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Do U.S. Drone Strikes Cause Blowback? Do U.S Do U.S. Drone Strikes Cause Blowback? Do U.S. Drone Strikes Aqil Shah Cause Blowback? Evidence from Pakistan and Beyond Since the terrorist at- tacks of September 11, 2001, the United States has relied almost exclusively on armed unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, to ªght Islamist militants on un- conventional battleªelds in countries including Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Critics, including analysts, ofªcials from human rights organizations, and for- mer U.S. government and military ofªcials, claim that drone strikes create blowback: rather than reducing the terrorist threat, drone strikes increase it by providing terrorist groups with fresh recruits. For example, Human Rights Watch has warned that “the deaths of numerous civilians” in drone strikes in Yemen have “fueled public anger and frustration...against the United States, handing a recruiting card to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).”1 Similarly, retired four-star Marine Corps General and former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright cautions that “drones cause anger, bitterness and resentment among Muslim populations targeted in the attacks, and will cause blowback against the United States.”2 According to proponents of this thesis, blowback can occur in three theaters: (1) locally, where family members living in the same target zone as a relative killed in a drone strike become revenge-seeking, anti-American militants; (2) nationally, in areas of a country not exposed to drone attacks but where people are motivated to politically or ªnancially support or join militant groups because they view such strikes both as humiliating violations of their country’s sovereignty and as indiscriminate killers of their fellow citizens (in Aqil Shah is Assistant Professor in the Department of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. For insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, the author thanks Bushra Asif, Tricia Bacon, C. Christine Fair, Michael Horowitz, Patrick Johnston, Asfandyar Mir, Jack Serle, partici- pants at the University of Oklahoma’s Middle East Seminar and the International Relations Semi- nar at the University of Texas–Austin, conference participants at the 2017 annual meeting of the International Studies Association, and the anonymous reviewers. Funding from the University of Oklahoma’s Vice President for Research and the College of International Studies is gratefully acknowledged. 1. Human Rights Watch, “Between a Drone and al-Qaeda: The Civilian Cost of U.S. Targeted Kill- ings in Yemen” (New York: Human Right Watch, October 22, 2013), https://www.hrw.org/report/ 2013/10/22/between-drone-and-al-qaeda/civilian-cost-us-targeted-killings-yemen. See also “The Civilian Impact of Drones: Unexamined Costs, Unanswered Questions” (New York: Center for Civilians in Conºict and Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic, 2012). 2. Quoted in Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, “Inºuential Aide to Obama Voices Concern on Drone Strikes,” New York Times, March 21, 2013. International Security, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Spring 2018), pp. 47–84, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00312 © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 47 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec_a_00312 by guest on 01 October 2021 International Security 42:4 48 some cases, drone strikes can exert additional national-level effects by motivat- ing allied governments to succumb to public pressure and curtail or sever co- operation with U.S. counterterrorism efforts); and (3), transnationally, when Muslims in other parts of the world are radicalized and/or participate in ter- rorist activities in response to co-religionists dying in drone strikes. Although scholars have extensively debated the military effectiveness,3 legal status, and ethics of drone warfare,4 there has been no systematic study of drone blowback beyond statements from some important public ªgures, anecdotes about individual terrorists,5 advocacy-driven research, and media commentary.6 In this article, I examine the conventional wisdom on drone blowback and ªnd that most critics of drone warfare assume, rather than dem- onstrate, the occurrence of blowback, typically pointing to a speciªc theater of supposed blowback or lumping together different theaters, often without specifying the causal mechanisms that connect drone strikes to blowback in each case. The purpose of this article is not to deny the harmful effects of U.S. drone strikes on civilian populations or to ignore that the use of drones in sovereign countries not at war with the United States is a manifestation of American unilateralism—even from the perspective of many U.S. allies. This article uses new data and secondary sources to evaluate variants of the blowback thesis. At the local and national levels, it analyzes the case of Pakistan, where since 2004 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has launched an estimated 429 drone strikes (roughly 75 percent of its known total strikes worldwide).7 Using a diverse