U.S. Drone Strikes

Do U.S. Drone Strikes Cause Blowback?
Do U.S. Drone Strikes Aqil Shah
Cause Blowback?
Evidence from Pakistan and Beyond
S
ince 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
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
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.”
erned under the 1901 Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR). There, the Taliban,
al-Qaida, and other foreign militant groups found sanctuary after the U.S. in-
vasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.13 FATA has an estimated population of
5 million, most of whom are ethnic Pashtuns. Several of its seven agencies
(districts)—in particular, South Waziristan (SWA) and North Waziristan
(NWA)—14 have become sanctuaries, training bases, and launching pads for
militant attacks in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Pakistan deployed its military for the ªrst time in FATA in 2002–03 under
pressure from the United States to prevent al-Qaida and Taliban militants
from mounting cross-border attacks against U.S.-led coalition troops in
Afghanistan. Pakistan deployed its military in FATA in 2002–03 under pressure
from the United States to prevent al-Qaida and Taliban militants from mount-
ing cross-border attacks against U.S.-led coalition troops in Afghanistan. In
2004, the military launched anti-terrorism operations in SWA. After suffering
major losses at the hands of local militants and their foreign allies, the military
opted for a policy of appeasement, entering into peace accords with the mili-
tants, including one signed in April 2004 in SWA with militant commander
Nek Mohammad, who was subsequently killed in a CIA drone strike in June
2004. The short-lived agreement offered the militants amnesty and money in
return for a pledge to renounce violence. In NWA, the military sporadically
clashed with different militant factions in 2005–06, which ultimately resulted
in a similar truce in September 2006 with Taliban commander Haªz Gul
Bahadur. The overall effect of these peace deals was to cede more space to the
militants and to enhance their political status, which helped them gradually
expand their inºuence over the region and establish a parallel administration
and court system modeled on Taliban rule in Afghanistan.15
Initially, U.S. drone strikes focused on South Waziristan, the home base of
Baitullah Mehsud, head of the Pakistani Taliban, and his al-Qaida-afªliated
foreign allies. After the Pakistan Army launched a major offensive in SWA
in 2009, the locus of militancy and drone strikes shifted to North Waziristan. In
addition to al-Qaida, drone strikes have targeted two main militant groups:
the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an umbrella group created by Mehsud in
13. This ªgure includes the strike that killed Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Mansur Akhtar in Paki-
stan’s southwestern Balochistan Province in June 2016.
14. It also includes frontier regions or tribal areas adjoining Peshawar, Kohat, Bannu, and Dera
Ismail Khan districts of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province.
15. Intikhab Amir, “Waziristan: Whose Writ Is It Anyway?” Herald (Pakistan), March 2006;
“Taliban Slap Taxes in Miranshah,” Dawn (Pakistan), October 23, 2006; “Mujahideen Shura Re-
solves to Enforce Sharia,” News (Pakistan), November 6, 2006; and International Crisis Group,
“Pakistan’s Tribal Areas: Appeasing the Militants,” Asia Report No. 125 (Brussels: International
Crisis Group, December 11, 2006).
2007 that has targeted the Pakistani state; and the Haqqani network, a group
aligned with the Afghan Taliban that has fought U.S.-led NATO and Afghan
security forces across the border.16
According to the existing literature, lethal drone strikes provide militant
groups with a steady stream of new recruits seeking revenge for the deaths of
relatives.17 The operating mechanism here is familial or tribal revenge. As
Audrey Kurth Cronin writes, “Drones are killing operatives who aspire to at-
tack the United States. . . . But they are also increasing the likelihood of attacks
over the long term by embittering locals and cultivating a desire for ven-
geance.”18 According to two other prominent experts, David Kilcullen and
Andrew Exum, drones have a negative net effect on terrorism.
While violent extremists may be unpopular, for a frightened population they
seem less ominous than a faceless enemy that wages war from afar and often
kills more civilians than militants. Press reports suggest that over the last three
years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But according to
Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. That is 50 civilians
for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent—hardly “precision.” American
ofªcials vehemently dispute these ªgures. . . . Nevertheless, every one of these
dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge,
and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially
even as drone strikes have increased.19
Although some of those who support terrorist groups or become terrorists
themselves may be motivated by the desire to seek revenge for loved ones
killed in drone strikes, neither Kilcullen and Exum nor other proponents of the
blowback thesis provide empirical data to support their arguments. Indeed,
16. On the Pakistani Taliban, see Shehzad H. Qazi, “Rebels of the Frontier: Origins, Organization,
and Recruitment of the Pakistani Taliban,” Small Wars & Insurgencies, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2011), pp. 574–
602, doi:10.1080/09592318.2011.601865; and Hasan Abbas, “A Proªle of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Paki-
stan,” CTC Sentinel, Vol. 1, No. 2 (January 2008), pp. 1–3, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/
u2/a539361.pdf. On the Haqqani network, see Vahid Brown and Don Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad:
The Haqqani Nexus, 1973–2012 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
17. See, for instance, Brian Glyn Williams, Predators: The CIA’s Drone War on al-Qaida (Washington,
D.C.: Potomac, 2013), pp. 207–217; Michael J. Boyle, “Costs and Consequences of Drone Warfare,”
International Affairs, Vol. 89, No. 1 (January 2013), pp. 1–29, doi:10.1111/1468-2346.12002; and Da-
vid Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum, “Death from Above, Outrage Below,” New York Times,
May 16, 2009.
18. Cronin, “Why Drones Fail.” See also Stanley McChrystal, “Special Address to the International
Institute for Strategic Studies,” London, England, October 1, 2009, p. 2, https://www.iwp.edu/
docLib/20131125_GenMcCrystalAddress1012009.pdf.
19. Kilcullen and Exum, “Death from Above, Outrage Below.” Kilcullen also made this claim in
David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 230–232. For a similar argument, see Leila Hudson, Colin S.
Owens, and Matt Flannes, “Drone Warfare: Blowback from the New American Way of War,”
Middle East Policy, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 2011), http://www.mepc.org/journal/middle-east-policy-
archives/drone-warfare-blowback-new-american-way-war.
Kilcullen and Exum based their claims about blowback on dubious ofªcial
Pakistani ªgures that appeared in a local press report.20 But even if one accepts
Kilcullen and Exum’s hit rate as valid, it demonstrates only that drones kill
more civilians than terrorists, not that they create more terrorists than they
kill. John Feffer has argued that blowback would exist even if only 0.1 percent
of FATA’s 4 million residents joined the Taliban out of anger over drone
strikes.21 Feffer is right to count even the smallest number of drone-spawned
militants as blowback, but in the absence of actual data, his argument is
mere speculation.
As mentioned earlier, studies by human rights advocacy groups also argue
that lethal drone strikes create militants. These include a widely cited report
conducted by the Law School Clinics of Stanford and New York Universities.22
The report’s ªndings, based on eyewitness testimony, are undermined, how-
ever, by a serious conºict of interest: the London-based charity, Reprieve,
known for its anti-drone advocacy, commissioned the report. Moreover, the
study’s participants were paid for their travel to Islamabad and Peshawar to
sit for interviews by Reprieve and its Pakistani partner, the Foundation for
Fundamental Rights, which the report describes as “the most prominent legal
advocate for drone victims in Pakistan.”23 In addition, similar to other advo-
cacy research,24 the report paints a biased picture because it bases its conclu-
sions on three drone strikes that reportedly killed a larger number of civilians
than a typical drone strike. The report also suffers from other empirical and
methodological problems.25 Admittedly, the human costs of drone strikes
should not be minimized, and documenting these costs is both necessary and
desirable. Nevertheless, the charge that drones cause excessive casualties,
which has a radicalizing effect, does not withstand scrutiny. In fact, drones ap-
20. Amir Mir, “60 Drone Hits Kill 14 Al-Qaeda Men, 687 Civilians,” News (Pakistan), April 10,
2009.
21. John Feffer, “The Coming Drone Blowback,” Foreign Policy in Focus, May 25, 2016, http://
fpif.org/coming-drone-blowback/.
22. See Stanford Law School and New York University (NYU) School of Law, Living under Drones:
Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from U.S. Drone Practices in Pakistan (Stanford, Calif. and New
York: Stanford Law School and NYU School of Law, 2012), pp. 133–135.
23. Ibid., p. 3.
24. For instance, Amnesty International based its investigation of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan on
9 of the 45 strikes that occurred in NWA between January 2012 and August 2013. See Amnesty In-
ternational, “Will I Be Next?’ U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan” (London: Amnesty International, Oc-
tober 22, 2013), https://www.amnestyusa.org/ªles/asa330132013en.pdf.
25. See C. Christine Fair, “Ethical and Methodological Issues in Assessing Drones’ Civilian
Impacts in Pakistan,” Monkey Cage blog, Washington Post, October 6, 2014, https://www
.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/06/ethical-and-methodological-issues-
in-assessing-drones-civilian-impacts-in-pakistan/?utm_term⫽.706209dbd5f6.
pear to cause unintended deaths at a rate lower than their alternatives, such as
Pakistani military campaigns involving F-16 jets.26
Some analysts have cited opinion polls to substantiate their claims about
local blowback. For example, a 2010 poll based on a sample of 1,000 residents
in all seven FATA agencies showed that 76 percent of respondents opposed
drone strikes; only 16 percent thought that such strikes accurately target insur-
gents; and 48 percent believed that the strikes largely kill civilians.27 Moreover,
60 percent believed that suicide attacks against the United States were “some-
times” or “always” justiªed. Peter Bergen and his collaborators, who commis-
sioned the survey, have used these ªgures to claim that suicide attackers are
widely popular across FATA, and that the main motivation for anti-American
radicalization “stems from anger at CIA-directed drone strikes at militants liv-
ing in the area.”28 Flaws in the poll, however, undermine its ªndings. The ªrst
ºaw is the presence of a “social desirability bias” (i.e., responses seen as so-
cially acceptable or safe), which may be enhanced in conºict situations where
respondents fear reprisals from the government or insurgents. In the words of
Nizam Dawar, head of a network of local development organizations in FATA,
“There was no space to do independent research in FATA at the time. My own
family in North Waziristan was threatened by militants after I spoke about
drone attacks to a foreign media outlet in 2010. Survival required a policy of
see no evil, hear no evil, say no evil.”29 Second, the polling sample is not repre-
sentative of the population. In 2010, a sizable portion of FATA’s population
was internally displaced. For instance, one-third of SWA’s estimated total pop-
ulation of 600,000 had left the area prior to the Pakistani military’s October
2009 offensive.30
methods for assessing local blowback

