When nothing fails so much as success

The New York Times front page yesterday featured reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch criticizing US drone attacks in Pakistan (in particular North Waziristan) and Yemen, respectively.  At the same time, the Washington Post published Linda Robinson’s op/ed claiming that they will be used relatively less in the future.  It seems we have come to prefer on-the-ground special forces raids, whether we conduct them or our partners do.

It is nice to know that after hundreds of drone strikes abroad we’ve come to realize that there is nothing antiseptic about them.  No matter how precise, they cannot be 100% accurate.  They kill people we don’t intend to kill.  That is what the Amnesty and HRW reports are focused on:  the immediate threat to civilian non-combatants.  The two reports document meticulously that we are not only hitting our intended terrorist targets.  We are hitting other people too, sometimes in ways that breach the laws of war and declared US policy.  Those are major concerns for Amnesty and HRW, which argue their case–as one would expect–mainly on legal and human rights grounds.

Those are not my major concerns, much as I deplore the loss of innocent lives.  Conventional military means would also kill people other than those targeted, likely many more than drones do.  Nor can I regret that drones save American servicepeople from harm.  That’s what most advances in military technology do–enable us to kill more of the enemy while preventing them from killing more of us. War is not a pretty, or a glorious, business.

My concern is a different one.  Drone attacks disrupt life on the ground in a combat zone in ways that enable tactical success but ensure strategic defeat.  This is eminently clear in Greg Johnsen’s admirable narrative of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.  Drones don’t only kill.  They shred the social fabric, motivate revenge and incentivize recruitment to terrorist causes.

They also render difficult if not impossible the kind of civilian development assistance that places like North Waziristan and Yemen’s hinterland desperately need.  These are among the poorest places on earth.  Most people aspire to a bare minimum of security, shelter, food and clothing.  They need education and basic services like water as well as relative luxuries like health care and reliable electricity.  They want to be left alone to enjoy their families, produce what they can, worship as they know how.  Drones disrupt all of that.

There are other disadvantages as well.  When they succeed, drones render questioning of the target impossible.  Their presence, which is known to people on the ground even when they don’t strike, creates a pervasive sense of insecurity.  They discourage investment.  They encourage an esprit of resistance and defiance that makes young men into willing suicide bombers.

On-the-ground raids even by local security forces may not be much better, but at least they enable direct sighting of their targets, sometimes allow for capture and trial, and occasionally permit last-second course changes to save innocent lives.  But they entail risk to both us and them and are no panacea.  And they fail to deal with the underlying drivers of violence.  The Israelis use on-the-ground raids often against Palestinian militants.  It hasn’t reduced the grievances that have persisted for 65 years or so.

As the Westgate mall attack in Nairobi demonstrated, even terrorist groups on the ropes have the capacity to export mass violence.  We’ve been pursuing terrorists in Somalia for thirty years with drones and raids, the latter conducted both by the US and by partner countries.  Success against Al Shabaab  in the last couple of years seems to have spread it like a virus, not neutralized it.  We’ve seen that happen also in Iraq and Syria as well as Yemen.  Military instruments alone are not adequate to deal with extremist threats, Islamic or other.  Our approach has to be much more comprehensive if it is to succeed.  Nothing fails in counter-terrorism so much as success.