convenience sample of interviews with 167 well- informed adults from North Waziristan Agency (NWA), the most heavily tar- 3. See, for instance, Daniel Byman, “Why Drones Work: The Case for America’s Weapon of Choice,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 92, No. 4 (July/August, 2013), pp. 32–43; David A. Jaeger and Zahra Siddique, “Are Drone Strikes Effective in Afghanistan and Pakistan? On the Dynamics of Violence between the United States and the Taliban” (Bonn, Germany: Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit, December 2011), http://ftp.iza.org/dp6262.pdf; and Patrick B. Johnston and Anoop K. Sarbahi, “Impact of U.S. Drone Strikes on Terrorism in Pakistan,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 2 (2016), pp. 203–219, doi:10.1093/isq/sqv004. For the opposing argument, see Audrey Kurth Cronin, “Why Drones Fail: When Tactics Drive Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 92, No. 4 (July/August 2013), pp. 44–54; and Megan Smith and James Igoe Walsh, “Do Drone Strikes De- grade Al Qaeda? Evidence from Propaganda Output,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2013), pp. 311–327, doi:10.1080/09546553.2012.664011. 4. For an accessible treatment of these issues, see Avery Plaw, Matthew S. Fricker, and Carlos R. Colon, The Drone Debate: A Primer on the U.S. Use of Unmanned Aircraft Outside Conventional Bat- tleªelds (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littleªeld, 2016); and John Kaag and Sarah Kreps, Drone War- fare (London: Polity, 2014). 5. One such example, discussed in a subsequent section of this article, is the Pakistani-American terrorist Faisal Shehzad, who tried to bomb Times Square in May 2010. 6. One major constraint on examining the link between drone strikes and terrorist recruitment is the dearth of reliable data on militant recruitment. 7. The Pakistan drone program is different from those of some other countries where the United States operates lethal drones. For example, the Pakistan program is run primarily by the Central Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec_a_00312 by guest on 01 October 2021 Do U.S. Drone Strikes Cause Blowback? 49 geted district located in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), bordering Afghanistan; extensive interviews with respected experts on terrorism; and an ofªcial Pakistani police survey of 500 detained terror- ists from southern Sindh Province, I ªnd no evidence of a signiªcant impact of drone strikes on the recruitment of militants either locally or nationally. Instead, my data and secondary sources suggest that militant recruitment is a complex process driven by a variety of factors, some of which scholars and analysts have already identiªed. These include political grievances,8 the Pakistani state’s sponsorship of militancy as a tool of foreign policy,9 state re- pression,10 weak governance,11 and coercive recruitment by militant groups.12 Additionally, my examination of the trial testimony and accounts of terrorists convicted in the United States, together with social science scholarship on Muslim radicalization in the United States and Europe, offers little or no evi- dence that drone strikes create a systematic pattern of transnational blowback. Although jihadists typically explain their actions as a response to U.S. military interventions in Muslim countries, the main causes of global militant Islamism are not drone strikes but factors such as identity crises suffered by young im- migrants, the nature of state integration policies, social networks, and online exposure to extremist ideologies. The article proceeds as follows. In the next three sections, I explicate the the- oretical logic of the local, national, and transnational versions of the blowback theses; discuss the methodology employed to asses each one; and use my interview ªndings and other data to evaluate the blowback hypothesis. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of my ªndings for scholarship and policy. Local Blowback Context is essential when examining the blowback thesis. The United States has targeted its lethal drone operations primarily in Pakistan’s northwestern Federally Administered Tribal Areas, a quasi-autonomous frontier region gov- Intelligence Agency rather than the U.S. military (e.g., Afghanistan) or jointly by the two organiza- tions (e.g., Yemen). 8. Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970). 9. See, for example, Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005). 10. Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: State and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 11. See International Crisis Group, “Pakistan: Countering Militancy in FATA,” Asia Report No. 178 (Brussels: International Crisis Group, October 21, 2009). 12. Kristine Eck, “Coercion in Rebel Recruitment,” Security Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2014), pp. 364– 398, doi: 10.1080/09636412.2014.905368. See also International Crisis Group, “Pakistan.” Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec_a_00312 by guest on 01 October 2021 International Security 42:4 50 erned under the 1901 Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR).
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