Drone Strikes Research Articles

Combat Drones: Hives, Swarms, and Autonomous Action?

From both jus ad bellum and jus in bello perspectives, the lawfulness of unmanned aerial vehicle/combat drone strikes have been examined extensively but not yet exhaustively. Recent advances in technology allow combat drones to operate as a swarm—similar to their vespidae counterparts. An overly simplistic conclusion would suggest that the current legal tapestry applicable to solo drone usage would ‘automatically’ apply to drones acting collectively or as a swarm. This article, however, posits a more controversial position that the technological uniqueness of individual drones acting as a swarm necessitates a more thorough deconstruction of the applicable legal framework. In other words, does the unique way in which a swarm operates lawfully comply with both jus ad bellum and jus in bello parameters? Crucial to this discussion, is to examine the extent to which a swarm is programmed both offensively and defensively—with a view to exploring the algorithm of an automated response from other drones within the swarm. Within this broader question, the article seeks to scrutinise two specific areas. First, to what extent is the drone swarm’s architecture calibrated to comply with the cardinal self-defence parameters of necessity and proportionality should the swarm be attacked? And secondly, is the ‘swarm’ capable of being fully jus in bellow compliant in terms of distinction and proportionality and the duty to take precautions (‘The General Principles’). Would, for example, the chain of command structure in a drone swarm encompass the concept of the ‘reasonable military commander’ when it comes to targeting? The purpose of this article is not to reopen, or indeed close the debate surrounding artificial intelligence and its ethical implications. Rather, it is to seek to open further discussion surrounding the applicability of 20th century legal thresholds to 21st century phenomena and beyond.

Totalitarian tendencies in drone strikes by states

ABSTRACTLethal drones or unmanned combat aerial vehicles have been used to kill thousands of persons suspected of complicity in terrorism. Despite concerns aired by legal scholars that drone strikes outside areas of active hostilities violate international law, the US government contends that targeted killing is distinct from assassination, and has persisted in the practice to the point where it has become normalised as a standard operating procedure and taken up by other nations as well. Drone strikes have been championed by Western politicians as a “light footprint” approach to war, but the institutional apparatus of remote-control killing rests on totalitarian, not democratic principles. Secretive targeting criteria and procedures are withheld from citizens under a pretext of national security, resulting in a conflation of executive with judicial authority and an inversion of the burden of proof, undermining the very framework of universal human rights said to be championed by modern Western states. Moreover, lethal drones hovering above in the sky threaten all persons on the ground with the arbitrary termination of their lives and as such represent a form of terrorism no less than the suicide bombings of jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Sheltering the president from blame: Drone strikes, media assessments and heterogeneous responsibility 2002–2014

This article presents the first systematic analysis of how location of drone strikes and the identification of civilian or terrorist casualties in newspaper reporting affect media assessments of operational outcomes and elite responsibility. Conducting a content analysis of several hundred newspaper articles, we evaluate the likelihood of these newspapers identifying the civilian casualties, the role those casualties play in media assessments of operational outcomes, and who they blame for failure. We found that there were significant differences in the likelihood of the two newspapers reporting civilian casualties. We demonstrate that political elites including the US President tended to avoid blame for failure, with much of the focus of newspaper dissatisfaction being directed at the intelligence agencies. We believe these findings have serious ramifications for the democratic oversight for future warfare and have the potential to undermine the ability of public to constrain elites from launching military operations using drones.

“A Work of Mourning: Criticism after Nasser Hussain”

This article recalls and recounts Nasser Hussain’s unique manner of thinking. Focusing on several texts that reflect the extraordinary range of his curiosity and erudition – the book The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (2003), and two articles, “Hyperlegality” (2007), and “The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike” (2013), as well as a co-authored Amici Curiae brief in support of the petitioners in the case of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. (2011) – the article discusses three areas where Hussain’s work makes the greatest impact: history, jurisprudence, and critique.

