Blowback against Blowback

I published a post on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 explaining my thoughts on why people became so radicalised that they supported Al Qaeda and even became part of it. I emphasised the importance of cultural dissonance, i.e., feeling apart from a culture. I’m not going to go over the empirical support for my position again – I wanted to give more empirical evidence against a position I dismissed. I did not ignore foreign policy in explanation, but I did say it was neither necessary nor sufficient for terrorism.

The assumption behind thinking foreign policy leads people to lose their morality and start supporting a group that blows people in order to implement regimes that would make whole races and genders second class citizens is that they become aggrieved. This is typically used in the Palestinian context as well: what do you expect the Palestinians to do after their homes have been demolished and their cousins killed? What do you expect the Iraqis to do when the U.S occupies their land?

This assumption is wrong for multiple reasons – it plays on racist assumptions of Arabs as agents moved by external factors. One can point to several societies, including our own, where this faux analysis is not applied – even if there have been comparable or worse atrocities. This post is aimed at addressing that argument so I don’t have to repeat myself. As most of the arguments are about Hamas and Al Qaeda, those are the groups I’ll be addressing.

The Palestinians vs. Hamas

Starting with the Palestinians, this extends not only to IDF attacks but to Israeli policy – like the blockade. Except, there is no empirical proof for it: the blockade was implemented in 2007 – and yet, “according to a variety of polls, support for Hamas has steadily dropped since... its election in January 2006. [P]ublic support for Hamas has not just dropped in the West Bank but in its hometurf of Gaza” (Myths, Illusions and Peace, Ross and Makovsky, p.263).

This result shouldn’t be surprising – it was only after Hamas took over the Gaza strip, carried out a purge of Fatah members and usurped the executive in Gaza that Israel imposed the blockade. Aside from the social and economic woes that followed, this was an illegitimate move: often it is pointed out that Hamas is democratically elected – but this ignores everything that happened the day after the election. Hamas won the legislative elections and then proceeded to take control of the executive functions of government in Gaza – something they were not elected to do. The conflict that broke out between Fatah and Hamas in 2006 led the latter to go after Fatah officials and throwing them off buildings (for a full account of why Hamas took over and initiated a power grab, see here).

Even then, ignoring all of that (which is sufficient to lose all democratic legitimacy), elections have not been held for the legislative or executive body since 2006. Even when the President, who has the right to call them under Palestinian law, calls them, Hamas has consistently opposed them. Israel’s blockade was too restrictive before 2010 and that was wrong – now, the security blockade in place would not be there (as it wasn’t when the PA controlled the area) if there was not a security threat. Palestinians very likely see that – which explains the Palestinians’ continuing opposition to Hamas. Hamas and the other factions have also fired rockets which have led to Israeli response – often in their own areas – which probably explains why 70% of Palestinians want them disarmed.

And this brings us to violence in the Israel-Palestinian conflict – does it really increase radicalisation and lead to more violence? Again, the empirical support is simply not there. Before I get on to the academic literature, I just want to give one example of one set of polling. Operation Cast Lead was carried out from December 2008 to January 2009 – it’s worth looking at polling before and after the attacks to see the support for Hamas. In a December 2008 Near East Consulting poll (before Cast Lead started), support for Hamas was low: Hamas would only have won 10% in the presidential elections, 11% in legislative elections and when asked to respond to the statement, “Some believe that Hamas will win the next election,” a majority obviously disagreed.

In the next Near Consulting Poll in March 2009, the results had not changed much at all: 11% believed Hamas only represented them, they would have received 14% of the vote in presidential elections and they would have won 16% in the legislative elections. Operation Cast Lead seems to have no negligible effect on supporting terrorist organisations. This also explains why Hamas opposes elections: it would get blown out of Palestinian politics.

And this is a consistent finding in the academic literature. In a Journal of Public Economics article, Jaeger et al (2012) investigate “effects of violence on the political preferences of an aggrieved population.” The results are robust and show that “the overall effect of Palestinian fatalities is not statistically significant.” And the same results apply for not just supporting radical groups but their attacks on civilians too. From Haaretz:

According to the poll released by the JMCC [in 2011], since the Gaza war the ratio of Palestinians who opposed "military operations" against Israel rose from 38.1% in January of 2009 to 51.8% in April of 2011 (my emphasis).

