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Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann at the New America Foundation released a report on the CIA’s drone strike program. It considers the program to resulted in the deaths of between 250 to 320 Pakistani civilians between 2006 and the present, or a civilian kill-rate of around 30 percent. You can read it here. I critiqued it at the Washington Independent. This post is about how their methodology probably means that their civilian-death figure is a low baseline. And this one linked David Rohde’s account of being held hostage by the Haqqani network to the radicalization caused by drone strikes.
But I want another bite of the apple here.
I have enormous respect for both Peter and Katherine. So don’t take anything that follows as a criticism of them as analysts. Any journalist who covers Afghanistan or al-Qaeda would be a fool not to listen to Peter, in particular, one of a handful of reporters to have interviewed Usama bin Laden. Their methodology is entirely open source — they’re going off of what they (and probably most Americans) consider reputable news organizations’ reports of “militant” deaths. That’s about as good as can be determined.
But that’s still not very good. It appears to mean we’re going off of what initial reports call “militants” to mean “not-civilians.” And that’s just not a measurement with any precision. Often times the news agencies cited don’t have people in, say, South Waziristan, and even the best news organization is going to go off of what official sources tell them was the tally, whether it’s right or not. And often there’s just no practical way of correcting those figures, or disaggregating who was really an insurgent and who was, say, a cook or a mechanic or something. How do you judge legitimate targets in an intel-dark situation like that?
I’m not saying Peter and Katherine did anything wrong here. I do not know how to solve this basic methodological problem, and I commend them for trying to be rigorous here. Yet we’re left with these facts, from the report: there have been between 750 and 1000 people killed in 82 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2006. “Among them were about 20 leaders of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and allied groups,” they write. Everyone else is in some nether-category, along a spectrum from Pure Insurgent to Innocent Bystander. I do not pretend that I can fine-tune that distinction.
But that should give us very grave pause. Because it raises the possibility that the real civilian casualty rate, in a region that is serving as a cauldron for insurgents whom Rohde thinks are growing more global in their ambitions (I haven’t yet seen the installment where he substantiates the point; patience), is so dreadfully high. This is the sort of thing that vengeance is made out of. Andrew Exum and David Kilcullen have made this point, and I just hear that dreadful echo when I read Peter and Katherine’s report.
Drone strikes are what you do when you don’t have better options. I sympathize with the concern of policymakers here. No one wants to invade Pakistan. And I have written for months that it makes no sense to be skeptical of drones in Pakistan and favor a more-offshore strategy for Afghanistan; nor does it make sense to be skeptical of drones and air power in Afghanistan but uncritical of drones in Pakistan. Lots of intelligence goes into the drone strikes. And they still may have a terribly high civilian kill-rate — my God, Peter and Katherine’s report, with its somewhat optimistic assumptions about who is a “militant,” finds that one out of every three people killed by the drones is a civilian.
Air power is a scary thing. It may not be enough to break a foe’s will. But it is enough to sear something into his mind. Abu Musab al-Suri, one of al-Qaeda’s premier strategists, urged his co-takfiris to abandon the “training camp” model, because he had seen in 2001-2 what U.S. air power could do to a bunch of terrorists who had banded together in a camp. Now, perhaps the Pakistani Taliban have so badly marginalized themselves that they don’t have a popular base of support to radicalize through exploiting the drone deaths. I’d like to believe that. But these are all optimistic assumptions. How much of a gamble are we prepared to take — especially with other people’s lives?
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Spencer:
But, in fairness, the empirical evidence suggests that military occupation provokes tremendous resistance as well. This is what I object to in the debate — the notion that drone strikes are bad because civilian casualties is accurate, but the alternative of troops on the ground is equally problematic.
You are assuming, effectively, that POPCOIN is a “better option.” There is quite literally no empirical evidence that is the case.
–BF
Bernard, that is an excellent point. Another takeaway of the Rohde piece — and, frankly, common sense — is that people do not like to live under occupation. What has astonished me, particularly when I went to Afghanistan last year, is the evident fact that it has provoked much less antipathy to the US than I thought it would. I expected to travel to eastern Afghanistan and hear that the US was rejected outright. Instead I heard that the US wasn’t doing anything for the Afghan people. I freely admit that has played a large role in my thinking. It’s not a decisive argument by any stretch. But we are not in an Iraq-like situation here.
I suppose there’s little I can tell you about my skepticism about counterinsurgency, since you’ve decided that I simply parrot COINdinista positions out of craven careerism. So I’m disinclined to respond to you more fulsomely. But luckily there’s the Google, which can compile a real-time document of what I’ve written on the subject.
I’m going to argue, Bernard, that there is some empirical evidence that foreign occupation provokes resistance, and some that it does not. Context matters, and different sectors of society react differently to the presence of armed foreigners.
Germany, Japan, and South Korea — well we all know how those places turned out under American occupation. The Philippines were under occupation for decades, and when another set of foreigners arrived proclaiming liberation, the Filipinos fought overwhelmingly on the American side (as opposed to the Indonesians in similar circumstances).
Anbar province seems to provide another one of those nonexistent empirical examples of pop-COIN not provoking furious reactions by the locals (indeed, they were previously quite angry but got less so as COIN became more emphasized as opposed to purely military responses).