10
The Argument against Drones
We need to be extremely careful about undermining the longer-term objective—a stable Pakistan, where elected politicians control their own national-security establishment, and extremism is diminishing—for the sake of collecting scalps.
The problem with the Americans is that the only instrument up their sleeve is the hammer, and they see everything as a nail.
During her October 2009 visit to Pakistan, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton was frequently criticized in conferences by Pakistanis who strongly resented the killing of their compatriots on Pakistani soil by Americans prosecuting the war on terrorism. On one occasion an angry Pakistani audience member told Clinton that the drone strikes amounted to a form of “execution without trial.”1 The Pakistani Observer said, “Instead of tactical gains or strategic advantage, the daily slaughter of some militants, heavy collateral damage of civilian lives, homes and property will leave long lasting scars, which will never heal.”2 The majority of Pakistanis seem to agree that the distrusted Americans are carrying out a campaign of extrajudicial execution of their countrymen in a unilateral hunt for anti-American terrorists.
DRONE STRIKES ARE A PUBLIC RELATIONS AND STRATEGIC DISASTER IN PAKISTAN
The prevalent Pakistani belief that the majority of those who are being executed by drones are civilians only deepens the distrust of America. A 2010 Pew opinion poll in Pakistan found that “there is little support for U.S. drone strikes against extremist leaders—those who are aware of these attacks generally say they are not necessary, and overwhelmingly they believe the strikes kill too many civilians.” Specifically the Pew report stated, “Nearly all (93%) of those who are familiar with the strikes say they are a bad thing. Most Pakistanis (56%) who have heard about the drone attacks say they are not necessary to defend Pakistan from extremist groups, while about one-in-three (32%) believe they are necessary. Nine-in-ten think these attacks kill too many innocent people.”3 A subsequent 2011 Pew poll found that the number of Pakistanis who viewed the drone strikes negatively had risen to 97 percent.4 A 2012 Pew poll found that “about 75 percent of Pakistanis surveyed regard the United States as an enemy…. A key reason for the ongoing ill will appears to be America’s use of drone strikes as a tactic against Islamist militants based in Pakistan.”5
Unlike the poll by the Aryana Institute (discussed in chapter 9), which demonstrated support for the drone strikes among tribesmen in the FATA, a survey by the New America Foundation found the opposite. The New America Foundation reported, “More than three-quarters of FATA residents oppose American drone strikes. Indeed, only 16 percent think these strikes accurately target militants; 48 percent think they largely kill civilians and another 33 percent feel they kill both civilians and militants.”6 Although members of the Aryana Institute have argued that Taliban intimidated many average tribesmen into speaking out against the drone strikes when polled by outsiders, it is also clear that some people in Pakistan proper and the FATA strongly oppose the drone strikes. Their main concern is that the strikes kill too many civilians.
This was a concern I noticed while conducting research in Pakistan in 2010. Although many Pakistanis supported the killing of terrorists—just so long as it was done cleanly—they felt that there was no such thing as an “acceptable” number of civilians being killed in the process. For this reason, most thought the drone strikes were bad for Pakistan. Although, as has been pointed out in previous chapters, the drone campaign is unprecedentedly accurate and leads to relatively few civilian deaths, this was not the perception in Pakistan. Perception can be more important than reality. I found that even anti-Taliban, English-speaking secular elites in Islamabad, Peshawar, and Lahore believed that the drones were killing more civilians than terrorists. They could not tolerate the idea of a distrusted foreign intelligence service killing large numbers of Pakistani men, women, or children who were uninvolved with terrorism, even by accident as collateral damage.
With the Pakistani media banging a steady drumbeat of anti-Americanism, Americans have little power to change this perception. The three separate U.S. studies, discussed in chapter 8, that demonstrate that the drones kill only a small percentage of civilians in their strikes have not altered the Pakistani perceptions that the CIA is brutally killing large numbers of civilians in their country. Few Pakistanis are aware of these studies, and even if they were, they would probably distrust them because they were conducted by Americans. When U.S. officials such as Hillary Clinton visit Pakistan to engage the Pakistani people and present America’s softer side, they are drowned out by the voices asking about civilian deaths in drone strikes. This makes it impossible to “sell” America to the Pakistani people.
America is clearly losing the war of perceptions and with it the war for the hearts and minds of millions of Pakistanis, and the drones strikes don’t help. The false number of “700 dead civilians for just 14 terrorists” propagated by the antidrone voices in Pakistan is typical of this exaggerated rhetoric. This disinformation is the public relations collateral damage of the drone war, and it may far outweigh the tactical gains that clearly come from the killing of hundreds of Taliban and al Qaeda operatives and the disruption of their terror-insurgency campaign. In its most benign form this growing distrust of the United States and its drone campaign simply leads to anti-American rallies and American flag burnings. At its worse it can lead to Pakistanis, both Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns in places like the Punjab, joining or actively supporting the militants. The drones that kill terrorists may thus be inadvertently recruiting new ones to replenish their ranks. Few issues excite the fury of the Pakistanis more than stories of innocent Pakistani children killed in their homes by drone strikes; this can incite issues of ghairat (honor) and badal (revenge).
In the larger sense this failure in the war of perceptions undermines not just the Americans’ image but also the image of the Pakistani government, which is tied to it. Most Pakistanis see the Zardari government as either complicit in the murder of fellow citizens or too weak to prevent the bullying Americans from carrying out the drone assassination campaign. The Zardari government is forced to continually release public statements criticizing the drone strikes as violations of sovereignty in order to come off as defenders of Pakistan’s territorial integrity. The revelation that the CIA drones were being secretly flown from the Pakistani air base at Shamsi in southeastern Pakistan, with the obvious compliance of Pakistani authorities, seriously undermined the government’s credibility with its own people. Many Pakistanis felt that the government, which had issued many public criticisms of the drone strikes in the past, was being duplicitous.
For this reason, although there are clearly prodrone voices in the Pakistani government, as seen in chapter 8, one cannot write off all the official protests against the drone campaign as mere pro forma sop for the Pakistani masses designed to put daylight between Islamabad and the infamous CIA drones. The Pakistanis, for example, complained about the strikes to the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and the head of CENTCOM, Gen. David Petraeus, during a 2008 visit. After a meeting with Petraeus, Pakistani president Zardari said, “Continuing drone attacks on our territory, which result in loss of precious lives and property, are counterproductive and difficult to explain by a democratically elected government. It is creating a credibility gap.”7 This statement is hard to contest. The drone strikes make the weak Pakistani president look bad before his people.