To assess the occurrence of local blowback, I relied primarily on interviews
with inhabitants of North Waziristan. NWA offers distinct advantages in this
26. See Avery Plaw and Matthew S. Fricker, “Tracking the Predators: Evaluating the U.S. Drone
Campaign in Pakistan,” International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 13, No. 4 (November 2012), pp. 351–
354, doi:10.1111/j.1528-3585.2012.00465.x.
27. New America Foundation and Terror Free Tomorrow, “Public Opinion in Pakistan’s Tribal Re-
gions” (Washington, D.C.: New America Foundation and Terror Free Tomorrow, September 2010).
28. Ken Ballen, Peter Bergen, and Patrick Doherty, “U.S.-Led Drone War Is Self-Defeating,” CNN,
September, 10, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/09/30/ballen.bergen.pakistan/index
.html.
29. Author telephone interview, January 2017.
30. United Nations Ofªce for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “Pakistan—South
Waziristan Displacement,” situation report No. 4 (New York: United Nations Ofªce for the Coor-
dination of Humanitarian Affairs, November 19, 2009) https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/
ªles/resources/655DAC32B6BBE197C1257674003AD402-Full_Report.pdf.
regard. As mentioned earlier, 322 of the CIA’s 429 drone strikes in Pakistan
(75 percent) have occurred in the agency since the ªrst recorded strike in SWA
in 2004. The CIA’s drone campaign heavily targeted several subdistricts that
had become hubs of militant activity, including Datta Khel, Mir Ali, and
Miranshah. Therefore, the probability of ªnding evidence of local blowback
should be higher in these locales than in less frequently targeted or
nontargeted FATA districts, such as Mohmand or Orakzai. NWA thus consti-
tutes a “most-likely case” that must closely conform to the predictions of a the-
ory if one is to have any conªdence in its validity.31
At the same time, state and armed nonstate actors constrain the ability to do
research in FATA. Ironically, my access to research subjects was made possible
by the Pakistan military’s June 2014 offensive against the Taliban in NWA,
which displaced virtually all its estimated 400,000 residents to the nearby dis-
tricts of Bannu, Hangu, and Peshawar, as well as to Afghanistan. Although I
conducted my interviews outside NWA,32 building trust was still essential for
convincing participants to discuss a topic as sensitive as drones.33 Because ran-
dom sampling was impossible under the circumstances, I used a non-random
snowball sample to build a diverse population of interviewees. Snowball sam-
pling is a method in which initial contacts provide additional contacts.34 This
process proved useful because referrals from a trusted or reliable source in-
creased the likelihood that others would speak with me.35
The sample (n ⫽ 167) includes legislators, masharan (elders), maliks (head-
men), clerics, local ofªcials, reporters, lawyers, traders, shop owners, human
rights activists, teachers, university students, and local leaders and activists
from seven political parties—including the Islamist Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam and
Jamaat-e-Islami—covering the full spectrum of party ideologies in Pakistan.
Admittedly, snowball sampling carries a risk of selection bias, because respon-
31. Harry Eckstein, “Case Study and Theory in Political Science,” in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson
S. Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science, Vol. 7: Strategies of Inquiry (Reading, Mass.: Addison
Wesley, 1975), pp. 79–137; and John Gerring, “Is There a (Viable) Crucial-Case Method?” Compara-
tive Political Studies, Vol. 40, No. 3 (March 2007), pp. 231–253.
32. I conducted these interviews during two ªeld trips to Pakistan, in May–July 2015 and Decem-
ber 2015–January 2016.
33. Most survey respondents requested anonymity for reasons of personal safety.
34. On snowball sampling, see David L. Morgan, “Snowball Sampling,” in Lisa M. Given, ed., The
SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods, Vol. 2 (London: Sage 2008), pp. 816–817.
35. Being a native of northwestern Pakistan, I was relatively well positioned to conduct in-depth
interviews in the respondents’ native Pashtu language, which was also crucial for establishing
trust and reliably interpreting cultural cues and local idioms. On the advantages and disadvan-
tages of being an indigenous researcher, see Jenny Wüstenberg, “When the Field Is Home: Con-
ducting Research in One’s Country of Origins,” APSA-CP Newsletter, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer 2008),
pp. 19–23. See also Robert G. Burgess, In the Field: An Introduction to Field Research (New York:
Routledge, 2004).
dents are likely to recommend people with similar characteristics or similar

views on the topic of the interview.36 Hence, the snowball sample may have
produced additional interviewees who shared a generally favorable view of
drone strikes. Although I tried to reduce this bias by choosing the initial set
of respondents from an array of social and professional backgrounds, collect-
ing a convenience sample free of bias is impossible.
I conducted interviews using open-ended questions, such as: “What is your
opinion of drone strikes in NWA?” These were followed by probes to cap-
ture respondents’ speciªcs views of and/or experiences with drones. I used
thematic content analysis to analyze the interview data (see the online appen-
dix).37 I began by carefully reading each interview transcript. Using existing
works on drone blowback, I identiªed key themes, such as civilian casualties,
military operations, mental distress, displacement, militant recruitment, and
militancy, as initial coding categories. Then, I highlighted text that appeared to
describe an opinion about these themes, as well as new themes that emerged
from the interviews, such as militant brutality and property damage. Once
I coded all the transcripts in accordance with these themes, I examined
the data within each code to record the incidence/variance and direction
(e.g., supportive/opposed) of responses, which I descriptively report as percent-
ages for the whole sample. To further illustrate my ªndings, I chose quotations
typical of an opinion or sentiment expressed in the respondents’ accounts.
My sample is superior to existing samples for at least two reasons. First, al-
though the sample size falls short of a quantitative sample, it has the same or-
der of magnitude as the previously mentioned Stanford/NYU sample, but
without any conºict of interest. Second, unlike most existing advocacy reports,
my study does not rely on third parties, such as translators or interpreters,
thus eliminating translation-related biases that can affect the reliability of the
research ªndings. Although the interview sample is large compared with
those of all similar studies, one caveat is in order: there is no way of knowing
how representative the interviewees are of the entire population of NWA. The
interviews do, however, present a different “sample point” by capturing
36. See Erik Bleich and Robert Pekkanen, “How to Report Interview Data,” in Layna Mosley, ed.,
Interview Research in Political Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013), p. 87. See also
Anthony Seldon and Joanna Pappworth, By Word of Mouth: Elite Oral History (London: Methuen,
1988).
37. See Philipp Mayring, “Qualitative Content Analysis Forum,” Qualitative Social Research, Vol. 1,
No. 2 (June 2000), http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/viewArticle/
1089/2385; Robert Philip Weber, Basic Content Analysis (London: Sage, 1990), pp. 117–124; and Mi-
chael Quinn Patton, Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage,
2002), pp. 452–457. The online appendix is available at doi:10.7910/DVN/AGCWUR.
the voices of a diverse, informed section of a population directly affected by

drone strikes but generally disregarded in the larger debate.
assessment of local blowback

My interview ªndings contradict the local blowback thesis. When asked
whether drone strikes create militants, 71 percent of respondents disagreed,
11 percent agreed, and 18 percent were unsure or had no opinion. I followed
this question with a speciªc probe about whether respondents knew of indi-
viduals in their family, clan, or village who had become militants and whether
these militants had relatives who died or were injured in drone strikes. Al-
though most respondents claimed to personally know or be aware of someone
in their clan or village who had been involved in militant activity or who had
been indirectly linked to militants, none believed that the reason was the loss
of a relative in a drone strike. The minority who agreed with the blowback the-
sis spoke in general terms and could not identify speciªc cases of drone-
inspired militants.
The opinions of those I interviewed do not deªnitively prove or disprove
the existence of local blowback. But again, context matters. Virtually every
family in NWA has been affected by the conºict, whether through the death of
a relative, the destruction of property, or displacement resulting from a mili-
tary offensive. Yet these people have largely been left out of debates about
the threats they face and the impact of these threats on their lives. More-
over, the inhabitants of FATA identify themselves as members of a particular
Pashtun qabail or qaum (tribe) divided into khels (sub-tribes), each of which con-
sists of extended clans or families.38 Most inhabitants are therefore enmeshed
in dense social networks, which makes them uniquely informed about the ef-
fects of drone strikes on their community.
My interviews conªrm anecdotal accounts describing the CIA’s intensiªed
drone campaign in 2009–11 as having forced al-Qaida, Taliban, and other mili-
tants to limit their movements, curtail communications, and devote time and
resources to survival rather than planning attacks—thus undermining both
their operational capabilities and their ability to take advantage of the hypo-
thetical stream of recruits generated by drone strikes.39 A well-connected
Wazir tribal elder from Miranshah conªrms this ªnding: “Forget about new
38. “Tribe” is a problematic category typically associated with colonial ethnography. I use it here
in the sense that local inhabitants use it: as a marker of their social identity and spatial location in
the different agencies of FATA.
39. See Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah, “Drones Batter Al Qaeda and Its Allies within Pakistan,”
New York Times, April 4, 2010; and Pir Zubair Shah, “My Drone War,” Foreign Policy, February 27,
2012, http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/my-drone-war/.
members. The drone strikes either killed or drove the foreign and local mili-
tants underground. They could no longer roam freely, train openly, and force
or entice the locals to join them. They had to worry about their own safety.”40
Even if militants wanted to replenish their ranks, they had to worry that new
recruits could be CIA or Pakistani spies.41 As David Rhode, a New York Times
journalist held captive by the Haqqani network for several months in NWA in
2009, writes, drones were a “terrifying presence” for the militants, “hindered
their operations,” and created “a paranoia among the Taliban” about spies
in their midst. 42 A letter possibly written by Osama bin Laden acknowledges
the negative impact of drones on al-Qaida’s operations: “Over the last two
years, the spying aircrafts beneªted the enemy greatly and led to the killing of
many jihadi cadres, leaders, and others. This is something that is concerning
us and exhausting us.”43 Another letter, this one written by bin Laden’s dep-
uty, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, states: “We are facing difªculties due to the grave
shortages in personnel in some cadres and the abundance of spies operating in
our areas.”44
taliban, tanks, and drones

Several studies have suggested that in addition to physical destruction,
drone strikes produce mental distress, which also fuels anger against the
United States and incites terrorism.45 Even though it is hard to separate
the psychological impact of drone strikes from those of other forms of vio-
lence prevalent in NWA, such as Taliban suicide attacks or Pakistani airstrikes,
my interviews conªrm that drones do indeed create stress and anxiety, espe-
cially among children. According to a former British Broadcasting Corporation
correspondent with extensive experience reporting about militancy in FATA,
the psychological effects of drones are linked to the fear that “the drones are al-
ways hovering, watching us and can strike any time.”46 But as Mohsin Dawar,
a lawyer and human rights activist who hails from NWA, points out: “Local
40. Author interview with respondent 19, Peshawar, June 2015.

41. Asfandyar Mir and Dylan Moore, “Drones, Surveillance, and Violence: Evidence and Theory
from a U.S. Drone Program,” University of Chicago and Stanford University, 2017.
42. David Rhode, “A Drone Strike and a Dwindling Hope,” New York Times, October 20, 2009.
43. “Summary on Situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan” (Washington, D.C.: Ofªce of the Direc-
tor of National Intelligence, n.d.), https://www.dni.gov/ªles/documents/ubl/english/Summary
%20on%20situation%20in%20Afghanistan%20and%20Pakistan.pdf.
44. United States of America vs. Abid Naseer, Motion in Limine to Admit Bin Laden Media Docs
at the Trial, case 1:10-cr-00019-RJD, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, Feb-
ruary 15, 2015, http://kronosadvisory.com/Abid.Naseer.Trial_Abbottabad.Documents_Exhibits
.403.404.405.420thru433.pdf.
45. See, for example, Stanford Law School and NYU School of Law, Living under Drones.
46. Author interview with Dilawar Wazir, Peshawar, December 2015.
people were confronted with a dilemma: military offensive or drone strikes.

The military solution [bombardment] was sometimes worse than the disease.
Drones were noisy but necessary.” Dawar and most of my interviewees noted,
however, that no evidence exists to support the claim that psychological dis-
tress from drone strikes increases support or sympathy for the Taliban, let
alone produces new militant recruits.47
With regard to the destruction of property, 84 percent of my interviewees
seemed to dread drone strikes less than they did the Pakistani military’s
ground and aerial offensives, which have reportedly caused much more exten-
sive damage to civilian life and property, as well as the displacement of
roughly 1 million FATA residents.48 An automobile dealer from Miranshah,
whose shop was destroyed during the Pakistan military’s June 2014 offensive
against the Taliban, offered the following account: “Drones did not destroy our
property. Drones did not displace us. Drones did not humiliate us. The
Pakistan Army did. If anything, our youth should be motivated to pick up
arms against them Punjabi soldiers.”49 The owner of a cement business in
Miranshah’s main market who witnessed the aftermath of the offensive, com-
mented: “Drones are precise in most cases. After the military comes, nothing is
left. In the 2014 operation, they [the Pakistani military] destroyed everything:
markets razed to the ground, houses reduced to rubble by heavy bombings.
Talk to anyone from NWA and you will know why people are upset and
angry.”50 These sentiments may be overrepresented in the sample, because the
interviewees or their families suffered hardships related to their displacement
by the Pakistani military. They are consistent, however, with the spirit of the
“Peshawar Declaration,” a peace plan put forth by a broad-based coalition of
political parties and civil-society groups from the tribal areas during the
intense drone activity of 2009 and prior to the military operation in NWA.
The declaration concludes that drones are the only counterterrorism instru-
ment that “the people of the war-affected areas are satisªed with.”51 Further
evidence can be gleaned from the FATA-based Pashtun Tahafuz Movement,
which mobilized thousands of protesters in Islamabad in February 2018 to de-
mand accountability for the extra-judicial killings and disappearances of
47. Email communication to author, January 24, 2018.