Indeed, Palestinians are no more likely to support attacks on civilians than Israelis (in fact, across the Middle East, attacking civilians is a minority position). At the risk of pushing my point again – the same is true for the “killing one of them makes more” argument. Jaeger and Paserman (2008) examine the statistical evidence and conclude “the direction of causality... runs only from violence committed by Palestinians to violence committed by Israelis, and not vice versa.” That is, Israeli casualties lead to Palestinian casualties – but Palestinians casualties do not lead to Israeli casualties. Again, this really shouldn’t be surprising: Israeli counter-terrorism policy through targeted assassination, wide ranging military action is designed to deter and comes in response to terror.

Again, Operation Cast Lead is illustrative of this policy. This came after Hamas first escalated violence in November during the ceasefire and then refused to sign up to another one (see this post for a detailed analysis of the ceasefire). Israel responded – and the result was not more violence:

In fact, post Cast Lead yielded Israel’s “quietest year” in a decade: there was a 90% reduction in the first year and even at its highest levels, rocket fire has not matched even a third of 2007 levels. Something that is even more interesting is how much the circle of violence argument gets it the wrong way around. Hamas, after Cast Lead started patrolling the areas to make sure rockets weren’t fired. They have fired rockets since Operation Cast Lead, but the deterrence – not radicalisation - effect is clear from the graph.

Al Qaeda and its allies

I have covered some of the ground on why foreign policy is not the reason for support for Al Qaeda. Briefly, again, the vast majority of Muslims across the Middle East don’t like Al Qaeda. This gives prima facie evidence to the position I’m advocating: if foreign policy is the cause, why do we not see a wide spread response? To make an analogy: conservatives often argue that pornography leads to violence (in fact, it does the opposite) – but surely, there can be no causal connection by the simple fact that most people can enjoy pornography without grabbing an axe. Even in the West – just think about: a lot of people oppose American foreign policy. They don’t start jumping for AK47s and start supporting Al Qaeda.

And again, the academic support for what I am saying is clear (the support for what is the cause is in the aforementioned 9/11 post). Robert Pape claims to have evidence that occupation leads to suicide terrorism – except his thesis has been thoroughly discredited: the statistics are selective, the thesis inconsistent and stretched to find America at odds. Max Boot has discredited his “study” enough and I would have nothing to add to continue to talk about Pape’s polemics. I would just give one example from Boot of why Pape’s thesis is nonsensical. Over 12,000 people have been killed in Pakistan by Islamist terrorists – and yet there is no occupation. Pape’s answer should have everyone in hysterics: “the alliance between Pakistan and the United States evolved into—what is better termed—an indirect occupation.”

The drone programme also provides another opportunity to put the hypothesis to the test. I have already quoted two studies on how the drone programme has not led to “blowback.” The Washington Post recently claimed that the drone campaign in Yemen is “increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesmen to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States.” This was based on “20 interviews with tribal leaders, victims’ relatives, human rights activists and officials from four provinces.”

Except, this does not seem to be the end of the matter – Christopher Swift disagrees in an article published in Foreign Affairs. Swift interviewed “40 interviews with tribal leaders, Islamist politicians, Salafist clerics, and other sources.” His conclusions are vastly different from the Washington Post’s:

As a group, they were older, more conservative, and more skeptical of U.S. motives. They were less urban, less wealthy, and substantially less secular. But to my astonishment, none of the individuals I interviewed drew a causal relationship between U.S. drone strikes and al Qaeda recruiting. Indeed, of the 40 men in this cohort, only five believed that U.S. drone strikes were helping al Qaeda more than they were hurting it.

Both studies are limited because they are based on interviews not data on recruitment, attacks and American drone activity. That said, if I had to choose one of these two, I would naturally go with the study with the larger sample. So do I think that “when a U.S. drone missile kills a child in Yemen [or anywhere else mentioned above], the father will go to war with you, guaranteed”? Nope. 

Seumas Milne on Drones

I thought I’d get back into blogging with an easy post. It’s quite easy for me to find an article by Seumas Milne and quickly fisk it in my head – not because of any great skill that I have but simply because the man is a propagandist. His articles are misleading, filled with falsehoods and driven by an ideological zeal that means almost every single paragraph is filled with multiple lines of crap.

So, I thought I’d start with Milne’s latest article on drone strikes. For convenience, I’ve moved some of the paragraphs around where I can respond to them together. I’ve had to cut out some of the stuff because of space – but I’ve addressed all his substantive points. Milne writes: 

More than a decade after George W Bush launched it, the "war on terror" was supposed to be winding down. US military occupation of Iraq has ended and Nato is looking for a way out of Afghanistan, even as the carnage continues. But another war – the undeclared drone war that has already killed thousands – is now being relentlessly escalated. 

Except that nobody expected it to wind down. All the statements of the officials at the time and since point to a long, ideological drive against Al Qaeda and its allies. On September 17^th 2001, President Bush told Pentagon officials that “It's going to take a long time to win this war.” On September 20^th, the President said “this war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion” but a “lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen.” 

