistan and most Arab countries.

The people of Pakistan, reeling from the slaughter in a Peshawar school this week, are already fiercely angry about the drone attacks.

Most Pakistanis hate the local Taliban - but they are just as spiteful towards the US for the seemingly indiscriminate missile strikes in the country's north.

For this leak to come so soon after the US Senate publicly shamed the CIA for the senseless torture of prisoners in the years after September 11, 2001, the White House will feel the heat internationally.

But more importantly, the domestic critics of Obama's strategy in Iraq will seize on the report to further flay the President over his foreign policy record.

The CIA warning that so-called "targeted killing" does little to diminish the command and control structures of insurgents will set Republicans into a  frenzy.

Obama justified the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in 2011 by arguing the US could stand-off and help Baghdad from afar with special forces operations.

But the report had specifically warned of al-Qaeda's ability to "weather" the 2006 killing of then chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - and the remnants of his organisation morphed, split and reformed into Islamic State of today.

Not that this criticism of Obama will be fair; the CIA judgments are maddeningly divided and makes mostly general observations, giving very little concrete guidance for a policymaker to decide on a course of action.

"Fragmenting or splitting the insurgent group," is cited as a positive in taking out the leaders.

But at the risk of "radicalising an insurgent group's remaining leaders".

No easy choice.