Don't send drones into Pakistan
Max Boot wants to send drones after the Taliban inside Pakistan:
'There have been a few drone strikes on the Haqqani Network in and around Waziristan, Pakistan, but none, so far as I am aware, on the Taliban leadership headquartered in Quetta, Pakistanâ??nor on the operational Taliban hub at Chaman, Pakistan, just across the border from southern Afghanistan. These groups are actively killing Americans all the timeâ??more than al-Qaeda Central can boast of these days. Yet we have not unleashed the CIA and Special Operations Forces to do to them what they have done to al-Qaeda. Why not? Largely because of the sensitivities of the Pakistani government which is an active sponsor of the Taliban and the Haqqanis.But so what? The Pakistanis have declining leverage over us; they have kept their supply line to Afghanistan closed since last fall and it has not seriously disrupted NATO operations. The administration needs to figure out whether itâ??s serious about leaving a more stable Afghanistan behind when the bulk of U.S. troops are withdrawn. If it is, it will unleash the Reapers against the Taliban and Haqqanisâ??not just against al-Qaeda.
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It's just as likely that U.S. efforts to expand the number of drone war targets would lead Pakistan to destabilize Afghanistan even more than it has already done. Drones can't defeat the Taliban insurgency. What they can do, at best, is pare back the leadership. But if that comes at the expense of enraging Pakistan, the gains would be quickly undermined. As Anatol Lieven has noted, Pakistan has indeed supported the Afghan Taliban but it has not equipped them with very powerful weaponry nor directed them to wage the kind of proxy war they could fight if the Pakistani military decided it wanted to (aka what happened to the Soviets during their Afghan occupation).
The end result of this strategy would be to turn Afghanistan into a proxy-war battlefield between the CIA and ISI at a time when the CIA should be focused on keeping whatever's left of al-Qaeda from rearing its head. Utopian schemes of an Afghanistan free of Taliban or Pakistani influence shouldn't get in the way (again) of a more limited and achievable goal.
A wider drone campaign against sensitive Pakistani targets also enhances the risks of destabilizing Pakistan, which would be an absolute disaster for U.S. interests for reasons that should be clear to everyone.
(AP Photo)