Donald Rumsfeld stated just 8 days later that Americans should “forget about 'exit strategies'; we're looking at a sustained engagement that carries no deadlines." Robert Gates stated “many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity” referring to it as a “generational campaign” that Vice President Dick Cheney said the War “like other great duties in history, it will require decades of patient effort.”

Milne refers to the “carnage continuing” in Afghanistan. This is arguably untrue: NATO figures show that there was a 9% reduction in violence throughout the country and in areas where the fighting increased, NATO had gone on the offensive. Civilian deaths in the last 4 months have dropped 21%. There was a 2011 UN report which suggested a significant rise but their figures included arrests, searches and “intimidation” as “security incidents.” This is not to suggest that everything is fine or the NATO figures are sacrosanct but that it’s not as one-sided as Milne always argues. 

Milne is also wrong by calling the drone campaign “undeclared.” John Brennan, an Obama official, clearly stated that “the United States Government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qa’ida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones.” The administration has not only acknowledged the policy, but defended it many times. 

From Pakistan to Somalia, CIA-controlled pilotless aircraft rain down Hellfire missiles on an ever-expanding hit list of terrorist suspects – they have already killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians in the process. Since 2004, between 2,464 and 3,145 people are reported to have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan, of whom up to 828 were civilians (535 under Obama) and 175 children. Some Pakistani estimates put the civilian death toll much higher – plausibly, given the tendency to claim as "militants" victims later demonstrated to be nothing of the sort.

Yes, and the loss of civilian life is regrettable – but that does not make the campaign illegitimate. Al Qaeda operates in areas all over the world, they pose a threat not only to the regimes in which they live but to the West (more on the effectiveness of the strikes below). The official policy of the White House is that there must be a “near certainty” of no civilian deaths – or they must gain President Obama’s approval. Admittedly, I have a problem with the fact that the administration considers all men of military age combatants. 

However, even when we look to the independent figures for the civilians killed, the number is remarkably low (keeping in mind that when operating in Pakistan, the population is quite dense). At the low end, the Long War Journal has 138 civilians being killed from 2006-2012. According to Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann who use “reliable press accounts” 80% of those killed have been militants and 2010 that figure rose to 95%. 

At least 15 drone strikes have been launched in Yemen this month, as many as in the whole of the past decade, killing dozens; while in Pakistan, a string of US attacks has been launched against supposed "militant" targets in the past week, incinerating up to 35 people and hitting a mosque and a bakery.

Yes – but killing who? In Yemen, the civilian death rate in 56 out of more 240 militants killed according to the Long War Journal. The example of the mosque does nothing to further Milne’s point either. As the report which he links to notes, “Uzbek insurgents made up the majority of the fatalities from the strike.” Meaning that like other terrorists around the world, they are using places of worship, civilian centres as a shield for their own military purpose. Milne’s unsurprising response is not to attack those individuals, but the United States. 

The US president insisted recently that the civilian death toll was not a "huge number". Not on the scale of Iraq, perhaps, where hundreds of thousands were killed; or Afghanistan, where tens of thousands have died. But they gruesomely include dozens killed in follow-up attacks after they had gone to help victims of earlier strikes – as well as teenagers like Tariq Khan, a 16-year-old Pakistani boy decapitated in a strike last November after he had travelled to Islamabad to protest against drones. 

Yes – but who is killing in Iraq and Afghanistan? According to a study by King’s College London looking at civilian deaths from 2003-2008 concludes that of the 92,000 civilians deaths recorded by Iraq Body Count, 12% were attributable to coalition forces. 74% were carried out by “unknown perpertrators” described as “are those who target civilians (i.e., no identifiable military target is present), while appearing indistinguishable from civilians.” This classing encompasses “suicide bombers... sectarian combatants and Anti-Coalition combatants.” A further 11% were carried out by identifiable “anti-coalition forces.”

In Afghanistan, “tens of thousands” of civilians have not died. At the high end, the figure is 14,700 and the low end is 12,500. And again – every single report, every single statistic notes that almost all of these are killed by the Taliban or its allies. Civilian deaths caused by pro-government forces decreased by 24% from 2009-2010, making them responsible for 15% of civilian casualties. UN figures show that only 9% of the civilians killed in 2012 were attributable to coalition forces. 

By the way, Tariq Khan was killed by a drone strike but according to American officials, he was a militant. Is this true? I don’t know but I think I’d tell my readers about it – even if I was going to dismiss it. 