Gender, Vulnerability, and the Optics of Violence: The Case of Afiya Siddiqui

Gender, Vulnerability, and the Optics of ViolenceThe Case of Afiya Siddiqui Khanum Shaikh (bio) To call the frame into question is to show that the frame never quite contained the scene it was meant to limn, that something was already outside, which made the very sense of the inside possible, recognizable. The frame never quite determined precisely what it is that we see, think, recognize, and apprehend. Something exceeds the frame that troubles our sense of reality; in other words, something occurs that does not conform to our established understanding of things. Judith Butler, Frames of War, 9 introduction In March 2003 the FBI issued an alert requesting information about Afiya Siddiqui, a Muslim woman of Pakistani origin who had been living in the United States since 1990. The FBI alert claimed that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad—one of the masterminds of the 911 attacks on the US—had implicated Siddiqui as someone who had provided administrative support for Al-Qaeda operations in the US. This was the first time the FBI had issued a notice linking a woman with Al-Qaeda’s operations. Then Attorney General John Ashcroft named Siddiqui as one of the seven most wanted Al-Qaeda fugitives and described her as “armed and dangerous” and as a “terrorist facilitator.”1 The US media also began circulating Siddiqui’s name, referring to her often as “Lady Al-Qaeda” or “Al-Qaeda Mom” or “Mata Hari of Al-Qaeda,” and casting her as a dangerous female terrorist.2 Seven years later, in 2010, a US criminal court convicted Siddiqui for attempted assault against US Army personnel in Afghanistan. What is especially noteworthy about this case is that Siddiqui was never charged with or convicted of terrorist activity, even as she has continued to [End Page 29] serve an eighty-six-year prison sentence for her criminal conviction since 2010 at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Fort Worth, Texas. Siddiqui’s controversial case animated two contrasting discourses about Muslim women in the war on terror in the US and in Pakistan. In the US criminal case Siddiqui emerged as a threat to US national security and as a potentially dangerous agent of violence with links to global terrorist networks. Conversely, in Pakistan, her trial ignited a movement of protest among religio-political groups who deemed the criminal trial to be a cover-up for her enforced abduction and secret detention in joint US-Pakistan counterterrorism operations. In these mobilizations, Siddiqui is deployed as an injured and pious daughter of Pakistan who has suffered violations at the hand of US imperial power and its collaborations with a corrupt and weak Pakistani state rather than as an agent of violence herself. In this essay I juxtapose the mobilizations of Afiya Siddiqui as a deeply violated victim-subject of the war on terror among her supporters in Pakistan, on the one hand, with her emergence in the US criminal trial as an agent of violence and a threat to US national security, on the other. My review draws on feminist analyses of nationalism and nationalist movements and the centrality of the gendered body to the articulation of religio-political and nationalist projects.3 In Pakistan I examine the political and emotional force of her deployment within an “Islam vs. West” binary that posits Siddiqui’s imprisonment in the US as Western domination over an emasculated Pakistani state, and her recovery as a religious and moral obligation. I also build on Ramzi Kassem’s analysis of the gendered erasures in the war on terror, in which he examines how the US government’s strategy of regulating the optics of the violence in the extraterritorial front of the war on terror (i.e., its policies of rendition, detentions in secret prisons, interrogation practices, civilian deaths by drone strikes, etc.) is central to it self-production as a beacon of women’s rights, human rights, and democracy. To consider how various moments in her US trial produce her as a “possibly terrorist” subject who does not elicit sympathy, I draw on Judith Butler’s analysis of the mechanisms through which certain populations are “cast as threats to human life as we know it rather...

Internally Displaced Persons: Impacts of the US Drone Strikes and Operation Zarb-I-Azb in FATA

Internally Displaced Persons: Impacts of the US Drone Strikes and Operation Zarb-I-Azb in FATA

“What Matters Now”: Reading Fanon’s Call for Decolonization and Humanization in the Contemporary United States

