American drone strikes in Pakistan

Based on Wikipedia: American drone strikes in Pakistan

Death from Above: The Secret War in Pakistan's Skies

Somewhere in the mountainous tribal regions of northwest Pakistan, a man steps outside his compound. He doesn't hear the Predator drone circling 25,000 feet overhead. He can't see the camera that has been watching him for days, or the Hellfire missile that will end his life in seconds. This scene played out thousands of times between 2004 and 2018, as the United States conducted what some called a shadow war—and what Pakistan's courts would eventually rule were war crimes.

This is the story of how two ostensible allies waged a covert campaign that both publicly denied and privately enabled, killing thousands of militants and hundreds of civilians in a region most Americans couldn't find on a map.

A Deal Made in Secret

The arrangement was extraordinary in its contradictions. Publicly, Pakistan's government condemned the drone strikes in the strongest possible terms. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called them "a continual violation of our territorial integrity." Pakistan's National Assembly unanimously declared them violations of the United Nations charter and humanitarian law. The Peshawar High Court ruled them war crimes.

And yet the drones kept flying.

The reason was simple: Pakistan's leaders were saying one thing to their citizens and another to Washington. Former President Pervez Musharraf later admitted to The New Yorker that he had personally allowed the Central Intelligence Agency—the CIA—to operate drones within Pakistani airspace. In exchange, the Americans provided helicopters and night-vision equipment. Musharraf insisted he only granted permission "on a few occasions, when a target was absolutely isolated and there was no chance of collateral damage."

But leaked diplomatic cables told a different story. Pakistan's own Army Chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, had not only tolerated the drone flights—he had actively requested that Americans increase them. The country's intelligence service, known as the Inter-Services Intelligence agency or ISI, secretly fed information to the CIA about militant locations while the government publicly decried each attack.

This double game extended to infrastructure. The CIA operated out of Shamsi Airfield, a remote base 190 miles southwest of Quetta, deep in Pakistani territory. Local journalists could see the unmarked aircraft taking off. American officials confirmed the arrangement had been in place since 2002. The United States even faxed the ISI notifications before strikes, listing dates and general areas of operations. The ISI would acknowledge receipt without formally approving anything—a carefully constructed legal fiction that allowed both governments plausible deniability.

The Mechanics of Remote Killing

Understanding how these strikes worked requires grasping a fundamental shift in how modern warfare operates. The drones themselves—primarily MQ-1 Predators and their larger cousins, the MQ-9 Reapers—are unmanned aerial vehicles controlled by pilots sitting in air-conditioned trailers thousands of miles away, often in Nevada. The aircraft can loiter over targets for more than 24 hours, watching, waiting, and when ordered, firing missiles that cost roughly $100,000 each.

The program operated under the CIA's Special Activities Division rather than the military, which had profound implications. Military operations require disclosure to Congress and follow established rules of engagement. CIA operations are covert by definition. When the Bush administration began the program in 2004, officials publicly denied its very existence.

President Barack Obama inherited this machinery and dramatically expanded it. Under Bush, there had been perhaps 50 strikes in four years. Under Obama, strikes accelerated to nearly one every three days at their peak. The number of CIA drones operating over Afghanistan and Pakistan doubled after Obama took office.

Why the expansion? Some analysts pointed to an unintended consequence of Obama's other decisions. The new president had signed executive orders banning the CIA's secret detention centers—the so-called "black sites" where terrorism suspects had been interrogated using techniques widely condemned as torture. He had also pledged to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. With capturing prisoners now politically and legally complicated, killing them became the path of least resistance.

Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia put it bluntly: "Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets. They are not going to advertise that, but that's what they are doing."

The Geography of Violence

Nearly all of these strikes occurred in a region most Westerners have never heard of: the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. This remote mountainous zone along the Afghan border operated under different laws than the rest of Pakistan—a legacy of British colonial rule that had left the region in a kind of legal limbo for over a century.

The terrain matters. Steep valleys and caves provide natural hiding places. The border with Afghanistan is largely imaginary, a line drawn by a British diplomat in 1893 that cuts through ethnic Pashtun territory. Fighters could slip back and forth between countries with ease. For the Taliban and al-Qaeda, it was a sanctuary. For American planners, it was a target-rich environment where conventional military options seemed impossible.

The people living there faced an impossible situation. The Pakistani Taliban controlled much of daily life, enforcing their interpretation of Islamic law through violence. The Pakistani military launched periodic offensives that displaced millions. And now missiles fell from clear skies, killing militants but also, inevitably, others.

Who Died?

The numbers remain contested, which itself tells you something about the nature of this campaign. Various tracking organizations estimate that between 3,798 and 5,059 militants died in the strikes. Civilian deaths are estimated between 161 and 473, though some organizations put the figure considerably higher.

The militant deaths included genuine architects of terrorism. Baitullah Mehsud, who led the Pakistani Taliban and was linked to the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, died in a strike in August 2009. His successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, met the same fate in November 2013. Akhtar Mansour, leader of the Afghan Taliban, was killed in May 2016. Hundreds of lower-level commanders also died—seventy Taliban leaders in just ten days of May 2017 alone.

US officials claimed these strikes devastated terrorist leadership. Nine of al-Qaeda's twenty top commanders were reportedly killed by March 2009. Surviving leaders fled to cities like Quetta and Karachi, where drone strikes were politically impossible. The constant pressure, officials argued, sowed "uncertainty and discord" in militant ranks.

But the civilian deaths—whatever their true number—carried enormous costs. Each funeral created new grievances. Each wedding party mistakenly targeted (there were several) became a recruiting tool for the very organizations the strikes were meant to destroy. Pakistan's Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, summarized the criticism: "Drone missiles cause collateral damage. A few militants are killed, but the majority of victims are innocent citizens."

