The World's Jeb Sharp reports on the debate over CIA drone attacks in Pakistan. Proponents say the unmanned aircraft are essential for killing suspected members of al Qaeda and the Taliban. Critics say the drones kill too many civilians and contribute to the destabilization of Pakistan.
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI's THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI's THE WORLD is the program audio.
LISA MULLINS: One of the tools the U.S. employs in its fight against extremists in Pakistan is the unmanned aircraft, or drone. The Predator drone and its successor, the Reaper, are considered essential weapons in the hunt for Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. But as The World's Jeb Sharp reports, the use of drones comes at what some critics say is too high a price.
JEB SHARP: The Predator was born in the mid-1990s. It was designed mostly as an intelligence tool, an unmanned aircraft that could loiter over a war zone and send back real time information about what was happening. But it didn't take long for weapons to be added to the surveillance package. Andrew Brookes is a former Royal Air Force pilot now at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. He says the beauty of the drone is that unlike a jet, it can sit at 15 or 20,000 feet for hours.
ANDREW BROOKES: The bad guys don't know it's there. They can't really hear it. They can't really see it. So they go about their normal business and this thing doesn't get bored, doesn't want a meal, doesn't want a cigarette, doesn't want to go to the loo, and it'll sit there and just watch and watch and watch. And, of course, that is very, very good if you're in a position of saying as humanly possible we must make sure that this is the right target and we don't use the wrong target on the wrong objective with the wrong weapon.
SHARP: Those long loiter times theoretically allow extremely precise targeting that minimizes civilian casualties. But that's not what seems to be happening in Pakistan. Counterinsurgency expert Dave Kilcullen is an informal advisor to the U.S. government. He says the drones are clearly effective at killing Al Qaeda and Taliban members in Pakistan, but they kill far too many civilians as well.
DAVE KILCULLEN: That's based on Pakistani media reporting which has claimed that 14 mid-level Al Qaeda or Taliban leaders have been killed since January of 2006, and in the same time frame just over 700 civilians have been killed by the same hits. Most recently the Belfer Center at Harvard looked at those figures and one of their researchers concluded that they're broadly accurate. But let's assume that the strikes are twice as effective as the data suggests, and the civilian casualties are half what the Pakistanis are claiming. That's still only an 8% hit rate with 92% collateral damage.
SHARP: And do you feel you understand why that rate is so bad given the capabilities of the drones? I mean, if you're monitoring a place and watching activity and you know who your bad guy is and you're using a small bomb.
KILCULLEN: Well, we're not using a small bomb. We're using hellfire missiles which are huge. They're designed as anti-tank weapons. When they hit a house they collapse the house. It's not a tiny little... You know, it's smaller than an aircraft bomb but it's still a pretty substantial hit. The other thing is the fact that we're arguing about what the real rate is of success on the ground, illustrates one of the biggest problems with these things, which is that when you fire them into somebody else's territory, and you don't control the ground, you don't control the story.
SHARP: The extremists control it instead. They're able to paint the Americans as cowards who use machines to do their killing for them. There's another unforeseen downside to the drone attacks says Stanford University History Professor Priya Satia. It has to do with the British bombardment of this region when it was part of the Indian Empire.
PRIYA SATIA: And there's no way that aerial surveillance can be used again without it triggering memories of what happened before and what it meant then and what it meant then colonial rule and it's very hard for people who are living on the wrong end of aerial bombardment to see it as anything else.
SHARP: All of which contributes to the siege mentality that David Kilcullen says is destabilizing Pakistan right now. He thinks the attacks should stop, but he acknowledges it's a tough call especially given the U.S. goal of capturing and killing key members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The Obama Administration has vowed to go after them wherever they are. Daniel Byman says he generally agrees with that approach. Byman directs the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University. He says drone attacks against terrorists have two main benefits.
DANIEL BYMAN: One is if you do it with enough regularity you get into the terrorist groups recruitment and replacement cycle that they replace existing leaders with leaders who less experienced, less skilled, and as a result are less able to do attacks. The second fact is that the group has to spend a lot more time hiding. It can't communicate as effectively and in general it's simply spending more time playing defense and less time planning offensive attacks.
SHARP: Byman calls the strikes the least worst option right now, but he says they underscore just how flummoxed U.S. policy makers are when it comes to Pakistan. In that sense, the debate just emphasizes the lack of any coherent alternative. For The World, I'm Jeb Sharp.
transcript