And every dead innocent will grow us more Jihadis.
This keeps being said, but that's never been substantiated for those in the actual war zones. They're quite literally espousing Sun Tzu's
Art of War
by convincing their foes to not fight them with such arguments, and the West is eating it up. Look at what happened when ISIS didn't get dealt with early enough - they overran Western Iraq and stole hundreds of millions in gold as well as the armory in Mosul which gave them arms and equipment and the money to fund their armies. It also legitimized them as a force to followers worldwide and swelled their fighting ranks.
It's actually been a bigger problem for
Western
grown jihadis who cite that reason - of course, if people have more sympathy for actual terrorists getting killed in the name of religious unity that they would seek to commit terrorism within the country they grew up in, then I don't have a lot of sympathy for them when they do go overseas and get killed either
And on that note, the entire idea that bombing creates more jihadis has so many connotations of Western ideological superiority. Do you really think that people there are mindless and can't figure out whether their family members are truly innocent or not? Or that people can't figure out the nuances of such a war? They're not simpletons as people like to to paint them in broad strokes with
Look at the fanaticism of Japan during WW2 - they practically pioneered modern suicide tactics with kamikaze planes, human land mines, suicide charges, and fighting men who refuse to surrender - some even until the 1970s. Bombing and defeating them hasn't made generations of Japanese resentful to the West - instead, they're one of the closest partners to the West today.
And I'm sure people will downvote me for this, but this is such a strawman argument. The big issue is that those jihadists are already killing innocent civilians. You know who benefits most from not having airstrikes? The jihadists!
They're the ones who want free reign to subjugate people and kill those that oppose them. The idea that people should sit back and do nothing is exactly how ISIS came to power. The West and the Iraqi military did nothing when ISIS attacked Mosul with a small force - by taking Mosul, they took Iraq's second largest bank (and millions in gold bullion and money), its second largest armory (and tons of weapons and ammo), and legitimize its claims to a caliphate which drew tens of thousands of fighters and other groups to pledge allegiance to ISIS.
And worst of all, all the drone rhetoric in this thread isn't based in fact. It's a regurgitation of propaganda spread by militants and jihadists and yes, guilt-ridden Westerners, to get the West off their backs. Look at this source, which is frequently cited in drone threads:
Note their
methodology
- they even include jihadist websites and primarily draw on local sources, which vary considerably since they even admit that their local sources don't explicitly state if someone is a militant or not, or even if they are truly a child, using terms such as 'family member' or 'my child'
Even so, if you look at the numbers, here's the breakdown:
- 421 drone strikes in Pakistan since June 2004 or 3.4 drone strikes per month
- 107-127 drone strikes in Yemen since Nov 2002 or 0.75-.89 strikes per month
- 15-19 drone strikes in Somalia since Jan 2007 or 0.16-0.20 drone strikes per month
- 48 drone strikes in Afghanistan since Jan 2015 or 3.89 drone strikes per month
The tally of data when broken down by those killed/hurt per strike, tells quite a bit:
- In Pakistan, 5.88-9.47 killed per strike (1.0-2.3 civilians per strike, 0.41- 0.49 children per strike)
- In Yemen, 3.87-6.78 killed per strike (0.51-0.94 civilians per strike, 0.06-0.07 children per strike)
- In Somalia, 1.3-7.2 killed per strike (0-0.33 civilians per strike, 0 children per strike)
- In Afghanistan, 8.75-12.9 killed per strike (0.29-0.88 civilians per strike, 0-0.38 children per strike)
The ranges of people killed per strike seem to average/hover out around 6-7 per strike, which is consistent with the use of Hellfire missiles from drones (they're meant to be anti-tank weapons, not big explosions that level neighborhoods), and it really should put to rest the idea that drones are dropping bombs that can kill 100+ people at once.
The fluctuation in data between Pakistan's civilian death rate and those in Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan is unlikely to be due to drone operator error (the odds that operators in one country are a magnitude worse than other countries is unlikely, given uniformity in training and procedures) and must be looked at other factors, from Pakistan's demographic makeup/population density all the way to the possibility that due to the use of self-reported data, there is a lot more to gain from Pakistani militants (who have higher access to media than Somalia or Afghanistan) to claim higher civilian death tolls. In fact, this
examination of the sources used
goes into the ethical and methodological issues that many of these examinations of drone sources.
Of particular note is that the reliance on local sources to discern between "drone strikes" and airstrikes is impossible. The Pakistani Air Force has officially launched TEN TIMES as many airstrikes with F-16s in North Waziristan than 'reported drone strikes' and has dropped over 10,000 bombs there alone. Compare that to the grand total of 421 drone strikes in Pakistan in the past 11 years. The idea that a local source can discern between a drone strike and an F-16 airstrike is why it is imperative to examine these data points being thrown around on the Internet and not become a victim of propaganda.
What's ultimately wrong here is how many people quickly eat up unsubstantiated sources and data on drones, conflate that with the war on ISIS, then use it to justify no action which is precisely what the jihadists want to get free reign to execute civilians en masse, far more than any errant air strikes have caused, and to establish their caliphate.