48. Umar Farooq, “Civilians Bear Brunt of Pakistan’s War in the Northwest,” Foreign Policy, Febru-
ary 11, 2013, http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/02/11/civilians-bear-brunt-of-pakistans-war-in-the-
northwest/; and International Crisis Group, “Drones: Myth and Reality in Pakistan,” Asia Report
No. 247 (Brussels: International Crisis Group, May 21, 2013).
49. Author interview with respondent 61, Rawalpindi, June 2015.
50. Author interview with respondent 67, Bannu, December 2015.
51. Cited in Farhat Taj, The Taliban and the Anti-Taliban (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2011), pp. 198–212.
Pashtuns at the hands of the security forces. The movement’s grievances are
targeted entirely against the Pakistani state, not drone strikes. According to
one prominent member, Ayaz Wazir, “The most interesting aspect of protest
was the complete absence of drone attacks from the discourse emanating both
from the stage and the audience during the sit-in in Islamabad. The reason:
drones were never a problem for FATA residents.”52
These pragmatic perspectives on the utility of drones are inextricably linked
to at least two factors. The ªrst factor consists of the coercive tactics the Taliban
used to terrorize and control the local population, especially after the peace
deal of September 2006.53 These include taxation and harsh religious penalties
for minor offenses, such as petty theft, and for violations of the ban on shaving
beards, listening to music, and girls going to school. As a government contrac-
tor from the town of Mir Ali, who closely witnessed the operation of this paral-
lel justice system, described it: “The badshakla [ugly] Taliban made our lives
miserable. We had no choice but to obey them or suffer harm. We had to pay
compulsory donations for their ‘jihad’ or protection money to save our liveli-
hoods.”54 As part of this campaign, the militants also attacked and sought to
subvert alternative centers of social authority. According to a local activist
from Miranshah who was afªliated with the moderate left-of-center Pakistan
People’s Party, “They killed our elders and attacked jirgas [deliberative coun-
cils made up of maliks] while the government looked away. We were not safe
anywhere.”55 “We suffered on many counts,” said an accountant employed in
the NWA political administration who lost a relative in a suicide bombing.
“We were trapped between the tanks and the Taliban, between bombardment
from [ªghter] jets and Taliban terror. The Americans killed the militants for
their own interests. But it restored some normalcy to our lives.”56
The second factor relates to local resentments rooted in a sense of betrayal
by the Pakistani government. Whereas the rest of Pakistan is governed under
the 1973 constitution enshrining Pakistanis’ fundamental rights, FATA is still
governed under the 1901 Frontier Crimes Regulation, designed by British colo-
nial authorities. Under the FCR, a government ofªcial known as the “political
agent” administers each agency through maliks, who depend on monthly gov-
ernment allowances and enjoy virtually unlimited executive, ªnancial, and
magisterial powers. Although jirgas can resolve local disputes, the political au-
52. Email communication to author, February 10, 2018.

53. Zeeshan Haider, “Taliban-Style Militants Roam in North Waziristan after Pact,” Reuters, Janu-
ary 18, 2007.
54. Author interview with respondent 89, Bannu, January 2016.
55. Author interview with respondent 72, Hangu, June 2015.
thority can overturn their decisions. Moreover, the FCR prescribes harsh pen-
alties for crimes without the right of appeal in a court of law,57 including
collective punishments for offenses committed by one or more members of
a tribe or those committed by anyone in its area. During its operations, the
Pakistani military has used collective punishments, including razing of resi-
dential and business properties, economic blockades, and asset seizures, to
punish families or clans whose members they suspected of harboring foreign
militants. The state’s application of these draconian, often indiscriminate mea-
sures against the local population, and its appeasement of militants through
peace agreements, has only compounded the sense of alienation stemming
from counterinsurgency operations that, some studies show, beneªt in-
surgents.58 But in North Waziristan, many locals are alienated from both the
Pakistani state and the militants.
Given the dense social and kinship ties of NWA inhabitants, ªnding evi-
dence of blowback from well-informed locals should be relatively easy. As
one elder from Dande Darpa Khel, a base of the Haqqani network in tehsil
Miranshah and the target of more than a dozen reported drone strikes
since 2008, explained: “We hear rumors that this or that man joined the Taliban
or al-Qaida because of anger over drone strikes. It is possible. But much of it is
propaganda by the militants and intelligence agencies. I know almost every
family in my area, and I do not know of a case where a local man or boy joined
the Taliban as the direct result of death or injury to a close relative in a drone
strike. In fact, most of the Taliban ªghters were already radicalized, or inclined
toward militancy for various reasons.”59 I conªrmed this ªnding with another
tribal elder from Dande Darpa Khel, as well as with more than four dozen
other interviewees from the drone-targeted tehsils of Datta Khel, Ghulam
Khan, and Guryam.60
According to a Wazir elder loyal to the Pashtun nationalist party, the Awami
National Party, who survived a Taliban suicide attack in 2009 in Miranshah,
“I have seen many people recruited by militants, including people I knew
growing up. But their radicalization preceded the drone campaign. Many of
the Pakistani Taliban leaders attended madrassas [religious schools] in and
around the tribal areas or even in the settled districts established during the
Afghan jihad. Some fought alongside the mujahideen or Afghan Taliban. They
57. Parliament recently passed legislation that will extend the writ of Pakistan’s courts to FATA.
See “National Assembly Extends SC, High Court’s Jurisdiction to FATA,” Pakistan Today, January
12, 2017.
58. See, for instance, Jason Lyall, Graeme Blair, and Kosuke Imai, “Explaining Support for Com-
batants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan,” American Political Science Review,
Vol. 107, No. 4 (November 2013), pp. 679–705, doi:10.1017/S0003055413000403.
59. Author interview with respondent 17, Peshawar, December 2015.
60. Author interviews with respondents 13, 14, 18, and 27, Bannu and Peshawar, June 2015.
were able to mobilize the madrassa network across the region, as well as use
their links to Sunni sectarian groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.”61 According to
Sailab Mehsud, a well-regarded journalist from SWA who has interviewed key
Taliban commanders and covered extremism and violence in FATA for more
than a decade: “Talibanization followed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan,
and the Pakistani military’s operations and peace deals with Taliban militants,
which happened years before the drone campaign picked up momentum.
How can we say that drones are driving radicalization and militancy among
local youth?”62
Even local leaders of Islamist and other right-wing parties acknowledged
that the ability of drone strikes to spawn militants is exaggerated. According to
a local member of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), a party with long-standing
ties to the Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban, and other Deobandi militant or-
ganizations, “The people know drones kill the widely despised militants. Our
society is based on close family and community relations. So, it is not difªcult
to determine who dies in drone strikes and who becomes a militant.”63 Simi-
larly, a former JUI member of the national parliament from NWA, who person-
ally knows the families of several militants killed in drone strikes in Mir Ali
and Miranshah, stated that “drones did not fuel militancy. I think most of the
tribal people know that drones are precise. Those who died in drone attacks
were already militants or al-Qaida and Taliban leaders.”64 In fact, members
of the most vehemently anti-American party, the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf
(Movement for Justice party), characterized its national leadership’s claims
about blowback from drone strikes in terms of political expediency. According
to one local PTI ofªcial, “Our leader, Imran Khan, is cynically using drones for
political gain. He has never been to NWA or SWA. The gunehgar [sinful] mili-
tants, not drones, were blowing up innocent people to pieces. They are our real
enemies.”65 Similarly, two members of Jamaat-e-Islami contradicted the claim
of their emir (party chief), Syed Munawar Hasan, that drone strikes “are kill-
ing nearly 100 percent innocent civilians.”66 According to one, “Drones kill in-
nocents sometimes. But the [Pakistan] military and militants have more
innocent blood on their hands. The death and destruction caused by them
boils our blood.”67
Others with deep knowledge of FATA believe that the roots of militancy also
61. Author interview with respondent 53, Bannu, June 2015.

62. Author interview with Dera Ismail Khan, May 2015.
63. Author interview with respondent 32, Peshawar, June 2015.
66. Author interviews with respondents 43 and 44, Peshawar, December 2015. Quoted in Abbot,
“New Light on Drone War Death Toll.”
lie in social and political conditions that have plagued the tribal belt since at
least the 1979 CIA-led anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, when the region was
used by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency for training and arming
the mujahideen.68 Aided by the Pakistani state, the erosion of the region’s
tribal social structure during that war at the hands of Islamist militants, com-
bined with Pakistan’s consistent failure to provide FATA with meaningful
levels of economic development and political representation, created the struc-
tural conditions necessary for an insurgency. In addition, the Pakistani mili-
tary’s long-standing policy of using jihadi proxies to wrest Kashmir from
archrival India or to deny New Delhi inºuence in Afghanistan has backªred.
Since the September 11 attacks, the Pakistani military has selectively sided
with the United States in the “war on terror,” ªghting groups such as the
TTP, which has launched attacks against the Pakistani state, while continuing
to support other groups, such as the Haqqani network, that commit violence
in Afghanistan.
tribal revenge
One of the principal claims in the literature is that casualties in drone strikes
compel family members of the killed or injured to seek revenge, as prescribed
by their unwritten honor code of Pashtunwali (or the way of the Pashtun). In
the rush to make sense of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region in the
aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of
Afghanistan, many journalists, scholars, and policymakers fell back on British
colonial stereotypes and myths about Pashtuns.69 The most pervasive and re-
silient of these concerns the primordial identity and customs of tribal Pashtuns
as the key motivator of their social and political behavior. As late as 2006, the
Economist wrote, “His honour besmirched . . . a Pashtun is obliged to have his
revenge, or badal,” and “the wildest Pashtun places, including Waziristan,”
are likely to remain trapped in “their simmeringly murderous tribal ways” in
the foreseeable future.70 Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason describe Pashtuns
as a “revenge-oriented people,” with “zero tolerance for insult,” who take
68. Author interview with columnist and former senator Afrasiab Khattak, Peshawar, January
2015.
69. Much of the contemporary policy discourse on FATA has its roots in the writings of British co-
lonial ofªcials and observers, who presented it as a remote lawless borderland populated by hill
tribes who needed special forms of control and criminal justice presumably true to their native tra-
ditions. See, for instance, Olaf Caroe, The Pathans: 500 – 1957 (London: Kegan Paul Interna-
tional, 1958). For a critique of this colonial model of frontier management, see Benjamin D.
Hopkins, “The Frontier Crimes Regulation and Frontier Governmentality,” Journal of Asian Studies,
Vol. 74, No. 2 (March 2015), pp. 369–389, doi:10.1017/S0021911815000030.
70. “Honor among Them,” Economist, December 9, 2006, http://www.economist.com/node/
8345531.
up arms against outsiders because of their “peculiar cultural” mores.71