“What Matters Now”: Reading Fanon’s Call for Decolonization and Humanization in the Contemporary United States Courtney L. Gildersleeve (bio) In a passage from the “Conclusion” of The Wretched of the Earth,1 some of Frantz Fanon’s last printed words before his death in 1961, he cautions his comrades throughout the decolonizing world against adopting any aspects of the model through which “a particular Europe” had long brutalized humanity.2 Fanon identifies colonialism and capitalism, and the racism and racialized violence on which they are predicated, as systems that must be thoroughly overcome for human life to persist, making clear that the work of decolonization is not complete after formal independence. With a palpable sense of urgency, he writes: What matters now is not a question of profitability, not a question of increased productivity, not a question of production rates. . . . It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it. The notion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him. (Fanon 2004, 238) [End Page 24] Speaking from his lived knowledge of the colonial order in Martinique, Algeria, and France, Fanon advocates a categorical rejection of colonialism at all levels of society, and within the body and mind of the human being. As we see in the passage, this task crucially involves renouncing a capitalist notion of progress. Such efforts would inaugurate a radical transformation, ultimately effecting, in Fanon’s words, the creation of a “new man.” Fanon’s work resonates strongly today because “not dragging man in directions which mutilate him” arguably remains a “very basic question.” From ongoing drone strikes, to mass deportations, to military occupation, to assaults on basic social services, to various forms of terrorism, not only can one name countless instances of the breaking of human bodies and minds, and the destruction of lives, but the “mutilation of the human” seems to stand as a dominant feature of this age.3 It is not enough, however, simply to lament the current state of the world, in which the dehumanizing conditions that Fanon so fiercely contested in his work and his life persist. We know that his methodology, grounded in psychiatric practice, involves a precise naming of the ills of a society and an attempt to diagnose their origin, and, as a revolutionary, taking actions to fundamentally transform what causes harm. With regard to the still-existing colonial rule in his time, Fanon theorized what one might call the corrective role of violence in destroying colonialism. Rather than assert an absolute position toward Fanon’s analysis of violence, much less speak of violence in abstract terms, I want to locate this matter within another core preoccupation of his work. Coming to Fanon with a concern for the current proliferation of extreme brutality, but wary of merely moralistic appeals to nonviolence, what I am most interested in highlighting is the capacious notion of human agency that his work develops, and of which violence is but one part. When he states that “the dreams of the colonial subject are dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality,” Fanon identifies that fundamental to colonialism’s pathology is a reliance on inhibiting, even destroying, the mobility and agential capacity of a whole group or groups of people (2004, 15). It is such petrification—and the means of reproducing it—that must be challenged. One of the most generative aspects of Fanon’s work is his advocacy of human agency—his foregrounding of the human as a being who can act in and upon the world, and in history. For one thing, this way of thinking presents an antidote against the threat of powerlessness that one might experience before the problems of our time, and arguably [End Page 25] against systems of oppression at large. In this spirit, and in order to move beyond a general commentary on the unjust global order, another moment in the “Conclusion” begs our attention. In urging his comrades in the anti-colonial struggle to choose a path...

International Media’s Take on Drone Strikes in Pakistan: Analysis of Newsweek, The Economist, and Time Magazines

International Media’s Take on Drone Strikes in Pakistan: Analysis of Newsweek, The Economist, and Time Magazines

Elite Pakistan Press Discourse on US Drone Policy

Scholars in the arena of media and communication have paid attention to the news framing of the controversial US drone policy in the post 9/11 mainly from the Western media perspectives. Scant scholarly heed has been given to examine the media framing of the US drone strikes from the national media perspectives of the targeted countries. The current study attempts to build on the existing scholarship on US drone policy by exploring the news media framing in two elite national newspapers of Pakistan. Using inductive framing as methodological approach and qualitative analysis as methodology, the study analyzed the editorial discourse in the selected dailies on the US drones. The findings reveal that both the newspapers covered the drones using strikingly different frames. The Daily Times constructed the discourse on US drones using the efficacy frame predominantly- that the drones are effective and doing ‘good job’ against the militants. The Express Tribune framed the drones as violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and counterproductive. The discussion elaborates the possible factors for the differential framing of US drones in the two national dailies of Pakistan.

Disrupting “all the familiar geometry”: Drones, Settler Colonialism, and Nasser Hussain’s Difficult Questions

U.S. citizens rarely feel implicated in the harm caused by the U.S.’s widespread use of drones, and both drones’ opponents and proponents focus on value calculus of their usage. Nasser Hussain’s “Phenomenology of a Drone Strike” looks at the problem from the wider angle of the harm continuous use of drones wages on affected communities. This article links inattention to drones’ effects to a related blind spot, “settler common sense”: the way non-native settler colonial subjects rely on framings of the world that normalize settlement as the background truth against which experience of the world is interpreted – and thereby render invisible other possible framings of justice and resistance. If U.S. citizens do not feel implicated in ongoing injustice toward Native Americans, how did that denial become possible? Looking at this problem may help us understand something about our capacity to ignore the use of drones as instruments of terror. In turn, Hussain’s points about how drones are experienced on either side of their usage may help us understand something about settler common sense and indigenous resistance.

