The increasingly contentious American drone strikes in Pakistan and the climbing civilian casualty rates in Afghanistan moved front and center this week with the publication of an op-ed by counterinsurgency think tankers David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, who called for an end to the predator strikes, and an incident in Afghanistan where at least 30 Afghan civilians were killed during a firefight turned airstrike in which Taliban fighter used civilians as human shields—until an American B-1 bomber dropped two 2-ton bombs on the problem.
The civilian casualties and the drone strikes—which are killing and wounding civilians in Pakistan as well—are both harming the American effort while giving the Taliban and other insurgent groups fodder for propaganda and information ops campaigns, not to mention seriously pissing off the Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. I’ve come across a few bits recently that on some level speak to the problem, and I think they’re worth reading.
In Nicholas Schmidle’s new book To Live or to Perish Forever: Two
Tumultuous Years in Pakistan, he talks about an October 2006 Predator
drone attack on a madrassa in Bajaur, Pakistan, that missed al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri,
but killed forty students, who were then “featured in countless propaganda
speeches and leaflets distributed by Pakistani jihadi groups:
Rather than eliminating enemies, each missile strike only created more. “The government thinks it can persuade people to its side through development,” the Bannu journalist said. “And you know what? The people might thank the government. But revenge will never leave their minds…The day you forget your revenge, you are not a proper Pashtun.”
Pir spoke up and added, “People here are keeping score.”
Also check out Christian Bleuer’s post from a few years back where he recounts the example of a Soviet army Captain who apparently was a COIN expert (link via Josh Foust). Captain Zakharov’s troops were in involved in a complicated cat-and-mouse game with a mujahideen commander named Gayur, and Zakharov later explained the strategy he employed when Gayur tried to force him into killing or wounding Afghan civilians:
“Then the rascal thought of something else. As a way of forcing the peasants [who were friendly with Zakharov] to leave Afghanistanhe began to fire at my position straight from the neighboring kishlaks [villages] in an effort to draw our return fire. The provocations were repeated every day, but our guns remained silent. I refused to fire on peaceful civilians.”
I’m not saying that this is the way to go—even if Zakharov was successful in his approach, he was acting on his own, and in a very limited capacity. As Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said earlier this week, “we cannot succeed ... in Afghanistan by killing Afghan civilians,” But how, or when, this is going to happen is a tough to answer, even as civilians die, and the Taliban continues to rack up propaganda victories.
(Pic: U.S. Air Force)
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 05/22/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
Posted by: David M | May 22, 2009 at 10:06 AM