Drone War Reinforced Terrorist Groups More Than You Thought

One notable little nugget from Mark Mazzetti’s latest piece in The New York Times is the following, which gives added weight to warnings of blowback resulting from the Obama administration’s drone war:

…the map of Islamic militancy inside Pakistan had been redrawn in recent years, and factions that once had little contact with one another had cemented new alliances in response to the C.I.A.’s drone campaign in the western mountains. Groups that had focused most of their energies dreaming up bloody attacks against India were now aligning themselves closer to Al Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad.

Not only is the cruel nature of the drone war, with its massive civilian casualties, a motivation for unaffiliated locals to join the ranks of al-Qaeda, but other regional terror groups from the other side of Pakistan “cemented new alliances” with those in the Northwest Frontier Province as a result of the decade long bombing campaign.

See here for an extended interview with Mazzetti from Danger Room’s Spencer Ackerman.

10 thoughts on “Drone War Reinforced Terrorist Groups More Than You Thought”

  1. Not only is the cruel nature of the drone war, with its massive civilian casualties, a motivation for unaffiliated locals to join the ranks of al-Qaeda, but other regional terror groups from the other side of Pakistan “cemented new alliances” with those in the Northwest Frontier Province as a result of the decade long bombing campaign.

  2. Amongst us antiwarriors, the naive believe that our rulers have not considered the question of blowback.
    That is a silly arrogance. Our bosses have considered the trade off – an carefully.
    One can only conclude that the have adopted Caligula's maxim taken from Acceus, "Oderint dum metuant."

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