Johnson and Mason write that, of all the Pashtun tribes, “the Waziris of greater
Waziristan are reputed to be the most conservative and irascible.”72
At the heart of these stereotypes lies a culturally deterministic interpretation
of Pashtunwali as a normative straitjacket governing Pashtun life, whereby
each member strictly conforms to its expectations. This view, however, ignores
that the tribe is only one marker of Pashtuns’ many identities, and there is no
reason to conclude that it is the most important one. As Patrick Porter argues,
orientalist tracts assume “that Pashtuns [are] bound by their honor code re-
gardless of rationality or material considerations [which is] symptomatic of
a broader tendency in popular and academic discourse to reduce people
with multiple interests and identities to one-dimensional beings.”73 And
even if some Pashtun groups organize themselves in tribes, individual mem-
bers may choose not to follow group customs. As Makulika Banerjee writes,
“Notions of Pashtunness are not static but rather the subject of negotiation
and innovation.”74
Badal (exchange or reciprocity) is generally considered part of Pashtunwali.
The historian Robert Nichols contends that “badal has been reduced by colo-
nial orientalists and western writers to the exchange of violence or tribal re-
venge. Dismissing local behavior and responses as tribal and barbaric can be
used to justify unaccountable state violence and power.”75 Tribal norms of
revenge are, in other words, part of an “invented tradition” designed to render
special forms of colonial and, later, postcolonial governance possible.76
This so-called revenge thesis ignores that badal is meant to be exacted
against individuals in the context of family disputes, not against the civilian
population or security forces of a state, as Islamist militants have done in
FATA, the rest of Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Moreover, these disputes can be
ended amicably through a process known as rogha (mediated peace/truce),
which typically involves maaª (forgiveness), recompense of victims, or both. In
fact, the more than one dozen respondents in my sample who self-identiªed as
71. Thomas H. Johnson, and M. Chris Mason, “No Sign until the Burst of Fire: Understanding the
Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier,” International Security, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Spring 2008), p. 50, doi:10
.1162/isec.2008.32.4.41.
72. Ibid.
73. Patrick Porter, Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2009), p. 145.
74. Makulika Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the Northwest Frontier (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 15. See also Robert Nichols, Settling the Frontier: Land, Law,
and Society in the Peshawar Valley, 1500–1900 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 6–7.
75. Email communication to author, January 2017.
76. Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in Eric Hobsbawm and
Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 211–262.
relatives of drone victims were seeking redress from Pakistani or U.S. authori-
ties, not revenge.77
The revenge thesis suffers from other misinterpretations as well. First, as
several well-informed tribal elders and experts emphasized in my interviews,
Taliban ªghters and other militants are motivated by a jihadi ideology, not
family honor. In fact, many Taliban are not ethnic Pashtuns but Punjabis—
hence, the moniker “Punjabi Taliban.” Second, the revenge thesis fails to ac-
count for Taliban suicide attacks on jirgas, markets, sports grounds, and
schools in FATA that invariably kill local noncombatants (i.e., the very reason
for the presumed drone blowback).78 Finally, the Taliban have assassinated
hundreds of local inhabitants of NWA and other FATA agencies on suspicion
of their spying for the United States or sympathizing with the Pakistani mili-
tary.79 Yet, aggrieved family members have not resorted to retributive attacks
against Taliban militants.80
National Blowback
A subset of the literature on the blowback thesis examines the indirect effects
of U.S. drone strikes at the national level. According to this literature, drone
strikes impinge on a country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, enraging a
broad swathe of its population and providing anti-U.S. militant groups with
a sizable reservoir of sympathizers and potential recruits. Civilian deaths in
such strikes amplify the blowback effect. Thus, the operating mechanism here
is nationalism. According to a Stimson Center Task Force on U.S. drone war-
fare, “Even where strikes kill only legitimate targets, the perceived insult to
sovereignty—in places like Pakistan and Yemen—sparks bitterness, feelings of
nationalism . . . hostile to the U.S.” In addition, “civilian casualties, even if rela-
tively few, can anger whole communities, increase anti-U.S. sentiment and be-
come a potent recruiting tool for terrorist organizations.”81 According to
Kilcullen and Exum, the backlash against U.S. drone strikes extends beyond
FATA to “visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion in
77. Author interviews, Bannu and Peshawar, December 2015.

78. See data on suicide attacks in Waziristan at the South Asian Terrorism Portal, Institute for
Conºict Management, New Delhi, India, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/pakistan/
waziristan/datasheet/suicideattack.htm.
79. In 2005–06 alone, militants reportedly murdered 200 Wazir tribal elders who dared to oppose
their reign of terror. See Carlotta Gall and Ismail Khan, “Taliban and Allies Tighten Grip in North
of Pakistan,” New York Times, December 11, 2006.
80. Interviews with multiple respondents, December 2015.
81. John P. Abizaid and Rosa Brooks, “Report and Recommendations of the Task Force on U.S.
Drone Policy” (Washington, D.C.: Stimson Center, 2015), pp. 29–30.
Punjab and Sindh, the nation’s two most populous provinces.”82 The Pakistani
opposition leader and former cricketer Imran Khan, who revived his dormant
political career in part by loudly criticizing the U.S. drone campaign, has
claimed that drone strikes carried out in Pakistan kill many civilians and “are
turning young men into angry jihadis.”83
methods for assessing national-level blowback

Assuming that the national blowback thesis is true and that the backlash from
drone strikes is consequential, one should observe signiªcant numbers of
Pakistanis becoming radicalized or motivated to join militant organizations
because drone strikes feed their nationalist impulses. To test this argument, I
conducted interviews with terrorism experts and counterterrorism ofªcials
from Punjab and Sindh, which proponents of the blowback thesis claim are the
prime sites of drone blowback. I included journalists and scholars in my sam-
ple, as well as police and intelligence ofªcials from counterterror units in
the two provinces, given their ªrsthand experience of dealing with terror
suspects.84 In addition to the interviews, I analyzed the ªndings of the
Sindh Counterterrorism Department’s (CTD’s) 2017 survey of 500 detained
terrorists.85 The CTD sample is not representative of the universe of Islamist
militants in the province, but it does include active members of the key mili-
tant groups operating there, such as al-Qaida, Harkatul Mujahideen al-Almi,
the Sunni sectarian Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and the TPP.86
assessment of national blowback

To evaluate the blowback thesis at the national level, it is necessary to examine
whether civilian casualties from drone strikes amplify the backlash against
drone strikes in nontargeted areas of a country. Unfortunately, no one can reli-
ably know the number of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes, in good
82. Kilcullen and Exum, “Death from Above, Outrage Below.” See also Nathanial Fick, testimony
before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, July 7, 2009, 111th
Cong., 1st sess., p. 2, www.hsgac.senate.gov/download/ªck-testimony; Akbar Ahmed, The Thistle
and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam (Washington, D.C.:
Brookings Institution Press, 2013), p. 83; and Boyle, “Costs and Consequences of Drone Warfare,”
p. 15.
83. Rob Crilly, “Imran Khan’s Anti-Drone Protest Falls Short of Destination,” Telegraph, October 7,
2012.
84. The sample includes two inspectors general (the country’s highest police rank), four deputy
inspectors general, and two senior ofªcials of the Federal Investigation Agency, the Pakistani
equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
85. Its ªndings have been partially reported in the Pakistani media. See Imtiaz Ali, “Most Mili-
tants Surveyed in Jails Suffering from ‘Psychological Problems’: CTD,” Dawn, April 18, 2017,
https://www.dawn.com/news/1327614.
86. Email communication to author, August 6, 2017.
measure because the program is shrouded in secrecy. For many years, the
George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations neither conªrmed nor de-
nied its existence. Even after acknowledging the program’s existence in 2012,
top U.S. ofªcials continued to withhold detailed information, citing national
security concerns. Under mounting criticism from the media and human rights
organizations, President Obama admitted in a May 2013 speech that drone
strikes had resulted in civilian deaths. He went on to reassure critics and the
U.S. public that “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no
civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.” ) Only in
July 2016 did he reveal an ofªcial estimate of the number of civilian casualties
(64–116) resulting from U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa since
he had taken ofªce in 2009.87 As critics note, this deceptively low number is the
result of how the Obama administration deªned combatants: “all military-age
males in a strike zone . . . unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously
proving them innocent.”88
Another obstacle to determining the number of civilian deaths from drone
strikes is that most such strikes occur in areas with a heavy presence of Taliban
or Taliban-associated militant groups. Local inhabitants complain that mili-
tants close down roads and cordon off strike sites.89 Because independent me-
dia have no access to these sites, it is usually the militants who provide the
casualty ªgures reported in the Pakistani press. The Crisis Group contends
that civilian casualty ªgures are also misreported or unreliable because they
are based on information provided by unnamed Pakistani or U.S. ofªcials who
have an interest in exaggerating or underreporting the civilian death toll.90
Particularly problematic are so-called signature strikes, which target groups
of men based on their behavioral patterns rather than on their identity and
which are prone to causing high fatalities. One such attack in Datta Khel killed
40 people on March 7, 2011.91 Catastrophic strikes not only anger the victims’
relatives, but can arguably inºame Pakistani public opinion within and be-
87. “Obama Reveals How Many Died in Drone Strikes,” Associated Press, July 1, 2016.
88. See Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,”
New York Times, May 29, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-
in-war-on-al-qaeda.html.
89. “Cables Show U.S. Special Operations in Pakistan,” Al Jazeera, May 21, 2011, http://www
.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2011/05/201152175836483568.html. See also “Drone Attacks: Chal-
lenging Some Fabrications,” Dawn, January 2, 2010.
90. International Crisis Group, “Drones,” p. 25.
91. Among the dead were a local commander afªliated with Haªz Gul Bahadur, khassadars (tribal
police), and maliks who were gathered for a jirga meeting called to settle a dispute over chromite
mining. See Pir Zubair Shah, “Analysis: U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas Create Back-
lash,” Global Post, October 10, 2012, https://www.pri.org/stories/2012-10-10/analysis-us-drone-
strikes-pakistans-tribal-areas-create-backlash.
yond FATA. According to a reporter who visited the strike site in Datta Khel
and has interviewed family members of the victims, “I ªnd drones to be useful
in ªghting the Taliban and other militants. But such callously misguided
strikes are hard to swallow and make the local people question their utility.”92
The two main databases on drone strikes provide divergent numbers on ci-
vilian casualties, which underscores the difªculty of accurate estimation. The
London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism maintains that drone strikes
have caused 2,514–4,023 deaths in Pakistan, including 424–969 civilians.93 Ac-
cording to New America, the total number of people killed in drone attacks in
Pakistan is 2,281–3,672, of which 255–315 were civilians.94 These ªgures are
based on Pakistani and international media reports. But because the interna-
tional media have no access to the tribal areas, their data are drawn from often
unreliable reports, some of which have been planted by Pakistani intelligence
in the Pakistani media.95 Despite considerably divergent ªgures in the two
databases, both show that civilian casualties have declined drastically since
2011,96 a ªnding consistent with improvements in drone technology and modi-
ªed targeting protocols designed to minimize casualties.97 The Donald Trump
administration’s reported relaxation of guidelines intended to minimize civil-
ian casualties in U.S. airstrikes could result in more civilian deaths, however.
Regardless of the veracity of claims about civilian casualties, the belief that
U.S. drone strikes kill many innocent people could still produce a backlash
outside FATA. Scholars and analysts critical of drone strikes typically use opin-
ion polls conducted by the Pew Research Center to support their claims.98
These polls demonstrate high levels of opposition to drone strikes in Pakistan.
92. Author interview with reporter, Peshawar, December 2015.

93. Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “Drone Wars: The Full Data” (London: Bureau of Investi-
gative Journalism, n.d.), https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war/pakistan.
94. See Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, “Drone Strikes: Pakistan” (Washington, D.C.:
New America, January 2018), https://www.newamerica.org/in-depth/americas-counterterrorism
-wars/pakistan/.
95. C. Christine Fair, “The Problems with Studying Civilian Casualties from Drone Usage in Paki-
stan: What We Can’t Know,” Monkey Cage blog, August 17, 2011.
96. Alice Ross and Jack Serle, “Drone Strikes in Pakistan Attack Houses” (London: Bureau of In-
vestigative Journalism, May 23, 2014), https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2014/05/23/
most-us-drone-strikes-in-pakistan-attack-houses/.
97. For instance, the CIA shifted from targeting houses to targeting vehicles, because the latter
pose a lower risk of civilian casualties. See Joby Warrick and Peter Finn, “Amidst Outrage over Ci-
vilian Deaths in Pakistan, CIA Turns to Smaller Missiles,” Washington Post, April 26, 2010. See also
Steve Coll, “Obama’s Drone War in Pakistan,” New Yorker, November 20, 2014, https://www
.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/unblinking-stare.
98. See, for example, Boyle “Costs and Consequences of Drone Warfare”; Alexander B. Downes,
“The Truth about Obama’s Drone War: It’s about Attrition, Not Decapitation,” Hufªngton Post, Jan-
uary 16, 2013, https://www.hufªngtonpost.com/alexander-b-downes/obama-drones_b_2427030
.html.
Pew’s survey from 2014, the last year the organization ªelded questions about
drones, showed that 67 percent of Pakistani respondents who had heard of
the drone program opposed drone attacks because they kill “too many inno-
cent people.”99 U.S. drone strikes are globally unpopular, however, and many
countries have higher levels of opposition to U.S. drone strikes than does
Pakistan; these include Venezuela (92 percent), Greece (89 percent), and Brazil
(87 percent).100 Yet, blowback is not a global phenomenon. In other words,
popular disapproval of drones cannot stand in as evidence of blowback. As
scholars have recently shown, Pew polling data on Pakistan is not representa-
tive for two reasons. First, Pew’s samples are disproportionately urban (55 per-
cent), whereas Pakistan is a predominantly rural country with only 36 percent
of the population living in urban areas.101 Second, the polls have a very high
frequency of “don’t know” and “did not answer” responses,102 which indicates
a public largely uninformed about the drone program and unwilling to ex-
press opinions about a sensitive issue. As such, Pew polls typically capture the
opinion of a minority of the country’s population about drones.103
expert views on national blowback

My interviews with experts on terrorism show little support for the drone
blowback thesis at the national level. Of the twenty-four experts interviewed,
only two endorsed the national blowback thesis. Nevertheless, even they did
not think it was the most salient factor in fostering Islamist militancy, which
they blamed instead on the conducive environment created by Pakistan’s
sponsorship of militancy as a foreign policy instrument against India.
99. “A Less Gloomy Mood in Pakistan” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, August 27,
2014), http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/08/27/a-less-gloomy-mood-in-Pakistan; “Pakistani Pub-
lic Opinion Ever More Critical of U.S.” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, June 27, 2012),
http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/06/27/pakistani-public-opinion-ever-more-critical-of-u-s/;
“On the Eve of Elections, a Dismal Public Mood in Pakistan” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research
Center, May 7, 2013), http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/05/07/on-eve-of-elections-a-dismal-
public-mood-in-pakistan/; and Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project, “Spring 2010 Sur-
vey Data” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2010), http://www.pewglobal.org/category/
datasets/?download⫽15858.
100. See “Widespread Opposition to Drones” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center,
July 11, 2014), http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/07/14/global-opposition-to-u-s-surveillance-
and-drones-but-limited-harm-to-americas-image/pg-2014-07-14-balance-of-power-0-01/.
101. Pew claims to adjust for this urban bias by using weights.
102. For example, in 2010, 43 percent of the respondents had not heard about the drone program
despite a dramatic increase in drone strikes during the previous two years, and 22 percent did not
respond. See “Little Knowledge of Drone Strikes in Pakistan” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research
Center, August 12, 2010), http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2010/08/12/little-knowledge-
of-drone-strikes-in-pakistan/; and Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project, “Spring 2010
Survey Data.”
103. C. Christine Fair, Karl Kaltenthaler, and William J. Miller, “Pakistani Political Communication
and Public Opinion on U.S. Drone Attacks,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 38, No. 6 (2015),
pp. 852–872, doi:10.1080/01402390.2014.997932.
Experts in my sample agreed that drone strikes can be a useful recruiting

tool. Beyond that, however, their utility can vary depending on the agenda
and objectives of the militant organization in question. Tariq Parvez, founding
national coordinator of Pakistan’s National Counterterrorism Authority, ar-
gues that organizations with a clear anti-U.S. narrative such as al-Qaida can
exploit drone strikes for propaganda purposes, but that “drones are a distant
threat for people in Punjab or Sindh, for which you can express indignation
but not be really be threatened or motivated by it to become militants.”104
According to Ahmed Rashid, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the
Taliban and terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “There is no evidence to
show that Punjabi or other terrorist groups in Pakistan use drone strikes as
an important recruitment tool or that these attacks create terrorists en masse.
Even drone strikes outside of FATA, such as the one which killed the Afghan
Taliban leader Mullah Mansur in Balochistan, did not lead to any anger
against drones.”105 Arif Jamal, journalist and author of an important account of
the origins of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based militant group that
enjoys ofªcial backing and operates in the disputed Kashmir region and other
parts of India,106 similarly rejects the blowback thesis: “Haªz Saeed [leader of
LeT] has criticized U.S. drone strikes in his recent speeches, banding together
the U.S. and India as enemies of Islam. But demonizing the ‘inªdels’ [the
United States, Israel, and India) has long been part of their organizational rhet-
oric. Their main strategy is to exploit sympathy for fellow Muslims in Kashmir
to mobilize support for jihad against India.”107 A study based on 917 biogra-
phies of deceased LeT militants, coauthored by Jamal, concluded: “In general
ªghters viewed association with the group as a means to live a more meaning-
ful or purposeful life. Some were speciªcally motivated by corruption in their
societies. Others by what they saw as moral depravity. Some articulated an ob-
ligation to help fellow Muslims who experienced oppression and death at the
hands of non-Muslims in Indian Kashmir.”108 Expressing a view prevalent in
my interviews, the analyst Ayesha Siddiqa, who has conducted extensive ªeld
research on the rise of militant groups in South Punjab, argues that “the
Punjabi jihadists have an expansionist agenda which varies from liberating
Indian Kashmir to establishing an Islamic state in Pakistan which they use to
104. Email communication to author from Tariq Parvez, January 4, 2018.

105. Email communication to author from Ahmed Rashid, June 28, 2017.
106. Arif Jamal, Call for Transnational Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT): 1985–2014 (Portland, Or.: Avant-Garde,
2014).
107. Email communication to author from Arif Jamal, June 27, 2017.
108. Don Rassler et al., “The Fighters of Lashkar-e-Taiba: Recruitment, Training, Deployment, and
Death” (West Point, N.Y.: Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, 2013), p. 9.
recruit and motivate their cadres. Their rhetoric and discourse has little con-
nection to FATA or drone strikes.”109
I derived additional data for testing the national blowback thesis from inter-
views with sixteen senior active-duty police ofªcers, six from Sindh and ten
from Punjab.110 Although this sample is not representative of the universe of
police ofªcers in these two provinces, the mean length of the respondents’ ser-
vice in counterterrorism-related operations and investigations is thirteen
years. Among these ofªcers, there was a consensus that drone strikes in FATA
were not a crucial factor in militant recruitment in the two provinces. A senior
intelligence ofªcial in charge of counterterrorism put it plainly, “We receive
terrorism-related reports from our own people, and other law enforcement
agencies. We have not seen evidence to suggest that drone strikes play a
signiªcant role in fomenting militant recruitment in Punjab or Sindh.”111
According to an ofªcial in the Punjab Counterterrorism Department, “Mili-
tants in our province are motivated by a mix of factors which cannot be di-
rectly linked to drones. In our investigations, we routinely encounter two
types of hardened militants: the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi types who use violence
against religious minorities they consider to be inªdels, and the Taliban-type
militants trying to destabilize the state.”112 Expressing an opinion shared by
eight of the ten Punjab ofªcers mentioned above, Senior Superintendent of
Police Sohail Habib Tajik, who was additional director of the Federal Investi-
gation Agency’s Counterterrorism Wing from 2008 to 2010, when the U.S.
drone campaign was as it peak, stated: “Drone strikes did not generate mili-
tancy, militancy generated drone strikes.”113
Terrorism investigators from Sindh conªrmed the views of their Punjab
counterparts. To quote a senior superintendent of police from Karachi, “We
have interrogated militants from al-Qaida, TTP, Jundullah, and sectarian
outªts. They all profess a standard hatred of some enemy: Shias, Iran, the
Pakistan Army, India, Hindus, Jews, the United States, or the West in general.
Our investigations reveal that criminality, economic problems, inºuence from
someone close to them often has a strong impact. The notion that drone strikes
fuel militancy is quite simplistic.”114 In response to a question about the effects
of drones on militancy in Karachi, an ofªcer with extensive experience of inter-
rogating Taliban militants stated that “many militants have moved to Karachi
from FATA. What we ªnd is that drones are the reason for their ºight. Not
109. Author interview with Ayesha Siddiqa, London, October 16, 2016.
110. Kilcullen and Exum, “Death from Above, Outrage Below.”
111. Email communication to author from ofªcer D, September 14, 2017.
112. Email communication to author from ofªcer B, July 12, 2017.
113. Email communication to author from Suhail Habib Tajik, January 4, 2018.
114. Author telephone interview with ofªcer C, July 14, 2017.
their anti-state activities.”115 According to a senior intelligence ofªcer whose

responsibilities include monitoring militant groups in the interior (rural) parts
of Sindh Province, “Interior Sindh districts, such as Sukkur and Jacobabad,
that border the militant heartland of southern Punjab are mainly a recruitment
ground for Sunni sectarian outªts who socialize vulnerable youth into a narra-
tive of us and them, them being Shias and other religious minorities, who must
be eradicated. The [militant] threat engulªng this area is more domestic in
nature, having arisen from local social conditions rather than the war
on terror.”116
The CTD survey conªrms these observations and shows that the main
motivations for joining terrorist groups in Sindh Province are economic and
religious/sectarian, rather than anti-Americanism generally or opposition to
U.S. drone strikes speciªcally, although grievances against the West appear
to play an important role in kindling initial interest in militancy. The ªelded
questionnaire asked participants a host of demographic questions related to
education, employment, and marital status, as well as level of religiosity. It
also asked a series of questions about the sources of the captured militants’
motivations. In response to the ªrst question, “Why did you start thinking that
violence in the name of Islam was justiªed?” a plurality cited perceived injus-
tices of the West against Islam (41.4 percent), followed by lack of justice in soci-
ety (19.4 percent), personal experiences (19.8 percent), and other (19.4 percent).
The follow-up question was: “How were you inºuenced in developing ex-
tremist views?” Of the options listed, 40 percent chose religious cleric, 25.6 per-
cent peers, 15 percent family or community members, and almost 20 percent
were in the “other” category. In response to the ªnal and most important ques-
tion, “What ultimately drew you to join a terrorist/banned outªt?” 41 percent
cited unemployment or economic concerns, 40 percent religious concerns, and
16 percent psychological issues. A CTD ofªcer involved in supervising the sur-
vey explained that those who answered “other” in this series of questions did
not always identify the reasons for their participation in terror groups. He
could not recall, however, an example of revenge or anger at drone strikes as a
possible motivation.117 According to another CTD ofªcial, “The drone issue is
highly overrated as a motivation for militancy. In my experience [of more than
twelve years) in police and counterterrorism work, I have seen no evidence of
drone-driven militants in Sindh Province.”118
115. Email communication to author from ofªcer K, August 2, 2017.

