Drones Hardly Ever Kill Bad Guys

[Eugen Leitl]

(from-the-ORLY-dept)

http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/05/11/drones-hardly-ever-kill-bad-guys/

Drones Hardly Ever Kill Bad Guys

By Greg Grant Monday, May 11th, 2009 10:52 am

Posted in Air, International, Policy

The foreign policy communitybs favorite counterinsurgency adviser, or at
least their favorite Australian one, David Kilcullen, told lawmakers last
week that the drone strikes targeting Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in
Pakistan are creating enemies at a far faster rate than its killing them.
According to statistics he provided, the success rate of the drone bombing
campaign is extremely low: just 2 percent of bombs dropped have hit targeted
militants. The other 98 percent? Those killed noncombatant Pakistani
civilians, he said.

Since the drone strikes began in earnest in 2006, the U.S. has killed 14
mid-level Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. In the same time frame, the strikes
have killed 700 Pakistani civilians, Kilcullen said May 7, speaking before
the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Terrorism and
Unconventional Threats. The strikes themselves are not particularly unpopular
in the tribal areas, the FATA, that border Afghanistan, as many of the people
there are weary of the militants operating in their midst. Where the strikes
are extremely unpopular, he said, is in the more populated areas of Punjab
and Sind, areas where there has been a big jump in militancy since the
bombing campaign began.

bRight now our biggest problem is not the [extremist] networks in the FATA,
but the fact that Pakistan may collapse if this political instability
continues.b The U.S. should stop the bombing campaign against the Pakistani
Taliban and instead return to a narrower target set aimed only at Al Qaeda
operatives, Kilcullen said, as the bombing campaign has simply become too
counterproductive. The Taliban run a very effective binformation operationsb
that broadcasts the death toll from U.S. strikes to feed a rising tide of
popular anger against the U.S. and western involvement in Pakistan, he said.

The issue of civilian casualties caused by U.S. bombing is not simply a
humanitarian matter, but is a major factor influencing the political and
ideological battles being waged in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, says CSISbs
Anthony Cordesman in an email. bCivilian casualty estimates have effectively
become an extension of war by other means,b he says. bTactics that physically
defeat elements of the enemy and lose the population lose the war.b

Cordesman says the U.S. canbt bomb its way to victory in Pakistan. The U.S.
is also too unpopular to put significant numbers of troops there. He says
Pakistan will either succeed or fail against the Taliban based on whether it
can adopt some version of the bclear, hold and buildb counterinsurgency
strategy the U.S. applied in Iraq, and is trying to apply in Afghanistan,
versus bhaving the Pakistani Army smash its way into Swat and leave, which
has been the high point of Pakistani warfighting to date.b