This was almost certainly an exaggeration in numerical terms, but it captured a political reality. In 2013, it emerged that the CIA sometimes did not even know specifically who it was killing in certain strikes. The agency was reportedly targeting suspicious patterns of behavior—military-age males gathering in certain ways—rather than identified individuals. This practice, known as "signature strikes," blurred the line between combatant and civilian in ways that troubled even supporters of the program.

The Obama Doctrine

President Obama and his advisers developed an elaborate framework to justify the strikes. John Brennan, Obama's counter-terrorism adviser who would later become CIA Director, laid out the logic: "The purpose of these actions is to mitigate threats to US persons' lives. It is the option of last recourse."

Brennan described a "rigorous checklist" that included the infeasibility of capture, certainty of intelligence, and imminence of threat. Obama's defenders argued that ground operations in Pakistan's tribal areas were simply impossible—the terrain was inaccessible, the local population hostile, and Pakistani sovereignty meant American troops couldn't operate openly.

But this framework raised its own uncomfortable questions. In May 2013, the Obama administration acknowledged for the first time that four American citizens had been killed in drone strikes—including Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric killed in Yemen in 2011. The government had executed its own citizens without trial, a development that troubled civil libertarians across the political spectrum.

Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon's general counsel, tried to address concerns about the kill-over-capture approach: "We have to be vigilant to avoid a no-quarter, or take-no-prisoners policy." But the statistics suggested that was increasingly what the drone program had become.

The Pakistani Calculation

Why did Pakistan's leaders permit strikes they publicly condemned? The answer lies in the complicated relationship between the Pakistani state and the militants on its territory.

The Afghan Taliban—the movement that had controlled Afghanistan until the 2001 US invasion—maintained close ties to Pakistan's intelligence services. Many of their leaders lived openly in Quetta, and American pressure to target them there went nowhere. But the Pakistani Taliban was a different matter entirely. This group had turned against the Pakistani state itself, conducting attacks that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians.

When Obama expanded strikes to target Pakistani Taliban training camps in February 2009, the Pakistani government quietly approved. This was an enemy they shared. The arrangement became transactional: the Americans got access to airspace and intelligence; the Pakistanis got drone strikes against groups attacking their own country.

The relationship frayed badly in 2011. In May, US Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, a Pakistani garrison town uncomfortably close to the country's premier military academy. The raid was conducted without Pakistani knowledge, humiliating the country's military and intelligence services. Either they had known bin Laden was there—which suggested complicity—or they hadn't known—which suggested incompetence. Neither explanation was acceptable.

Then, in November 2011, NATO forces killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in an incident along the Afghan border. Pakistan responded furiously, evacuating Americans from Shamsi Airfield and closing supply routes to Afghanistan. Army Chief Kayani—the same general who had once requested more drone strikes—issued a directive to shoot down American drones.

The strikes stopped for two months. When they resumed in January 2012, it was under a new secret agreement signed by ISI chief Lieutenant General Shuja Ahmad Pasha and CIA Director David Petraeus.

Questions Without Answers

The drone campaign in Pakistan wound down after 2018, as the Pakistani Taliban weakened and American attention shifted elsewhere. But the questions it raised have only grown more urgent as drone technology has proliferated worldwide.

Were the strikes legal? The Obama administration insisted they complied with international law. Pakistan's courts said they were war crimes. International lawyers remain divided, with much depending on whether one considers the tribal areas a war zone or sovereign Pakistani territory where law enforcement rules should apply.

Were they effective? By narrow metrics, undoubtedly—thousands of militants killed, terrorist leadership decimated. But measuring what didn't happen is impossible. Did the strikes prevent attacks that would otherwise have occurred? Or did they create new militants faster than they killed existing ones? Did they stabilize or destabilize the region?

A 2013 International Crisis Group report concluded the strikes were "ineffective" at combating militancy in Pakistan. Shortly after, the Pakistani Taliban withdrew from peace talks following a strike that killed their deputy leader. The pattern repeated: strikes disrupted negotiations, negotiations' failure justified more strikes.

Were they ethical? This may be the hardest question. The administration's defenders argued that drones were actually more precise than conventional warfare, killing fewer civilians than ground operations or manned aircraft would have. Critics countered that the technology made killing too easy, that removing American lives from the equation removed crucial restraints on the use of force.

There's something unsettling about a pilot ending his shift after killing people on the other side of the world, then driving home for dinner with his family. The asymmetry is total—one side faces no risk at all while the other faces death from an invisible enemy. Whether that asymmetry is a technological triumph or a moral failing depends on premises the debate itself cannot resolve.

The Precedent

Perhaps the most significant legacy of the Pakistan drone campaign is the precedent it set. The United States demonstrated that a nation could conduct sustained lethal operations in another country's airspace, kill thousands of people, and face essentially no consequences.

Other countries took note. China has developed its own drone fleet and exports armed drones to nations the US refuses to sell to. Turkey uses drones in Syria, Libya, and Azerbaijan. Iran-backed groups operate drones throughout the Middle East. Russia deploys them in Ukraine.

The legal and ethical frameworks remain unsettled. If the United States could conduct strikes in Pakistan while publicly denying them, what rules apply when other nations follow the same playbook? If signature strikes against unidentified individuals are acceptable, who defines what behavior makes someone targetable?

In the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, the drones have largely stopped. But the technology has spread, the precedents have been set, and the questions raised by those years of shadow warfare remain as urgent as ever. Death from above has become a permanent feature of modern conflict—and the rules governing it are still being written.