116. Author telephone interview with ofªcer O, August 5, 2017.
117. Author telephone interview with ofªcer N, August 3, 2017.
118. Email communication to author from ofªcer L, August 2, 2017.
drones and anti-americanism in pakistan

Even if one accepts that drone strikes antagonize signiªcant segments of the
Pakistani population outside FATA, other issues likely feed and reinforce re-
sentment of U.S. policies, including a carefully curated ofªcial narrative of
the United States as an unreliable ally, which dates to at least the 1960s and
1970s.119 According to former Pakistani Ambassador to the United States
Husain Haqqani, Pakistani government ofªcials have long invoked anti-
American public opinion to extract concessions and aid from Washington.120
More recently, the Pakistani government, the military, and right-wing politi-
cians such as Imran Khan have sought to leverage media accounts of alleged
civilian deaths in drone strikes to fan anti-Americanism. Although there is al-
most no reliable reporting from areas where drone strikes occur, many pro-
military talk show hosts and journalists have played a key role in inºaming
public opinion,121 often by making wild claims about “thousands” of civilian
casualties resulting from drone strikes. According to Hassan Abbas, terrorists
and their sympathizers “expose and market civilian casualties . . . quite effec-
tively.”122 It is probable that sections of a country’s population not directly ex-
posed to drone strikes may be more vulnerable to media manipulation and
political propaganda because they are not well informed about the impact of
these strikes. However strident these propaganda efforts may be, their impact
on Pakistani public opinion toward the United States does not appear to have
signiªcant independent effects. For instance, post–September 11 Pew polls
show that unfavorable opinions of the United States have remained static over
time. In fact, 69 percent of Pakistanis held a negative view of the United States
in 2002 (two years before the ªrst drone strike), and an almost similar percent-
age (68 percent) in 2009 and 2010 (the ªrst two years of the Obama administra-
tion’s intensiªed drone campaign).123
The polls do show an upward trend in anti-U.S. opinion in 2011 and 2012,
but this spike may not be exclusively correlated to drone strikes. Instead, it can
be more reasonably linked to the events of 2011, the worst year for bilateral re-
lations since Pakistan formally joined the U.S.-led war on terror in 2001. The
119. Shafqat Hussain Naghmi, “Pakistan Public’s Attitudes toward the United States,” Journal of
Conºict Resolution, Vol. 26, No. 3 (September 1982), pp. 507–523.
120. See Husain Haqqani, Magniªcent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of
Misunderstanding (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), pp. 11–14, 42, 82.
121. Saba Imtiaz, “What Do Pakistanis Really Think about Drones,” in Peter L. Bergen and Daniel
Rothenberg, eds., Drone Wars: Transforming Conºict, Law, and Policy (New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press), p. 102.
122. Hassan Abbas, “How Drones Create More Terrorists Than They Kill,” Atlantic, Au-
gust 31, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/how-drones-create-
more-terrorists/278743/.
123. Data retrieved from Pew Global Attitudes Database, http://www.pewglobal.org/question-
search/?qid⫽844&cntIDs⫽@36-@36.5-&stdIDs⫽Pew.
percentage of Pakistanis who see the United States as an “enemy” already

stood at 60 percent in 2008, despite the sporadic nature of U.S. drone strikes
until 2007. It was the highest (74 percent) in 2012, following the steep plunge in
bilateral relations in 2011, and dropped close to the 2008 level (64 percent)
in 2013.124
Three events in 2011 seriously damaged U.S.-Pakistan relations. First, in
January Pakistani police arrested Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor, who fa-
tally shot two reportedly armed Pakistanis in Lahore who he claimed were
threatening him. The Obama administration’s position that Davis enjoyed dip-
lomatic immunity, which was contested by the Pakistani government, ap-
peared to conªrm for many Pakistanis that the U.S. government was
unconcerned about Pakistani lives or laws. Second, in May U.S. Special Forces
killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, sending a signal that the United
States had no regard for Pakistani sovereignty. And just as the two states were
beginning to mend their relationship, the U.S.-led NATO attack on the
Pakistani military’s border post in Salala, in November, killed twenty-
four Pakistani soldiers, plunging the relationship to a new low after the
Obama administration refused to apologize. In reaction, Pakistan blocked
the use of its ground lines of communication used by NATO forces for trans-
porting non-lethal supplies to Afghanistan and demanded the CIA vacate the
Shamsi Air Base in Balochistan.
drones, sovereignty, and counterterrorism cooperation

Some scholars have argued that public anger caused by drone strikes creates
pressure on allied governments to end or drastically curtail their cooperation
with U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Leila Hudson, Colin Owens, and Matt
Flannes contend that “the less direct effect of steady drone attacks . . . is a
smoldering dissatisfaction with the dead-end policy . . . which results in anti-
government agitation and anti-American sentiment, which may force sudden
policy adjustments by political and military actors.”125 Similarly, Abbas
claims that “anti-U.S. feelings in Pakistan increased substantially as a result
of this strategy [drone strikes], weakening the U.S.-Pakistan counterterror-
ism cooperation.”126
The indisputable unpopularity of drones in Pakistan conditions government
responses to drone strikes. Ofªcials in Pakistan’s ministry of foreign affairs
124. Data retrieved from Pew Global Attitudes Database, http://www.pewglobal.org/question-

search/?qid⫽793&cntIDs⫽@36-@36.5-&stdIDs⫽.
125. Hudson, Owens, and Flannes, “Drone Warfare.”
126. Hassan Abbas, “Are Drone Strikes Killing Terrorists or Creating Them?” Atlantic,
March 31, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/03/are-drone-strikes-
killing-terrorists-or-creating-them/274499/.
have repeatedly claimed that these strikes are illegal and violate the country’s
sovereignty.127 In an October 2012 meeting with President Obama, Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif reportedly emphasized the need to end the program
because it was “a continued violation of our territorial sovereignty.”128 This
ofªcial disapproval notwithstanding, the United States could not have oper-
ated drones in the country’s airspace without the consent of Pakistani authori-
ties, as the military’s air defense weapons systems can easily shoot them
down. A former director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence
agency, Lt. Gen. Shuja Pasha, told a Pakistani commission inquiring into bin
Laden’s death about an “understanding” with the United States regarding its
drone operations in the country. In 2013, Pervez Musharraf disclosed that, as
president of Pakistan, he had granted permission to the United States to
launch drone strikes in FATA.129 (The two sides had reportedly entered into a
covert agreement in 2004 that designated zones, or “ºight boxes,” for U.S.
drone operations in the Waziristans.130) The CIA was allowed to use air force
bases in Jacobabad (Sindh Province) and Shamsi (Balochistan Province) for its
drone ºeet. Even proponents of the blowback thesis claim that “Pakistan’s
government (both military and civilian) was fully on board . . . which
means the sovereignty issue was not relevant in many cases.”131 Khaled
Ahmed, one of Pakistan’s most proliªc analysts of Islamist ideologies and sec-
tarian militancy, argues that in “a state without internal control . . . [where] ter-
ritory is controlled by terrorists and insurgents,” opposition to drones is meant
to keep up pretenses of external sovereignty.132
Evidence suggests that, despite their public protestations, civilian leaders
have also acquiesced in drone strikes as a strategy to defeat terrorism. For in-
stance, Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gillani publicly criticized the United
States for its “illegal and counterproductive” use of drones, arguing that it fu-
els the Taliban insurgency against the government.133 According to leaked
U.S. diplomatic cables, however, Gillani, in a meeting in August 2008
127. “Drones Violating Pakistani Sovereignty, Hina Tells Olson,” Nation, January 23, 2013; and
Jethro Mullen, “Rights Groups Challenge U.S. on Drone Strikes in Pakistan, Yemen,” CNN.com,
October 22, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/22/world/asia/us-drone-strikes-reports/index
.html.
128. Mullen, “Rights Groups Challenge U.S. on Drone Strikes in Pakistan, Yemen.”
129. Nic Robertson and Greg Botelho, “Ex-Pakistani President Musharraf Admits Secret Deal with
U.S. on Drone Strikes,” CNN.com, April 12, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/11/world/asia/
pakistan-musharraf-drones/index.html.
130. Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Prepares for a Curtailed Relationship with Pakistan,” New York Times, De-
cember 25, 2011.
131. Abbas, “Are Drone Strikes Killing Terrorists or Creating Them?”
132. Khaled Ahmed, “Two Blowbacks from Afghanistan,” Express Tribune (Pakistan), May 5, 2012.
133. “Gillani Bemoans ‘Trust Deªcit’ with the U.S.,” Dawn, June 28, 2012.
with U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson, consented to drone strikes

“as long as they killed the right people.” He added, “We’ll protest in the
National Assembly and then ignore it.”134 Earlier that year, Army Chief of Staff
Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani asked the United States for “continuous predator
coverage” to aid the Pakistani army’s operations in South Waziristan.135 Senior
Pakistani military ofªcials reportedly even muted their public criticism after a
drone strike killed TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud in the summer of 2009.136
According to classiªed CIA documents and Pakistani diplomatic memos ob-
tained by the Washington Post, U.S. intelligence ofªcials routinely briefed their
Pakistani counterparts on speciªc drone strikes and casualty counts. From
2008 to 2010, the United States also targeted individual Taliban militants at the
request of the Pakistani authorities.137 Public criticism by Pakistani leaders to
assuage public opinion aside, even the most devastating U.S. drone strikes in
Pakistan have not severed or signiªcantly weakened bilateral counterterror co-
operation, especially the CIA’s use of Pakistani airspace to launch these strikes.
And despite Islamabad’s strong diplomatic rebuke when the Trump adminis-
tration decided in January 2018 to cut off all security-related assistance to
Pakistan because of its selective counterterrorism efforts, U.S. drone strikes
in Pakistan continue.
Transnational Blowback
Some scholars and analysts have argued that Muslims living in, for example,
the United States or Europe may become radicalized or retaliate violently
against the United States when their religious kin are killed or injured in drone
strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen.138 Hence, the operative
mechanism here is “long-distance” or diasporic nationalism.139 According to
the Middle East scholar Fawaz Gerges, “[D]rone strikes fuel the ªres of home-
grown [Muslim] radicalization in Western societies. This is a rising phenome-
134. “U.S. Embassy Cables: Pakistan Backs U.S. Drone Strikes in Tribal Areas,” Guardian, Novem-
ber 30, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/167125.
135. “Kayani Asked for ‘Continuous Predator Coverage,’” Dawn, May 19, 2011.
136. Daniel S. Markey, No Exit from Pakistan: America’s Tortured Relationship with Islamabad (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 157.
137. Greg Miller and Bob Woodward, “Secret Memos Reveal Explicit Nature of U.S.-Pakistan
Drone Agreement,” Washington Post, October 24, 2013.
138. Stanford Law School and NYU School of Law, Living under Drones, pp. 136–137. See also
Chase Madar, “Drone Attacks Undermine National Security,” Al Jazeera America, July 27, 2014,
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/7/drone-blowback.html.
139. Benedict Anderson, “Long-Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity
Politics,” Wertheim lecture given at the Center for Asian Studies, Amsterdam, the Netherlands,
1992.
non that has not been seriously debated, despite a string of high-proªle
attacks. . . . [T]he Woolwich attack in London and the Boston Marathon bomb-
ings are suspected to be the latest cases in point.”140 Michael Boyle claims that
“drones have replaced Guantánamo Bay as the number one [global] recruiting
tool for Al-Qaeda today.”141
methods for assessing transnational blowback