But, as the destabilisation of Pakistan and growth of al-Qaida in Yemen shows, the impact remains the same. The drone war is a predatory war on the Muslim world, which is feeding hatred of the US – and fuelling terror, not fighting it. 

Of course Milne provides no empirical evidence for such a claim. Johnston and Sarbahi (2012) in their analysis of the relevant data find that “drone strikes are associated with decreases in both the frequency and thelethality of militant attacks overall and in IED and suicide attacks specifically.” Jaeger and Siddique (2011) find "strong negative impacts of unsuccessful drone strikes on Taliban violence in Pakistan, showing thedeterrent effects are quite strong." 

If, like Milne, you like anecdotal evidence – then there is much of it. Tariq Azam (Taliban official) has publically told the press that meetings in Pakistan have been driven underground. The same report notes that the terrorists now suspect eachother of being spies. Pakistani General Mehmood Ghayur “acknowledged the effectiveness of the American drone strikes against foreign militants” 

The day after last Friday's Houla massacre in Syria, eight members of one family were killed at home by a Nato air attack in eastern Afghanistan – one of many such atrocities barely registered in the western media. 

It says so much about Milne that he believes the intentional murder of 92 civilians by cutting their throats for the simple act of protesting an authoritarian is more newsworthy than the unintentional killing of 8 civilians. Both are tragic and should not have happened – but to condemn the press for allegedly not covering it (they did) and suggesting an equivalence is flat out wrong. It goes without saying that these civilian deaths in Afghanistan have not been confirmed by a UN monitoring body (as in Houla) but an Afghan official (which NATO is taking seriously).

The US's decision to step up the drone war again in Pakistan, opposed by both government and parliament in Islamabad as illegal and a violation of sovereignty, reflects its fury at the jailing of a CIA agent involved in the Bin Laden hunt and Pakistan's refusal to reopen supply routes for Nato forces in Afghanistan. Those routes were closed in protest at the US killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers last November, for which Washington still refuses to apologise.

But Pakistan’s consent has always been elusive. The Prime Minister was quoted as saying in 2008 that “I don't care if they do it, as long as they get the right people. We'll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it." President Zardari has also said that “Kill the seniors. Collateral damages worries you Americans. It does not worry me." Milne’s own paper alleged a secret deal about “violations of sovereignty” last year.


It is true that there have been more vocal condemnations and demands to stop the strikes in the last year. However, as the Associated Press noted there are still “mixed signals.” The Pakistani government, for example, qualified their condemnation by saying it “should be seen in light of the presence of Islamist militants on Pakistani soil.” The AP goes on to say that “many analysts believe some in the government still support the program at some level.”


But lets assume all elements of the Pakistani government want the drone strikes stopped unequivocally – so what? The strikes are significant in decreasing the threat that Al Qaeda and it allies proposes. If Pakistan is unable or unwilling to act, then the United States and its allies should not have to justify themselves to anyone. 


Milne mentions the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers. Firstly, before the incident with the 24 deaths, there was a similar incident the previous year. In that situation, a joint investigation found NATO at fault – and NATO apologised and supply routes were re-opened. In this case, an American investigation found no fault. It might be that the investigation is wrong – but Milne doesn’t even discuss the possibility. Also, he refers to the “US killing” – but doesn’t mention the context: a joint US-Afghan contingent. According to an Afghan official – it was the Afghan personnel who requested the strike after being fired on. 

Lawyers representing victims' families are now preparing legal actionagainst the British government – which carries out its own drone attacks in Afghanistan – for taking part in war crimes by passing GCHQ intelligence to the CIA for its "targeted killings".

Of course Milne has to involve Britain in some way for these apparent “war crimes.” Yet, he provides no evidence whatsoever to support his claim. In fact if you click on his second link in this paragraph, the care the British military takes in avoiding casualties is shown. The link states the following of several different operations:

[1] Over a period of approximately 8 hours the Reaper crew maintained ‘eyes on’ before eventually seizing the opportunity to strike [a “high value insurgent”] when there was no risk of civilian casualties or collateral damage. 

[2] The crew spotted 2 civilians, one of whom was identified as a child… Realising the danger the crew diverted the missile towards an area of scrub land where it detonated harmlessly

[3] Reaper released weapon against fast-moving target, firing on friendly forces – however weapon diverted to avoid civilian casualties

This is Milne’s own link. There is one incident listed where 4 Afghan civilians were killed but that was in targeting “two insurgents” and “a significant quantity of explosives being carried on the trucks.” And so far as involvement with the Americans goes – there is no reason why we should shy away. These strikes are effective and have low civilian casualties.