Carl Schmitt’s politics in the age of drone strikes: examining the Schmittian texture of Obama’s enemy

When George Bush declared to his global audience that they were either ‘with us or against us’, he appeared to directly invoke the Schmittian antithesis of friend vs. enemy. Against the historical backdrop of Bush’s war on terror, and the scholarly attention his foreign policy received in relation to Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, this paper examines whether the Obama administration’s targeted killing regime has marked a departure from Schmitt’s paradigms of war and enmity. Focusing specifically upon the rapid increase in use of drone strikes during Barack Obama’s presidency, this paper argues that the production of the enemy’s abstractness and drive for its annihilation together push at the limits of the Schmittian political logic. However, rather than denoting the point at which political relations are unexplainable through a Schmittian lens, this paper proposes that this produced enemy and its treatment in drone ‘warfare’ obfuscates the lines between a complex of Schmittian paradigms.

Drone Deaths Violate Human Rights: The Applicability of the iccpr to Civilian Deaths Caused by Drones

This article argues that the thousands of lethal drone strikes conducted since 2001 violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (iccpr), and in particular, the right to life. The analysis provided is also applicable to the right to life enshrined in customary international law and regional human rights treaties. While most legal and academic commentary on deaths caused by drones has focused on an international humanitarian law (ihl) framework—perhaps because the primary weaponised drone user, the United States, insists that this is the appropriate legal context—this article argues that a human rights framework for assessing lethal drone strikes is preferable, useful, and necessary. Not only is it likely that the so-called war on terror is a semantic rather than a legal war, the iccpr continues to apply during conflict. Moreover, opacity surrounds most lethal drone strikes, which the Trump administration appears likely to increase, while simultaneously reducing Obama-era safeguards. In that context, a human rights assessment, which will be inherently more stringent towards fatalities than an ihl framework, is urgently needed. The article concludes that the right to life attaches to everyone regardless of the territory in which they are targeted; that effective jurisdiction and control is satisfied upon ability to lethally target an individual; that relevant iccpr rights apply in ungoverned territories as well; and that the threat of terrorism does not displace these rights or the applicability of the iccpr.

Presidential Policy Guidance: Procedures for Approving Direct Action Against Terrorist Targets Located Outside The United States and Areas of Active Hostilities

With the rise of terrorist threats emanating from outside the territory of the United States and simultaneous advancements in armed drone technology, the United States began a rapidly escalating lethal drone program in the years after 9/11. While the first U.S. drone strike occurred in Yemen in 2002 during the George W. Bush administration, President Barack Obama dramatically increased the number of drone strikes during his first term.

Perception of Foreign Drone Strikes by Citizens: The Context of US Drone Strikes in Pakistan

Since the start of US drone strikes in 2004–2005, these remotely piloted drone aircraft have been a subject of discussions internationally, especially at the UN. Previous studies have reported the effectiveness of US drone strikes in countering terrorism, and large public support in Pakistan for such measures. Contrasting with previous work on the subject, this research found that sentiments of reprisal were aimed against the Pakistan government, its armed forces including anti-US and anti-NATO feelings. This is in addition to the existence of some negative attitudes against local extremists and terrorists as well.

How Drone Strikes and a Fake Vaccination Program Have Inhibited Polio Eradication in Pakistan: An Analysis of National Level Data.

This article investigates whether the United States' counterinsurgency operations have inhibited polio eradication efforts in northwestern Pakistan, the world's last major reservoir of polio. Anecdotal evidence suggests that militants disrupt polio vaccination programs because of suspicions that campaigns are a cover for gathering intelligence on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) drone targets. This paper analyzes national-level quantitative data to test this argument. Between 2004 and 2012, the number of polio cases in Pakistan closely mirrored the number of drone strikes. But from 2013 onward, polio cases increased while drone strikes fell. This can be explained by the CIA's use of a fake immunization campaign in a failed attempt to obtain the DNA of Osama bin Laden's relatives prior to his assassination in 2011. This seemingly vindicated militants' suspicions that vaccination programs were a cover for espionage. Militants consequently intensified their disruption of immunization campaigns, resulting in an increase in polio cases in Pakistan, as well as in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. For politicians and military planners, drones are attractive because they are said to harm fewer civilians than conventional methods of warfare. However, this paper demonstrates that drone strikes had negative effects on the well-being of civilians in Pakistan and further afield because they undermined global efforts to eradicate polio.