Gathering conclusive proof of terrorist motivations is notoriously difªcult. To
evaluate the transnational blowback thesis, I rely on three main sources. The
ªrst source consists of trial testimony and public statements by U.S.-based cap-
tured terrorists believed to have been motivated by drone strikes. Second are
court documents (i.e., criminal prosecution complaints and testimony) and
secondary sources relating to Somali-American men charged with terror-
related offenses in the United States. Since 2007, the al-Qaida afªliate
al-Shabaab has recruited more than two dozen men from the Minneapolis–
St. Paul area (and several others from the Somali diaspora in Europe) to join
the insurgency against the United Nations–backed transitional government in
Somalia.142 Al-Shabaab, designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist
organization (FTO) in 2008, has been the target of some sixty U.S. drone strikes
in Somalia since 2008. Hence, an assessment of the motives behind violent
jihad among Somali immigrant youth can provide at least a sample for evalu-
ating the transnational blowback thesis. The third source of evidence com-
prises scholarly accounts of the motivations for militant Islamism in Europe,
one of the main hubs for its transnational spread.
assessment of transnational blowback

It is important to note that only a handful of the approximately 100 jihadist-
linked or inspired terror plots (successful, failed, or foiled) in the United States
since September 11 were reportedly hatched by individuals who claimed that
drone strikes were one, if not the only, source of their motivation.143 The
140. Fawaz Gerges, “Why Drone Strikes Are Real Enemy in ‘War on Terror,’” CNN.com,
June 21, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/21/opinion/terrorism-gerges/index.html. It is un-
clear whether the two attacks cited by Gerges involved militants inspired speciªcally by drone
strikes.
141. Boyle, “Costs and Consequences of Drone Warfare,” p. 13. See also Glen Greenwald, “An-
drew Sullivan, Terrorism, and the Art of Distortion,” Guardian, May 25, 2013.
142. Whereas al-Shabaab recruiting has dwindled since 2010, presumably because of a community
backlash against the organization, the Islamic State has become the primary terrorist organization
recruiting from the Somali diaspora. See Jack Healey, “For Jihad Recruits, a Pipeline from Minne-
sota to Militancy,” New York Times, September 6, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/
for-Jihad-recruits-a-pipeline-from-Minnesota-to-militancy.html.
143. Martha Crenshaw and Gary LaFree, Countering Terrorism: No Simple Solutions (Washington,
D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2017), p. 69.
ªrst and most commonly cited case is that of the Pakistani-American terrorist
Faisal Shehzad, who tried but failed to bomb Times Square in May 2010.
Media accounts show that his radicalization preceded the U.S. drone cam-
paign in Pakistan and Afghanistan.144 Shehzad was reportedly angered by the
West’s “crusade against Islam,” exempliªed (in his view) by U.S. foreign
policy in the Middle East, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and the publi-
cation of satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark. In 2009,
Shehzad abandoned his family in the United States and traveled to Pakistan,
where he was trained in bomb making by the TTP.145 In court testimony,
Shehzad justiªed his actions as revenge for a range of U.S. policies, including
the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as drone strikes in
Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.146 In a video recorded prior to the failed attack,
he justiªed jihad as a fundamental pillar of Islam and vowed to avenge “the
killing of Baitullah Mehsud and Abu Musab Zarqawi [the Jordanian militant
who led al-Qaida in Iraq], and for all the weak and oppressed and martyred
among the Muslims.”147 Baitullah was, indeed, killed in a drone attack in
Pakistan, but Zarqawi died in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq. In other words,
Shehzad’s turn to terrorism was driven not by U.S. drone or airstrikes, but by
the U.S. government’s more general policy of assassinating foreign adversar-
ies. The United States is unlikely to forgo this policy, at least in the near future,
even if it were to prioritize the use of political and diplomatic tools in ªghting
the “war on terror.” Hence, stopping the use of drones would not have
stopped Shehzad from trying to carry out his plot. And from a counterfactual
perspective, Shehzad would most likely have become a terrorist even in a
world without drones.
The second case involved Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant arrested
by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in September 2009 for conspiring to
bomb the New York subway system.148 According to his court testimony, Zazi
went to Pakistan with his co-conspirators in September 2008 with the ultimate
goal of traveling to Afghanistan to join the Taliban in their ªght against U.S-
led NATO forces. While they were transiting through the Pakistani city of
Peshawar, an al-Qaida cell recruited them for a “martyrdom operation” in the
144. Andrea Elliott, Sabrina Tavernise and Anne Barnard, “For Times Sq. Bomber, Long Roots of
Discontent,” New York Times, May 15, 2010.
145. David Tan, “Case 34: Times Square,” in John Mueller, ed., Terrorism since 9/11: The American
Cases (Columbus: Mershon Center, Ohio State University, 2011), p. 515.
146. See United States of America vs. Faisal Shehzad, Defendant Plea before U.S. District Court,
case 10-CR-541 (MGC), Southern District of New York, June 21, 2010, p. 8, http://online.wsj.com/
public/resources/documents/06l1shap.pdf.
147. The video, released by the Al-Arabiya news channel, is available at https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v⫽Mang4w4SbZo.
148. Daniel Klaidman, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency (New
York: Houghton Mifºin Harcourt, 2012), p. 119.
United States. Zazi told the judge at his plea hearing that he was ready to kill
himself “to bring attention to what the United States military was doing to ci-
vilians in Afghanistan.”149 Neither Zazi’s court statement nor secondary ac-
counts of his path to terrorism make any mention of drones.150 Some scholars
and analysts argue, however, that drone strikes in Afghanistan did take him
down this path.151 But while they could have been a factor, they were not the
most important one. To begin, Zazi’s radicalization was reportedly inspired by
YouTube videos of the pro-al-Qaida Indian Muslim televangelist Zakir Naik,
whose call for jihad does not involve grievances linked to drones or other tar-
geted killings.152 Second, Zazi had already started conspiring with his partners
before the start of the United States’ extensive deployment of armed drones in
Afghanistan in 2008.153
Although these two cases may suggest the existence of a wider theater of
blowback, there is no credible evidence of systematic transnational blowback
in response to U.S. drone strikes. Further, these home-grown militants were
not driven by the same grievances. Indeed, one of Zazi’s co-conspirators
claimed in court that he wanted to bomb New York because of the “Zionist
Jews who, I believe, run a permanent government in the United States.”154
What he and those described above share is an aversion to U.S. foreign policy,
including the United States’ occupation of Muslim countries such as Iraq and
Afghanistan or its backing of Israel.155 For example, one of al-Qaida’s original
objectives was to wage jihad against U.S. troops in bin Laden’s native Saudi
Arabia. As a declassiªed 2011 intelligence assessment by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation concludes, “A broadening U.S. military presence overseas” was
among the factors behind the growing number of U.S.-based Islamic extremist
plots between 2001 and 2010. The report pointed to the “perception that the
United States is at war with Islam and jihad is the correct and obligatory re-
149. United States of America vs. Najibullah Zazi, Transcript of Criminal Case for Pleading, case
1:09-cr-00663, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, February 22, 2010, p. 28,
https://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/USvZazi.pdf.
150. See, for instance, Peter Bergen, United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terror-
ists (New York: Crown, 2016), pp. 113–118.
151. Gerges, “Why Drone Strikes Are Real Enemy in ‘War on Terror.’”
152. Michael Wilson, “Najibullah Zazi: From Smiling Coffee Vendor to Terror Suspect,” New York
Times, September 25, 2009.
153. Drones were introduced into combat in Afghanistan at the start of Operation Enduring Free-
dom in October 2001, but were rarely used until 2008. See “If Drone Strikes Continue in Afghani-
stan, Lack of Transparency Must Not” (London: Bureau of Investigative Journalism, October 16,
2014), https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/opinion/2014-10-16/comment-if-drone-strikes-
continue-in-afghanistan-the-lack-of-transparency-must-not.
154. John Marzulli, “Najibullah Zazi Cohort Zarein Ahmedzay Admits Plot Role,” NY Daily News,
April 23, 2010.
155. “Terrorism in America after 9/11” (Washington, D.C.: New America Foundation, n.d.).
sponse.”156 Ultimately, as Martha Crenshaw and Gary LaFree argue, “individ-

uals follow different pathways to the development of violent intentions and
plans for action,” and “there are few clear patterns other than that most perpe-
trators are young men who are American citizens or residents . . . from diverse
immigrant family backgrounds.”157
somali americans, radicalization, and terrorism

My examination of secondary accounts of the pathways to radicalization of
more than thirty Somali Americans charged or convicted in terror-related
offenses in the United States provides little or no reason to accept the argu-
ment that their decision to materially support or engage in armed violence was
the result of U.S. drone strikes or other forms of targeted killings.158
The case of militant recruitment in the Somali-American community in
Minnesota, the largest in the United States, sheds light on whether the back-
lash against drone strikes has transnational reach. Having escaped a civil war
in their country in the 1990s, Somali Americans face particular challenges of
assimilation compared to most other U.S. Muslim immigrant communities.159
Studies of Somali-American youth in Minnesota show that the decision to be-
come a violent extremist is shaped by a combination of factors, such as an
“identity crisis” born out of problems associated with assimilation that can be
worsened by the reportedly aggressive and intrusive actions of U.S. authori-
ties, as well as the physical or social media presence of terrorist recruiters who
can exploit these vulnerabilities.160
For instance, al-Shabaab recruiters typically rallied young Somali-American
men by appealing to their Somali origins and urging them to defend their orig-
inal homeland by ªghting against U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops.161 A group of
Somali men successfully prosecuted in the United States for providing mate-
rial support to al-Shabaab explained their decision to join the group as a way
156. See “Decade in Review: Self-Selecting U.S. Persons Drive Post-2006 Increase in Anti-U.S.
Plotting,” intelligence assessment (Los Angeles: Federal Bureau of Investigation, March 7, 2011),
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/ªles/SPolice%20Gen16031414460.pdf.
157. Crenshaw and LaFree, Countering Terrorism, p. 95.
158. See “Al-Shabaab’s American Recruits” (New York: Anti-Defamation League, Febru-
ary 15, 2015), https://www.adl.org/sites/default/ªles/documents/assets/pdf/combating-hate/
al-shabaabs-american-recruits.pdf.
159. Jessica Stern, “Muslims in America,” National Interest, May/June 2011, p. 42.
160. See Justin Heinz and Errol Southers, “Foreign Fighters: Terrorist Recruitment and Countering
Violent Extremism (CVE) Programs in Minneapolis-St. Paul” (Los Angeles: National Center of Ex-
cellence for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, University of Southern California,
2015); and Arvin Bhatt and Mitchell D. Silber, “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown
Threat” (New York: New York City Police Department, 2007).
161. Ethiopia intervened in Somalia in 2007 to defend the Somali transitional government against
the Islamist insurgency.
of helping rebuild war-torn Somalia. One of them, identiªed in court docu-

