Taliban vs. Predator
Are Targeted Killings Inside Pakistan A Good Idea?
Article Summary and Author Biography
Targeted killings of enemy leaders have high costs, high risks, and limited benefits -- but are still a sensible way to combat al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan.
DANIEL BYMAN is Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, and the author of the forthcoming book, A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism.
Essay
One of the tactics Israel has used in responding to terrorism has been to seek out and kill individual enemies. Now Washington has started doing the same. The United States and Israel face different circumstances, however, and so the Bush administration should think twice before proceeding.
Roundtable
On March 1, 2009, an unmanned drone reportedly killed eight Taliban and Arab militants in the Sora Rogha area of tribal Pakistan. The strike, the fifth drone attack in Pakistan since late January, demonstrates that the Obama administration is not jettisoning the policies of the Bush administration regarding targeted killings; in fact, it appears to be ramping them up.
Taliban and al Qaeda militants seek to kill Americans and American allies and are instituting a reign of terror in the parts of Pakistan they control, so few tears should be shed over their demise. However, as the administration moves forward, it should bear in mind lessons from the Israeli experience with similar targeted killing operations, which I discussed in an article in Foreign Affairs in 2006. The Israeli example suggests that the current U.S. campaign of using Predator attacks to go after its enemies is fraught with risks and can neither defeat al Qaeda nor remove it from its stronghold within Pakistan. That said, continued U.S. strikes should help tamp down the threat al Qaeda poses -- at least temporarily -- making them Washington’s least bad policy choice for the moment.
In its operations in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel found it hard to kill only terrorists. B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, reports that of the 386 Palestinians who died as a result of targeted killing operations, from the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000 through the latest war in Gaza at the end of 2008, 40 percent were not the objects of attack -- and some of the unintended victims were children. In spite of all precautions taken, therefore, continued Predator strikes will inevitably kill innocent civilians as well as the enemy.
To have any chance of hitting their targets, meanwhile, Predator strikes require superb intelligence. Israel has a vast intelligence network, with thousands of informers in the Palestinian territories and a near-constant overhead presence of unmanned aerial vehicles and helicopters. In Pakistan’s tribal areas, by contrast, good human intelligence is always in short supply, and constant surveillance is difficult due to the size of the area in question...
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