As military solutions go, drones really are hard to beat. As Brennan noted, "Countries typically don't want foreign soldiers in their cities and towns." By contrast, "there is the precision of targeted strikes." The drone thus represents a lesson learned from the first generation of the war on terror: Precision limits popular backlash. But is that really true? By all accounts, drone strikes in Pakistan have become ever more accurate, but still inflame Pakistani public opinion almost as much as has the occasional incursion by U.S. or NATO forces. In March, Pakistan's parliament voted to prohibit such strikes altogether. That outrage, in turn, has made it almost impossible for the United States to achieve its long-term goals of helping Pakistan become a stable, civilian-run state. Short-term success has jeopardized the long-term goal -- though that price might still be worth paying.
That hasn't happened yet in Yemen. And perhaps it won't, so long as the drones hit al Qaeda terrorists rather than local insurgents, not to mention civilians. But that's a leap of faith. As Barbara Bodine, a former ambassador to Yemen, notes, "Right now we don't have a Pakistan-like reaction. But at first we didn't have that reaction with Pakistan either. This is something that builds. And folks in Yemen know what's going on in Pakistan. This will play into the broader narrative of the drones we use in Pakistan and Afghanistan." Another lesson learned from Afghanistan is that even a counterinsurgency effort designed to protect civilians and promote good government will provoke nationalist resistance. People on the ground will see the intervention as against them, not for them (which explains why, according to WikiLeaks cables, President Saleh publicly insisted that the Yemeni air force had launched the strikes). Counterinsurgency, which seemed so promising all of two or three years ago, now looks like an illusory, or at least oversold, solution to the war on terror. How long before we say the same of drones?
The answer, in both cases, is not to abandon the approach but to acknowledge its inevitable costs. There are no cost-free military solutions. The drone strikes that killed Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, two AQAP leaders, were well worth the effort; the same should be said of more recent attacks. But when does the cost exceed the value? Bodine said that she recently attended a conference at "an undisclosed location" in which this very question provoked furious debate among security officials. The White House, in fact, pushed back against a CIA request to set the same targeting rules in Yemen that it now operates under in Pakistan, where it is permitted to strike militants who pose a threat to U.S. forces whether or not they include a high-value target. So there is skepticism in high places, if not in the CIA or special operations forces. The new "pattern" rules may still be too broad.
The frequency of strikes is already much greater than most of us realize. A report by the Britain-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism counts 21 definite or possible drone strikes in Yemen over the last two months; a Yemeni government official has said that the United States has been launching an average of two strikes a day since mid-April. The danger of producing more militants than we kill in Yemen hardly seems hypothetical.
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