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Drone Strikes

Sounds a fair description of your average New York Times scribbler’s periodic output, but actually it’s David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum weighing in against Predator hits in Pakistan. These two terrorist-killing/converting enthusiasts make a lot of good points, like this one:  

… the use of drones displays every characteristic of a tactic — or, more accurately, a piece of technology — substituting for a strategy. These attacks are now being carried out without a concerted information campaign directed at the Pakistani public or a real effort to understand the tribal dynamics of the local population, efforts that might make such attacks more effective.

To be sure, simply ending the drone strikes is no more a strategy than continuing them. Stabilizing Pakistan will require a focus on securing areas, principally in Punjab and Sindh, that are still under government control, while building up police and civil authorities and refocusing aid on economic development, security and governance. Suspending drone strikes won’t fix Pakistan’s problems — but continuing them makes these problems much harder to address.

What they don’t mention that is key to any discussion of drone use in Pakistan, especially where tactics, strategy and public opinion is concerned, is that the Pak public is turning sour on the Taliban and the Pak military is going after them aggressively, two developments that if encouraged and exploited, may render drones with all their negative side effects unnecessary. Or less necessary.

Former Australian Army LTC David Kilcullen you’ll remember as part of Petraeus’ Baghdad Brain Trust and Australia’s gift to a world at war. His newly minted counterinsurgency classic: The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One. More on Kilcullen here.

Exum, also a former counterinsurgency practitioner, blogs at Abu Muqawama, hangs out at the Center for a New American Strategy and is the author of This Man’s Army: A Soldier’s Story from the Frontlines of the War on Terrorism.

Topics: Pakistan, military

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:05 am on Sunday, May 17, 2009

One Response to “Drone Strikes”

1. These Are Not The Drones You’re Looking For « Around The Sphere Says:
   May 18th, 2009 at 12:26 pm

   [...] from the right, Jules Crittenden: What they don’t mention that is key to any discussion of drone use in Pakistan, especially where [...]

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