ments as Ahmed, claimed that his decision to “join al-Shabaab was rooted in
[a] sense of responsibility and a desire to do something to help.” Another,
Yusuf, stated that he was not a “violent person” or a “fanatic,” but that he was
simply “motivated by an abiding belief that the people of Somalia have the
right to political self-determination.” “His efforts were directed exclusively to-
ward his homeland, Somalia, out of a profound concern for the safety, security
and future of the Somalian people.”162 It is possible that the defendants made
these statements in hopes of being given leniency, and that they were moti-
vated primarily by the desire to “kill non-believers and apostates” as argued
by the prosecution.163 The federal judge hearing the case, however, turned
down the prosecution’s plea to sentence each of them to ªfteen years in prison
(the maximum sentence for providing material support to an FTO), and re-
duced their sentences on the grounds that the men had joined al-Shabaab only
to ªght in Somalia against Ethiopian troops.164
In addition, there seems to be no positive correlation between the U.S. drone
campaign in Somalia, which was negligible until 2015 (on average, there were
two U.S. drone strikes per year from 2011 to 2014), and al-Shabaab’s recruit-
ment in the United States, which peaked in 2008–09 and has since declined
sharply. While al-Shabaab is a sworn enemy of the United States and may even
be able to draw some recruits by inciting or exploiting anger against U.S.
drone or air strikes in Somalia, there is no concrete evidence to suggest that the
group’s transnational recruitment is signiªcantly driven by them.
More recently, Islamic State (ISIS) recruiters have recruited young Somali
Americans to ªght in Syria and Iraq. To date, the largest ISIS conspiracy case in
the United States involved nine Somali-American men, three of whom were
sentenced to life in prison in November 2016 for providing material support to
an FTO by plotting to ªght on its behalf in Syria. Their court testimony reveals
that they were motivated to join ISIS because of personal factors, such as peer
inºuence and conºicted identities exacerbated by racism or prejudice, which
were duly leveraged by ISIS social media campaigns. One of the men who
pleaded guilty, Zacharia Abdur Rahman, cited three factors leading to his
transformation into an ISIS supporter: a racist incident when he was spat on,
inspiration from a friend who had traveled to Syria to join ISIS, and his subse-
162. United States of America vs. Ahmed et al., document 339, case 1:12-cr-00661-JG-LB,
United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, January 8, 2016, https://www
.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/2919.pdf.
163. Ibid., p. 13.
164. “Two Swedish Citizens Get 11 Years in U.S. Prison for al-Shabaab Support,” Reuters, January
15, 2016.
quent moral outrage over the conºict in Syria.165 In other words, Rahman and
some of his co-conspirators ªrst experienced what Quintan Wiktorowicz calls
a “cognitive opening,” which can be triggered by a variety of factors, including
job loss, discrimination, humiliation, or personal loss, that renders a person
amenable to ideas that would otherwise be ignored or rejected. This opening
can prompt a search for a “satisfactory system of meaning,” often through so-
cial ties and networks involving friends and relatives.166 Ultimately, Rahman’s
transition from passively supporting ISIS to joining the organization was
sealed with what he called a “hug” from ISIS recruiters on social media.167
muslims in europe
Research on the causes of Muslim radicalization and terrorist recruitment in
Europe underscores the importance of factors similar to those discussed
above,168 including the appeal of a transnational Islamic identity to second-
and third-generation Muslims that helps them overcome their conºicted iden-
tities,169 state policies on immigration and integration that marginalize Muslim
communities in countries such as France,170 the role of radical imams (mosque
preachers),171 and more recently, the inºuence of social media both as a facilita-
tor of terror recruitment and as a source for self-radicalization.172
Still, context matters in evaluating motivations for violent jihad: factors that
are important in a U.S. or European setting may not be applicable in North
Africa or South Asia. And even within Europe, the conditions that promote
radicalization can vary from country to country, depending on the national
background of the Muslim community in question (e.g., Pakistanis in Britain,
Turks in Germany, North Africans in France), which emphasize different roles
165. Mukhtar M. Ibrahim, “ISIS Trial in Minnesota: What You Need to Know,” Minnesota Public
Radio, May 6, 2016, https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/05/06/isis-trial-minnesota-faq.
166. Quintan Wiktorowicz, Radical Islam Rising: Muslim Extremism in the West (Lanham, Md.:
Rowman and Littleªeld, 2005), pp. 5, 20–22.
167. Laura Yuen, “3 out of 9 Sentenced in ISIS Conspiracy Trial,” Minnesota Public Radio, Novem-
ber 14, 2016, https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/11/14/ªrst-day-of-sentencing-isis-trial.
168. For a concise review of the literature, see Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, “Violent Radicalization in
Europe: What We Know and What We Do Not Know,” Studies in Conºict and Terrorism,” Vol. 33,
No. 9 (2010), pp. 797–814, doi:10.1080/1057610X.2010.501423.
169. See, for example, Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2004), pp. 303–309; and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers: Allah’s
New Martyrs (London: Pluto, 2005).
170. Peter R. Neumann and Brooke Rogers, “Recruitment and Mobilization for the Islamist Mili-
tant Movement in Europe” (London: International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Po-
litical Violence, King’s College London, 2007).
171. Gilles Keppel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 2004).
172. Neumann and Rogers, “Recruitment and Mobilization for the Islamist Militant Movement in
Europe,” p. 83.
for religion in political and social life; the history of immigration (recent immi-
grants in Southern Europe vs. second- and third-generation immigrants in the
United Kingdom and France); and variation in national policies on immigra-
tion and integration.173 Even if drone strikes do play a part in generating anti-
U.S. resentment among some Muslims around the world, their motivations
can vary and it is not easy to pinpoint the source of blowback. Moreover, trans-
national terror groups can ªnd plenty of material for recruitment in U.S. na-
tional security policies. For instance, a 2016 al-Shabaab propaganda video
exploited the Trump administration’s “Muslim” travel ban to rally support for
its cause in the United States.174 As Daniel Byman notes, “The problem is that
the list [of grievances] is long, and it is hard to tell if one grievance would sim-
ply be replaced by another in the mind of an angry, idealistic, and excitable
young volunteer. Instead of hating America or the West for ten reasons, they
now hate the West for nine.”175
Conclusion
I have evaluated the validity of the drone blowback thesis, which posits that
drone strikes generate a backlash effect by creating more terrorists than they
eliminate at the local, national, and international levels. At the local level, the
logic of the blowback thesis is that family members of those killed or wounded
in drone strikes will mechanically follow tribal norms to avenge their relatives
by joining anti-American militant groups such as the Pakistani Taliban. Based
on my interviews with a diverse group of respondents from North Waziristan,
I argue that the notion that drone strikes turn aggrieved relatives into blood-
thirsty militants is deeply problematic because it essentializes an entire ethnic
group and reduces their choices to primordial urges, mores, and customs. In
my interviews, experts with deep knowledge of the Federally Administered
Tribal Areas, especially North Waziristan, in addition to well-informed local
elders and others deeply embedded in social networks, reject the claim that
drones provide a recruitment card for militant organizations. Even though the
sample is not scientiªcally drawn, at a minimum, it reºects the position of
many of those who have been directly affected by drone strikes yet whose
voices have gone unheard in the debate on drones. Clearly, this article does not
173. Ibid., pp. 27–28.

174. “Al-Shabaab Releases Recruitment Video Featuring Donald Trump,” ABC News, January 1,
2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v⫽Z9Rr3kD75uM.
175. Daniel Byman, “Thoughts on Counterterrorism and Blowback,” Lawfare blog, Novem-
ber 30, 2014, https://www.lawfareblog.com/foreign-policy-essay-thoughts-counterterrorism-and-
blowback.
offer the ªnal word on the effects of drone strikes. It does, however, offer a cor-
rective to the literature that has essentially ignored those who should be the
most well informed about the impact of drone strikes.
Proponents also claim that blowback occurs at the national level in areas not
directly targeted by U.S. drone strikes. This is because the people in these areas
have not directly witnessed or experienced the effects of drone strikes. Hence,
they may be more susceptible to believe anti-U.S. state or militant propaganda
in the media that portrays the ºying of U.S. drones as an infringement on na-
tional sovereignty and/or as the cause of large numbers of civilian deaths. My
interviews with scholars, journalists, and counterterrorism ofªcials from
Pakistan, as well as an assessment of a Pakistani police survey of 500 detained
terrorists, contradict this argument. Most experts I interviewed maintain that
militant groups outside FATA mobilize support and attract recruits by blaming
or demonizing a range of domestic and international enemies, including
India/Hindus, the West, the United States, and, in some cases, minority
Muslims such as Shias. Even the few experts who argue that militant groups
have used drones as a propaganda tool claim that drone strikes are not the
most important factor in driving recruitment, which instead beneªts from
state policies that nurture select militant groups.
Although U.S. drone strikes in Muslim countries might play a role in the
radicalization or violent extremism of co-religionists around the world, the
available evidence does not support the assertion that drones are “fueling
the ªres of homegrown radicalization” in Western societies or that these un-
manned aerial vehicles are the new Guantánamo. Like the local and national
blowback arguments, this argument is based primarily on anecdotal evidence
and statements of individual terrorists. Transnational terrorist groups such as
al-Qaida have sought to use U.S. drone strikes to incite violence against civil-
ians in, for example, the United States and Europe. Islamist terrorists convicted
in the United States do not, however, seem to be solely or even mainly moti-
vated by drone strikes. Instead, they typically express their main grievances in
terms of a broader antagonism toward the United States’ foreign policy
in the Middle East and its occupation or military presence in Muslim-
majority countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan. In other words, militants may
use drone strikes as evidence of the West’s “war against Islam,” but it is not
their main motivation.
The radicalization of individuals in the Somali diaspora, especially in the
state of Minnesota, illustrates the role of U.S. policies targeting Muslim com-
munities at home; personal factors, such as conºicted identities among
young Somali Americans; and their nationalist desire to evict foreign troops
from Somalia, a desire that recruiters from the al-Qaida afªliate al-Shabaab
have been able to exploit. My brief examination of the social science litera-
ture on the drivers of Islamist militancy among Muslims in European coun-
tries similarly points to domestic factors such as an identity crisis among some
young Muslims, state policies of marginalization and discrimination, and the
role of radical preachers and terrorist recruiters who leverage these vulnerabil-
ities for recruitment.
In conclusion, the blowback thesis offers a simplistic, monocausal explana-
tion of a complex process of radicalization and jihadist recruitment at the local,
national, and transnational levels. To develop a better understanding of these
activities, scholars and other analysts should begin by focusing their efforts
not on anecdotal accounts, but on data-driven empirical evidence. In addition,
the argument and ªndings of this study should not be viewed as a license for
future U.S. drone strikes. President Trump’s reported decision to expand the
powers of the CIA for carrying out drone strikes and to relax Obama-era re-
strictions on counterterrorism operations by both the CIA and the military is
likely to increase the risk of civilian casualties in conºict zones. Beyond the ob-
vious need for transparency when conducting drone strikes, the United States
should do its utmost to protect civilians from harm in accordance with interna-
tional legal and normative standards.

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Do U.S. Drone Strikes Cause Blowback?

Do U.S. Drone Strikes Aqil Shah

geted district located in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas

methods for assessing local blowback

dents are likely to recommend people with similar characteristics or similar

the voices of a diverse, informed section of a population directly affected by

assessment of local blowback

taliban, tanks, and drones

40. Author interview with respondent 19, Peshawar, June 2015.

people were confronted with a dilemma: military offensive or drone strikes.

47. Email communication to author, January 24, 2018.

52. Email communication to author, February 10, 2018.

61. Author interview with respondent 53, Bannu, June 2015.

up arms against outsiders because of their “peculiar cultural” mores.71

77. Author interviews, Bannu and Peshawar, December 2015.

methods for assessing national-level blowback

assessment of national blowback

92. Author interview with reporter, Peshawar, December 2015.

expert views on national blowback

Experts in my sample agreed that drone strikes can be a useful recruiting

104. Email communication to author from Tariq Parvez, January 4, 2018.

their anti-state activities.”115 According to a senior intelligence ofªcer whose

115. Email communication to author from ofªcer K, August 2, 2017.

drones and anti-americanism in pakistan

percentage of Pakistanis who see the United States as an “enemy” already

drones, sovereignty, and counterterrorism cooperation

124. Data retrieved from Pew Global Attitudes Database, http://www.pewglobal.org/question-

with U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson, consented to drone strikes

methods for assessing transnational blowback

assessment of transnational blowback

sponse.”156 Ultimately, as Martha Crenshaw and Gary LaFree argue, “individ-

somali americans, radicalization, and terrorism

of helping rebuild war-torn Somalia. One of them, identiªed in court docu-

173. Ibid., pp. 27–28.

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