Call Off the Drones? -- A Commentary

Fully loaded MQ-9 Reaper (This is from a General Atomics ad in a military magazine but it does give you an idea of what the Reaper would look like if it was ever fully loaded.) Image from Military Photos.

From Commentary Magazine:

Dave Kilcullen, author of the new book The Accidental Guerrilla (which I reviewed here), is one of our best counterinsurgency experts. So when he says something it’s worth paying attention, even if you don’t necessarily agree.

He just told Congress that “we need to call off the drones” that are being used to target Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. According to the L.A. Times:

“I realize that they do damage to the Al Qaeda leadership,” he told the House Armed Services Committee. But that, he said, was not enough to justify the program. “Since 2006, we’ve killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we’ve killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they’ve given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism. … The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population.”

Another problem, Kilcullen says, is that “using robots from the air … looks both cowardly and weak.”

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