“The drone is a justice-delivering technology,” one respondent from South Waziristan said. For them, drones had done what local militias and even Pakistani military operations could not do: kill the bad guys, with limited-to-no collateral damage. Media coverage of American drone strikes is dominated by images of houses reduced to rubble, news articles about scores of estimated deaths of women and children, and videos of charged Pakistani protestors setting American flags on fire.īut as I spoke to more and more local residents from Pakistan’s tribal areas - tribal leaders (known as malik) and elders (known as masharaan), university students, journalists, academics, activists, lawyers, and internally displaced persons returning to their homes - a clear majority of them rejected that narrative. However, the respondents quickly added that a majority of the strikes killed only militants.īefore beginning my research, I believed that drone strikes killed more civilians than militants. All those in favor of unmanned strikes admitted that there were instances of civilian casualties, such as the attack on a Taliban commander’s funeral in 2009 and another strike at a jirga in 2011. Two-thirds of my sample said that they were in favor of the American drone program, calling it “successful” and “effective” in killing militants. I collected data by interviewing 116 residents of Pakistan’s tribal belt - where the United States has conducted over 420 drone strikes. My own quantitative with the qualitative research confirms that over-the-horizon strikes can be carried out consistently and effectively with minimum casualties or popular blowback. From 2013 onwards, no local civilian was reported killed by American drone strikes in Pakistan. From 2009 onwards, even though drone strikes increased in number, civilian casualties decreased with every subsequent year. The drone program in Pakistan, particularly under Obama’s second presidential administration, targeted and killed top al-Qaeda commanders as well as chiefs and militants of both the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban with minimal civilian harm. However, we have more data showing how effective this strategy can be. But as critics have pointed out, it is just one data point. The attack on al-Zawahiri after America’s troop withdrawal from Afghanistan is exactly what President Biden’s “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism strategy sought to deliver. This shows that drone strikes can be precise and discriminating and achieve counter-terrorism goals. Nevertheless, the quality of the intelligence locating and identifying the targets, the decision to conduct the attack at an opportune time, and the ability to avoid civilian casualties and widespread property damage in a closely-built area are very similar. Indeed, the drone strike in Kabul’s affluent downtown neighborhood eliminated a very high-value target in comparison to the North Waziristan bazaar strikes, which targeted makeshift improvised explosive device factories. Although 10 years apart, the drone strikes are remarkably similar.
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