What we read and hear in the print and electronic media of Pakistan about drone attacks as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty or resulting in killing innocent civilians is not true so far as the people of Waziristan are concerned. According to them, al Qaeda and the TTP are dead scared of drone attacks and their leadership spends sleepless nights. This is a cause of pleasure for the tormented people of Waziristan.96
In an article for the Daily Times, Taj came out strongly in support of the drones:
They [the people of Waziristan] want al Qaeda along with the Taliban burnt to ashes on the soil of Waziristan through relentless drone attacks. The drone attacks, they believe, are the one and only “cure” for these anti-civilisation creatures and the US must robustly administer them the “cure” until their existence is annihilated from the world. The people of Waziristan, including tribal leaders, women and religious people, asked me to convey in categorical terms to the US the following in my column.
This was the view of the people of Waziristan. I would now draw the attention of the US to the Peshawar Declaration, a joint statement of political parties, civil society organisations, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, labourers and intellectuals, following a conference on December 12–13, 2009, in Peshawar. The declaration notes that if the people of the war-affected areas are satisfied with any counter-militancy strategy; it is drone attacks that they support the most. Some people in Waziristan compare drones with the Quran’s Ababeels—the holy sparrows sent by God to avenge Abraham, the intended conqueror of the Khana Kaaba….
The overpowered people of Waziristan are angry. They believe no one in their entire history has inflicted so much insult on them as al Qaeda. In our native land, they say, al Qaeda has killed so many of us.97
Taj made a similar comment in an article posted on Viewpoint:
It is in this context that contrary to the wider public opinion in Pakistan, people of FATA welcome drone attacks and want the Americans to continue hitting the FATA based militants with the drones till their complete elimination. I know all this because of my close association with the area. The same is true about Amn Tehreek, those who passed the Peshawar Declaration as well as the Pakhtun journalists working with radio Mashal. I would encourage the researchers and journalists around the world, who care for professional standards of their work, to also get to know the FATA people’s support for the drone strikes through their investigative skills and direct access to people from the drone hit areas.98
Even those tribesmen who have given the Taliban sanctuary in their hujras out of fear or a feeling of melmastiia seem to be tiring of the Taliban. The Taliban’s brutal spy witch hunts and subsequent executions, suicide-bombing attacks on civilians, burning of local schools, propensity for violence, policy of forbidding polio vaccinations, and tendency to act as a magnet for drone strikes and Pakistani army invasions has turned many tribesmen against the organization. One tribal elder said of the Taliban, “They are swarming our place. We gave them shelter because we thought they were fighting infidels but now they are dictating what to do in our own land. They set up check posts on the main roads and then ask us about our identity. Who are they to ask us such questions?”99
In response, across the FATA tribesmen have formed lashkars to fight against the Taliban.100 The Taliban have responded with suicide bombings of civilian jirgas that have killed hundreds in the region, but the battle goes on between the majority who do not support the terrorists and the Taliban.101 In this sentiment the Pashtuns reflect a trend in their country. In 2008 only 33 percent of Pakistanis held a negative view of the Taliban; by 2009 it had gone up to 70 percent. As for the drones, one Pashtun source known only as “Khan” (to hide his identity from the Taliban) has written, “Another excitement is the sighting of a drone. People and children do not rush indoors, they look at them and discuss and argue about the distance at which they must be flying. The general impression is that they are close. They feel the happiness of something close, friendly and powerful against evil.”102
As for the notion that Pakistan proper, on the other side of the Indus (Punjab and Sindh), is seething with fury and mass protests against the drones, although it is true that these regions’ inhabitants are more inclined to dislike the American campaign than those in the FATA, the antidrone protests have been small and limited. Even Imran Khan, a former world-class cricketeer-turned-politician who has attacked the “hypocrite” Zardari government for allowing the drones, has failed to mobilize the masses based on their hatred for the strikes. A recent article in Dawn, titled “US Drone Strikes Fail to Mobilise Pakistan Masses,” said, “Campaigners condemn US drone strikes in Pakistan as extra-judicial assassinations that kill hundreds of civilians, but popular protests against them are conspicuous by their rarity…. Rallies protesting the CIA-run operation against Taliban and al Qaeda allies in Pakistan’s tribal areas on the Afghan border are few and thinly attended.” One Pakistani quoted in the article dismissed the efforts of Imran Khan (known as Taliban Khan by his critics) to rally Pakistanis based on violations of sovereignty: “Imran Khan and others are demonstrating against drones and their victims…. But can any of these people go to North Waziristan and come back alive?”103
The same paradigm can be found in Yemen. As for the idea that drones drive Yemeni tribesmen to join the terrorists, Christopher Swift, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University who carried out fieldwork in Yemen the summer of 2012, found that “to my astonishment, none of the individuals I interviewed drew a causal relationship between drone strikes and Al Qaeda recruiting. Indeed, of the 40 men in this cohort, only five believed that U.S. drone strikes were helping al Qaeda more than they were hurting it.” Swift also reported that the primary factors driving young men to join the insurgency in Yemen were “overwhelmingly economic,” not drone-based. A tribal militia commander from one of the provinces that had been taken over by militants who were trying to create a Taliban-style shariah law state summed up his feelings on drones as follows: “Ordinary people have become very practical about drones. If the United States focuses on the leaders and civilians aren’t killed, then drone strikes will hurt al Qaeda more than they help them.”104 It would thus seem that in Yemen, as in Pakistan, many who live in the drone-targeted areas have come to have pragmatic views of the drones. It is primarily among Western drone activists and elites in towns in Yemen and Pakistan that the “drones create more terrorists than they kill” paradigm prevails.
Finally, Professor Amitai Etzioni of Georgetown University makes an interesting argument against the “drones make more enemies than they kill” paradigm:
Such arguments do not take into account the fact that anti-American sentiment in these areas ran high before drone strikes took place and remained so during periods in which strikes were significantly scaled back. Moreover, other developments—such as the release of an anti-Muslim movie trailer by an Egyptian Copt from California or the publication of incendiary cartoons by a Danish newspaper—led to much larger demonstrations. Hence stopping drone strikes—if they are otherwise justified, and especially given that they are a very effective and low-cost way to neutralize terrorist violence on the ground—merely for public relations purposes seems imprudent.105