Drone Wars’ Effectiveness

Word hit the street over the weekend that senior CIA officials have been pushing the Obama administration to expand unmanned aerial drone attacks against targets in Pakistan.  In the spies’ cross hairs are top Taliban commanders based in Quetta, a large regional city.

If counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations aren’t your cup of tea, you may have missed the ever-expanding role that unmanned drones have played in Pakistan.  While it’s true that President Obama has signed off on the program’s expanded use to now include more of Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, the issue of targeting Quetta - a major population center - seems to have given the White House some pause.

A former senior CIA official said he and others were repeatedly rebuffed when proposing operations in Baluchistan or pushing Pakistan to target the Taliban in Quetta. “It wasn’t easy to talk about,” the official said. “The conversations didn’t last a long time.”

That sounds about right - attacking Quetta is a bridge too far in the drone war.  Here’s why:

Many question whether we should have an unmanned drone program in the first place.  There are strong and reasoned arguments from intelligent analysts who believe the costs of a drone program outweigh its benefits.  The strongest argument offered against the program is that by unintentionally causing civilian casualties with off-target or ill-timed strikes, the program agitates and alienates the population that the counter-insurgents are supposed to be protecting.

After this story first broke, I agree with that basic premise, but said that drone attacks should be “extraordinarily limited, not stopped” because they were a “valuable tool in certain rare circumstances.”  Further, I developed a five-part criteria as a guideline to determine when those might be.  My forth criterion says that it’s “unrealistic to say that drone won’t fire on population centers because then the targets would just hide in plain sight.  However, the US must carefully weigh the chance of civilian casualties and seek to avoid them - by using smaller missiles, modifying times of the strikes, etc. - at all costs.”

However, Quetta is a city of 850,000 people, and it is difficult to imagine that innocent civilians could be reasonably avoided in any single strike - no matter how good the intelligence is.  Therefore, the administration is right to endorse the general practice, but to oppose its application in this specific instance.