May 19, 2009 10:00 AM

CIA Chief: Drones 'Only Game in Town' for Stopping Al Qaeda

Call off the drones? No chance, CIA director Leon Panetta says. Not only are the spy agency’s unmanned aircraft “very effective” in taking out suspected militants in Pakistan, he told the Pacific Council on International Policy yesterday. “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al […]

Call off the drones? No chance, CIA director Leon Panetta says. Not only are the spy agency's unmanned aircraft "very effective" in taking out suspected militants in Pakistan, he told the Pacific Council on International Policy yesterday. "Very frankly, it's the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership."

For months, counterinsurgency specialists have been warning that the drone attacks in Pakistan could turn public opinion against the government there. "If we want to strengthen our friends and weaken our enemies in Pakistan, bombing Pakistani villages with unmanned drones is totally counterproductive," Dr. David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency adviser to both Gen. David Petraeus and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Danger Room in February.

Especially problematic are the civilian casualties which result from the strikes. One likely-inaccurate -- but widely believed -- Pakistani survey claimed that only two percent of the deaths caused by the drones were militants. Panetta disputed that, saying the drone program "is very precise, it’s very limited in terms of collateral damage."

The other question is whether taking out extremist operatives is, by itself, an effective strategy for countering a jihadist group. "One former Bush administration official" tells terrorism expert Peter Bergen "that the drones had so crimped the militants' activities in FATA [Pakistan's tribal wildlands] that they had begun discussing a move to Yemen or Somalia."

*Two officials familiar with the drone program point out that the number of 'spies' Al Qaeda and the Taliban have killed has risen dramatically in the past year, suggesting that the militants are turning on themselves in an effort to root out the sources of the often pinpoint intelligence that has led to what those officials describe as the deaths of half of the top militant leaders in the FATA... *
Daniel Byman, who runs the Security Studies program at Georgetown, has studied the effects that targeted assassinations have on terrorist groups. For years, the Israeli government has mounted assassinations against the leaders of groups like Hamas. Byman found that the dead leaders were replaced by more junior members of the group, "who are not as good; you drive down the age and experience of the leadership."*

But "militant organizations like Al Qaeda are not like an organized crime family, which can be put out of business if most or all of the members of the family are captured or killed," Bergen adds. "Al Qaeda has sustained and can continue to sustain enormous blows that would put other organizations out of business because the members of the group firmly believe that they are doing God's work."

In the end, Pakistan's jihadist problem (and ours) won't go away until the people and the military there decide they've had enough of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. That political will is slowly "beginning to emerge," thanks to a series of gruesome bombings and assassinations. But it may take years for it to coalesce -- and for the Paksitani military to get halfway-decent at counterinsurgency. Until that changes, the drones may be, in Panetta's words, "the only game in town."

[Photo: USAF]

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