Surveys of a Pakistani population closely affected by U.S. drone strikes found overwhelming support for the strikes, along with a belief drones are accurate and rarely result in civilian casualties.
The findings stand in stark contrast to larger surveys that have found widespread opposition to U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, and to the “blowback” theory that the strikes lead to further radicalization of local populations and too often result in civilian deaths.
Writing in The Washington Post, professor and scholar Aqil Shah explains how he conducted 147 interviews with adult residents of North Waziristan in 2015 in an effort to find out what the people located close to the strikes think about the program. Shah found a 79 percent of the tribal elders, reporters, lawyers, activists and others interviewed support U.S. drone strikes, and that 64 percent believe the strikes accurately target militants.
“Most respondents support drone strikes,” Shah wrote in The Washington Post. “This is not to say that America’s drone campaign is ‘winning hearts and minds,’ to borrow that imperious slogan of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine. Instead, locals approve of drone attacks because they viscerally hate the militants and feel betrayed by their own government.”
As for non-militants caught in the crossfire, according to one key part of Shah’s write up, “Over two-thirds of respondents said that most of the non-militant civilians who die in drone attacks are known militant sympathizers or collaborators who may already be radicalized.”
The survey is not statistically representative of the whole population, but does represent the most comprehensive survey of a local population actually affected by the strikes, according to Shah. Most of the polling and information on Pakistanis opinions of the program are based on much broader surveys that disproportionately vocalize the opinions of urban residents largely unaffected.
The U.S. has carried out 75 percent of all drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Waziristan in particular is known as a hotbed of radicalism.
Residents surveyed also took issue with the theory that the relatives of people killed in the strikes will take revenge in accordance with customs predating Islam. Only 15 percent of those surveyed agreed with the revenge theory, while tribal elders stressed militants are motivated purely by radical Islam. If the revenge theory were true, some of them reasoned, the locals would actually turn on the Taliban.
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