"human rights organizations and even some former U.S. military commanders argue that drone strikes inadvertently increase terrorism by exerting a “blowback” effect. Their logic is simple. Drone strikes kill more innocent civilians than terrorists, which radicalizes affected populations and motivates them to join terrorist groups to retaliate against the United States...
Opinion polls, such as those carried out by the Pew Research Center since at least 2009, indicate widespread Pakistani anger at drone strikes. Pew’s latest 2014 survey showed that 67 percent of respondents opposed drone attacks because they kill “too many innocent people.” However, Pew data on drones is deeply misleading as the organization draws its samples mostly from areas not directly impacted by drone strikes because the Pakistan military and/or militants limit or deny access to the conflict zone. Nonetheless, in a 2011 survey conducted by a local NGO in FATA, 63 percent of the respondents thought drone strikes “are never justified.” But when the results are disaggregated, support for drone strikes is the highest in North Waziristan, the FATA agency (district) where the CIA has carried out most of its lethal drone operations, compared to the other six...
To assess local perceptions of drone strikes, I conducted 147 semi-structured interviews with adult (18 years or older) residents of North Waziristan in the summer and winter of 2015...
the data contradict the presumed local radicalization effects of drones. In fact, 79 percent of the respondents endorsed drones. In sharp contrast to claims about the significant civilian death toll from drone strikes, 64 percent, including several living in villages close to strike locations, believed that drone strikes accurately targeted militants...
Recent studies have also posited a link between drone fatalities and revenge in the FATA. When someone dies in a drone strike, the argument goes, their family members are obligated to take revenge in accordance with their ethical code of Pashtunwali. But less than 15 percent of the respondents supported the revenge thesis. As many tribal elders stressed to me, militants are motivated by a violent jihadi creed, not Pashtun customs predating Islam...
However, almost one-fourth of the respondents affirmed drones’ negative psychological effects on locals if for no other reason than, as a journalist with extensive experience of reporting from North Waziristan told me, the perception that the “drones are always watching us” and can “strike any time.”"
Interesting.
I've been trying to recognize the issues that I have instinctive opinions on because of my cultural group (West Coast liberal), not because I've actually been educated about it. These are typically the areas that have the worst partisan divides and these constant policy failures and unproductive reactive media coverage. It's echo chamber stuff, where everyone in your social network has the same idea about it but no one can remember exactly how they learned about it and no one knows solid details, just a series of logical assumptions that reinforce the original idea that X needs to go or Y is necessary. And people don't seek out real information because (a) it doesn't occur to you that you might not actually know anything, and (b) most information sources are going to be political and biased and more informative about ideology than the subject matter.
Drones are in my set of cultural disapprovals, and I need to remind myself that (a) I know nothing, really; and (b) I don't NEED to have an "opinion", at least not at this moment in my life.
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