Pivoting off a paper by Patrick Johnston and Anoop Sarbahi, Erica Chenoweth tries to provide a clear answer to the question of whether or not the Obama administration's use of drone strikes in Pakistan has measurably reduced the ability of terrorists to execute attacks:
Using WITS data on terrorist attacks, they basically find that drone strikes between 2004 and 2010 have had a modest negative effect on the frequency and lethality of terrorist attacks in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan, as well as a modest decline in suicide attacks and IED attacks. The study is rigorous and compelling.
One the surface, Johnston and Sarbahi's piece suggests that drone strikes have worked so far in Pakistan. But there are three important caveats: (1) The study is limited to a single country over a relatively brief time span, when the drone program was just becoming a mainstay of the United States' long-term overseas contingency operations strategy. It remains to be seen whether such trends play out in other contexts over time. (2) One never knows whether American drones accidentally killed more civilians than the terrorists would have: did the drone strikes ultimately hurt more Pakistanis than the deceased Al Qaeda affiliates would have if they survived? (3) We cannot know whether whether those civilians could have been spared if the United States (or Pakistan) had relied on human operations to neutralize these targets.
Sarbahi and Johnston seem pretty skeptical to me. Their conclusion is that "any reduction in terrorist activity associated with the drone campaign appears modest in scope," and that " their effectiveness is more likely to lie in disrupting militant operations at the tactical level than as a silver bullet that will reverse the course of the war and singlehandedly defeat al Qaeda." Some military experts have been even more critical of the drones' long term impact, namely that eliminating individual "high value targets" may seem like progress, but that success proves temporary and that the drones ultimately exacerbate the conditions that produce them in the first place. In a piece two years ago calling for a moratorium on drone strikes, Andrew Exum and David Kilcullen offered this thought experiment:
Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people's houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn't it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.
Extremism has long been fueled by regional rivalries between Pakistan and India, a problem that at present seems almost impossible to resolve. The U.S. seems to be relying on drone strikes in part because they believe there's not much else that is within their power to do.
