Dave Kilcullen, author of the new book The Accidental Guerrilla (which I reviewed here), is one of our best counterinsurgency experts. So when he says something it’s worth paying attention, even if you don’t necessarily agree.
He just told Congress that “we need to call off the drones” that are being used to target Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. According to the L.A. Times:
“I realize that they do damage to the Al Qaeda leadership,” he told the House Armed Services Committee. But that, he said, was not enough to justify the program. “Since 2006, we’ve killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we’ve killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they’ve given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism. … The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population.”
Another problem, Kilcullen says, is that “using robots from the air … looks both cowardly and weak.”
The concerns Kilcullen raises are legitimate. In a better world I too would favor calling off the drones. As I have argued repeatedly, long-range precision strikes are not a very effective tool for counterinsurgency. If we can put a lot of boots on the ground, that’s a strategy much more likely to succeed. That’s why I’ve favored the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan and rejected limited counter-terrorism strategies as urged by the likes of Joe Biden.
But in Pakistan we don’t have the option of putting a lot of boots on the ground. We aren’t going to send large numbers of U.S. ground forces unless there is another 9/11-type attack planned from Pakistan.
We want the Pakistani army to clean out the jihadists but we have repeatedly discovered that the Pakistanis are unwilling or unable to do the job. Efforts to bolster the Pakistani military should continue
but probably will not pay dividends anytime soon.
That leaves only one viable strategy if we want to degrade Al Qaeda in the short-term. That’s right: drone attacks. For all their imperfections, I don’t think we have any choice. And there is evidence that they are having a positive impact. The New York Times, for instance, obtained an interview with a man who claims to be a facilitator for the Pakistani Taliban. According to the Times:
“The drones are very effective,” he said, acknowledging that they had thinned the top leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the area. He said 29 of his friends had been killed in the strikes.
His friends were no friends of ours.
UPDATE: In response to my initial post, a friend who served in the Bush administration offers a further thought that strikes me as spot on: “The attacks have been devastatingly effective and it is a little bit hard to understand the argument about anti-Americanism in Pakistan. It was pretty rife long before we started the current drone campaign a year ago.”
