In Praise of Drones
The case for using armed unmanned aerial vehicles in Pakistan is stronger than ever.
By SADANAND DHUME
Like a late night rerun of a once popular TV show, the debate about the U.S. use of armed drones in Pakistan's tribal areas refuses to fade away.
Last week, the London-based not-for-profit Bureau of Investigative Journalism published a series of articles accusing the U.S. of covering up numerous civilian casualties over the past year. And in a New York Times op-ed on Sunday, retired Admiral Dennis Blair, President Barack Obama's former director of national intelligence, declared that America's drone campaign "is eroding our influence and damaging our ability to work with Pakistan to achieve other important security objectives like eliminating Taliban sanctuaries, encouraging Indian-Pakistani dialogue, and making Pakistan's nuclear arsenal more secure."
Critics of the officially secret program have been wrong since its inception in 2004. Drones represent the most discerning—and therefore most moral—form of aerial warfare in human history. In Pakistan, they keep terrorists on the run. They also give policy makers in Washington a handy stick to wield against an ostensible ally that has repeatedly shown that it doesn't respond to carrots alone.
But first the criticism: According to the Bureau's journalists, the drone campaign has killed at least 45 civilians in Pakistan over the past year. This flatly contradicts a claim in a June speech by top Obama counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan of drones not causing "a single collateral death" since last August. For some critics, Predator and Reaper drones—the two most common varieties—conjure up images of sinister remote-controlled robots let loose to spread mayhem. Others equate drone strikes with illegal assassinations.
Then there's the realpolitik argument. Drones allegedly create day-to-day friction in U.S.-Pakistan relations that get in the way of Washington pursuing broader economic and political objectives in the country. Without the bad blood they cause, as Adm. Blair suggests, ties between Washington and Islamabad would be free to flourish.
To be fair, neither argument can be casually dismissed. The claim of zero collateral deaths in a land where militants often live with their families, or cheek-by-jowl with other civilians, appears implausible on the face of it. The strikes—53 so far this year—tend to draw street protests and harsh criticism from the Pakistani press. Both Pakistan's parliament and the provincial assembly in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province have passed resolutions calling for their end.
On closer examination, however, this case collapses. According to U.S. government officials quoted in the Times, the Bureau's reportage is unreliable. To begin with, Pakistani authorities, and the local reporters they hold sway over, have an incentive to fabricate or exaggerate casualty figures. That the reports rely, at least in part, on information provided by a Pakistani lawyer who publicly outed the CIA's undercover station chief last year doesn't help their credibility either.
Though even a single civilian casualty ought not to be taken lightly, the focus on alleged collateral damage distorts the essence of the drone program. In reality, technology allows highly trained operators to observe targets on the ground for as much as 72 hours in advance. Software engineers typically model the blast radius for a missile or bomb strike. Lawyers weigh in on which laws apply and entire categories of potential targets—including mosques, hospitals and schools—are almost always off bounds.
All these procedures serve one overriding purpose: to protect innocent civilian life. The New America Foundation's database of strikes shows it's working. This year civilians made up only about 8% of the 440 (at most) people killed in drone strikes in Pakistan down from about 30% two years ago. As for affecting U.S. popularity on the ground, according to the Pew Global Attitudes survey, the U.S. favorability rating—long battered by conspiracy theories and an anti-American media—hovers at about 12%, almost exactly where it stood before the program's advent seven years ago.
At the same time, the program also serves a larger purpose. One of Washington's most pressing objectives in Pakistan is to end the use of its territory for attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan. Another is to wean the country off its historic support for terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan, India and beyond. It cannot achieve either without the help of the Pakistani army and its notorious spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence.
But, riddled with jihadist sympathizers, and with a two-decade old belief in its mission to dominate Afghanistan and bleed India, the Pakistani army has so far shown little inclination to do much more than the bare minimum. The violently anti-American Haqqani network remains comfortably ensconced in North Waziristan near the Afghan border. And terrorists such as Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, whose group was behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people, including six Americans, routinely give inflammatory speeches to adoring crowds.
Against this backdrop, drones offer a practical way to eliminate some terrorists (such as al Qaeda's Ilyas Kashmiri, killed in a strike in June) and keep others on the move. They also raise the incentives for the Pakistani military to crackdown on terrorism on its soil, or else deal with the social unrest unleashed by the strikes. Indeed, instead of cutting back on drones, the U.S. should threaten to ratchet up their use should the army and ISI fail to crack down on anti-NATO forces in Afghanistan. Upward of $20 billion in aid over the past decade has not done enough to alter Islamabad's behavior. A carefully calibrated drone strategy, backed by resolve to stay the course in Afghanistan, may produce better results.
Mr. Dhume is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, and a columnist for WSJ.com.
Sadanand Dhume: In Praise of Drones - WSJ.com
