Earlier this year US President Barack Obama defended his administrations’ use of drone strikes. He emphasised that killing leaders of al-Qaeda and its affiliated movements was the primary objective of such attacks.
Three weeks ago, Pakistani Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, died in a drone attack, the day before a delegation was scheduled to fly to North Waziristan to discuss peace talks with the leader.
He was quickly replaced by Mullah Fazlullah, a hard-line commander whose men shot schoolgirl activist Malala Yousafzai last October.
And in the latest sign of rising tension caused by US drone attacks in the country, thousands of people protested at the weekend, blocking a road in northwest Pakistan used to transport NATO troop supplies and equipment in and out of Afghanistan.
For more than a decade unmanned robots, piloted remotely by the US Central Intelligence Agency have killed hundreds of people – including civilians – across the Middle East and South Asia.
While many experts and US leaders have long argued that drone strikes have been effective at disrupting and degrading terrorist organisations, critics have asserted that, aside from killing innocent civilians, drones anger Muslim populations and rouse Islamic terrorism.
According to the New America Foundation, a non-profit public policy institute and think tank, drone attacks between 2004 and 2013 killed 28 senior al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan.
While this has been hailed as a success for a myriad of reasons, a recent report by the United Nations said that at least 450 civilians have been killed by drones in Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
A study earlier this year by political scientist Anoop Sarbahi and RAND Corporation researcher Patrick Johnston examined the correlation between the location of drones strikes and terrorist violence in northwest Pakistan and bordering areas of Afghanistan.
The study found that drone strikes were associated with a reduction in the rate of terrorist attacks, and the number of people killed as a result.
In addition, it found that the reduction in terrorism was not the result of militants leaving unsafe areas and conducting attacks elsewhere in the region – which many argue – but rather that drone strikes had a small violence-reducing effect in areas near those struck by drones.
However, other studies have been more critical of the drone “war” in Pakistan.
The report, Living Under Drones, jointly authored by New York University and Stanford University last year, argued that the US narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan as a “precise” and “effective tool” that made the US safer with minimal downsides, was simply false.
Rather the authors recommended the US conduct a re-evaluation of current targeted killing practices.
“US policy-makers, and the American public, cannot continue to ignore evidence of the civilian harm and counter-productive impacts of US targeted killings and drone strikes in Pakistan,” the authors concluded.
Other critics of US drone policy argue that drones do little to counter terrorism and instead believe they fuel anti-Americanism and push locals, looking for retaliation, into the arms of terrorist organisations.
In fact, earlier this year, Yemeni activist Farea al-Muslimi, testified before the US Senate subcommittee about the impact of drone strikes and targeted killings on his homeland saying the US had “become al-Qaeda’s public relations office”.
Meanwhile, Christopher Swift, an adjunct professor of national security studies at Georgetown University, said drone strikes must be evaluated within the context of policy, not its platform.
“We need to remember that drones are a tool,” he said.
“It is important to distinguish success on the battlefield from the social and political consequences associated with any use of force. We can be defeating an enemy in military terms and still create conditions that undermine our long-term political objectives. So the goal here is to make sure that when we do use force – including drones – we do so in a manner than balances short-term military necessity with our long-term political goals.”
He added that gaining stability on the ground in such areas as Pakistan’s tribal belt and Yemen’s rural provinces would take much more than defeating the adversary.
“[Gaining stability] is a long-term process that requires developing economic and political structures, and these are not things that drone strikes can do. Drone strikes are not a replacement for policy or strategy. If the long-term goal is stability on the ground, we need to look at all the factors that contribute to instability.”
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