Preventive Force by Kerstin Fisk & Jennifer M. Ramos

Author:Kerstin Fisk & Jennifer M. Ramos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL000000 Political Science / General
Publisher: NYU Press

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Studying Drones

The Low Quality Information Environment of Pakistan’s Tribal Areas

C. Christine Fair

Pakistan captures the attention of those interested in U.S. drone policy because it has experienced far more drone strikes than any other country from 2004 onward. Even though the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the U.S. Air Force developed the capacity to weaponize remotely piloted aerial vehicles (RPVs)1 well before the events of September 2001,2 it took the events of 9/11 to galvanize the Bush administration to finally approve the use of armed drones in what became the U.S.-led “Global War on Terror” (Frisbee 2004). Analysts believe that the CIA first employed a weaponized drone on February 4, 2002, in an effort to kill Bin Laden near the city of Khost, in Afghanistan’s Paktia province. In what now seems unusual, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, using the passive voice of government obfuscation, acknowledged the strike: “A decision was made to fire the Hellfire missile. It was fired” (Sifton 2012). The United States then expanded the use of armed RPVs to kill alleged terrorists and insurgents in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).3 Subsequently, and consistent with the expanding scope of the global war on terror, the U.S. intelligence and military agencies employed armed RPVs in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and elsewhere. However, the most notorious of these theaters is the FATA in Pakistan, which has been the site of the vast majority of U.S. armed RPV strikes since they began after 9/11.

As the covert use of RPVs in Pakistan proliferated, so has the body of writing on the program and its consequences. Unfortunately, many of these analyses fall short because they pay inadequate attention to the specificities of the program in Pakistan. In this chapter, I first provide important contextual information that should foreground any study of RPV usage in Pakistan. Next, I discuss some of the problems with popular notions of “Pakistani sovereignty” that undergird commentary about the RPV program there. I then evaluate Pakistan’s willingness and ability to do more to protect the international community from the terrorist groups ensconced in its territory. Following this, I critique recent human rights advocacy reports, highlighting the methodological, and even ethical, problems that undermine their examination of drones. I conclude with a number of thoughts on how scholars can improve the quality and thus reliability of their work to understand the impact of the RPV program in Pakistan and perhaps other low information environments.

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