Thursday, February 11, 2010

Drones -- again

Vikash Yadav at Duck of Minerva argues that a leadership decapitation strategy via drone strikes is not effective against the Taliban and associated networks in Pakistan. He says it creates only temporary disruption and causes civilian casualties. But this raises a question I just asked in comments there: what other military strategy against the Pakistani Taliban is available to the U.S.? This may be a case where doing nothing is preferable to doing something ineffective, but persuading the CIA and Pentagon of that would, I suspect, prove to be difficult.
Update: Yadav's reply is now up at the DofM comment thread.

2 comments:

hank_F_M said...

LFC

You asked the best question in that comment thread, including mine.

Keep it up.

LFC said...

I'll be interested to see how Yadav responds. Clearly he knows a lot about the region and seems to be following the situation closely -- which is not to say of course that I, or you, will agree with him all of the time.