Word hit the street over the weekend that senior CIA officials have been pushing the Obama administration to expand unmanned aerial drone attacks against targets in Quetta, Pakistan. In the spies’ cross hairs are top Taliban commanders based in that city, a massive regional population center.
If counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations aren’t your cup of tea, you may have missed the ever-expanding role that unmanned drones have played in Pakistan. While it’s true that President Obama has recently signed off on the program’s expanded use to now include more of Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, the issue of targeting Quetta seems to have given the White House some pause:
A former senior CIA official said he and others were repeatedly rebuffed when proposing operations in Baluchistan or pushing Pakistan to target the Taliban in Quetta. “It wasn’t easy to talk about,” the official said. “The conversations didn’t last a long time.”
That sounds about right — attacking Quetta is a bridge too far in the drone war. Here’s why.
Many question whether we should have an unmanned drone program in the first place. There are strong and reasoned arguments from intelligent analysts who believe the costs of a drone program outweigh its benefits. The strongest argument is that by unintentionally causing civilian casualties with off-target or ill-timed strikes, the program agitates and alienates the population that the counter-insurgents are supposed to be protecting and winning over.
After this story first broke, I agreed with the basic premise of that argument, but said that drone attacks should be “extraordinarily limited, not stopped” because they were a “valuable tool in certain rare circumstances,” like when corroborated evidence places a senior Al Qaeda figure in a relatively remote location. Further, I developed five criteria as guidelines to determine when those might be. My fourth criterion is that it’s “unrealistic to say that drones won’t fire on population centers because then the targets would just hide in plain sight. However, the U.S. must carefully weigh the chance of civilian casualties and seek to avoid them — by using smaller missiles, modifying times of the strikes, etc. — at all costs.”
Quetta is a city of 850,000 people, and it is difficult to imagine that innocent civilians could be reasonably avoided in any single strike — no matter how good the intelligence is. Therefore, the administration is right to endorse the general practice while opposing its application in this specific instance.