Toward a Comprehensive Solution? Yemen's Two-Year Peace Process

In the two years since Yemeni president 'Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi called on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to intervene against the expanding threat of the Huthi insurgency in March 2015, the conflict in Yemen has left more than 7,500 killed and another 18.8 million in need of humanitarian aid. The GCC-led intervention is only the latest phase of conflict in Yemen, which in the last 15 years has witnessed a string of armed rebellions in the north from 2004 to 2010, experienced a southern insurgency after 2009, and been the theater of American drone strikes on suspected al-Qa'ida affiliates since 2002. In addition to the GCC, Hadi also called on the United Nations Security Council to issue a resolution in support of the intervention. After 20 days of arguing, the Security Council issued Resolution 2216, demanding that Ansar Allah withdraw from captured cities, relinquish their arms, and cease any role in governance.

Dehumanization increases instrumental violence, but not moral violence

Across five experiments, we show that dehumanization-the act of perceiving victims as not completely human-increases instrumental, but not moral, violence. In attitude surveys, ascribing reduced capacities for cognitive, experiential, and emotional states to victims predicted support for practices where victims are harmed to achieve instrumental goals, including sweatshop labor, animal experimentation, and drone strikes that result in civilian casualties, but not practices where harm is perceived as morally righteous, including capital punishment, killing in war, and drone strikes that kill terrorists. In vignette experiments, using dehumanizing compared with humanizing language increased participants' willingness to harm strangers for money, but not participants' willingness to harm strangers for their immoral behavior. Participants also spontaneously dehumanized strangers when they imagined harming them for money, but not when they imagined harming them for their immoral behavior. Finally, participants humanized strangers who were low in humanity if they imagined harming them for immoral behavior, but not money, suggesting that morally motivated perpetrators may humanize victims to justify violence against them. Our findings indicate that dehumanization enables violence that perpetrators see as unethical, but instrumentally beneficial. In contrast, dehumanization does not contribute to moral violence because morally motivated perpetrators wish to harm complete human beings who are capable of deserving blame, experiencing suffering, and understanding its meaning.

The Obama administration’s conceptual change: Imminence and the legitimation of targeted killings

AbstractStarting in 2010, the Obama administration engaged in an effort to justify drone strikes relying on the concept of ‘imminence’. The aim of this article is to understand the reasons behind such insistence and to assess the administration’s efforts at conceptual change. Building on Skinner’s and Bentley’s work, the article argues that the administration has followed an ‘innovating ideologist’ strategy. The analysis shows how waves of criticisms exposed the administration to a key contradiction between its rhetoric of change that emphasised international law and the need for aggressive counterterrorism. Reacting to this criticism, the administration has relied on imminence due to its connection with legitimate uses of force, while working to change the criteria for the concept, causing a shift away from imminent as ‘immediate.’ Reassessing Skinner’s place in IR, the article identifies conceptual change as a lens to assess foreign policy rhetoric and practice. The analysis emphasises the connection between actors’ intentions, beliefs, and practices. It highlights the importance of criticism in engendering contradictions, exploring why only some criticisms are confronted. Finally, the article develops an original typology of the limits confronted by the innovating ideologist and methods to assess whether the actor has respected them.

Ordering without bordering: drones, the unbordering of late modern warfare and ontological insecurity

ABSTRACTBorders – both physical and otherwise – are seen to be on the rise, but in late modern warfare, a complex process of unbordering can be observed in drone warfare. Targeted killings through drone strikes have changed the battlespace, made physical occupation unnecessary and rendered the Westphalian border as contingent and arbitrary. Furthermore, drones perform a complex form of ordering without borders in unruly spaces imbued with uncertainty, violence and danger. This article examines the intersection of bordering, drones and ontological security through the CIA-led U.S. drone strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northwest Pakistan. It examines the relationship between drone warfare and ontological security, specifically the effects produced by postcolonial unbordering and ordering. For the liberal state, drones provide a sense of ontological security and cohere with liberal values because they are deemed precise and ethical weapons that avoid collateral damage and protect military personnel, without the costs of occupation. Yet drone strikes create deep insecurity within postcolonial borderspaces, impacting communities already subject to multiple forms and legacies of power and control. This article argues that drone warfare has complex implications for bordering/unbordering practices in late modern warfare as well as hierarchical ontological insecurity in postcolonial and liberal subjects.

A Marriage Estranged: The Strategic Disconnect between Pakistan and the United States

A Marriage Estranged:The Strategic Disconnect between Pakistan and the United States Moeed Yusuf (bio) Like a bad marriage that holds together only because the couple deems divorce to be cost-prohibitive, the United States and Pakistan remain locked in a deeply distrustful relationship. Both sides regularly accuse the other of being an insincere partner and complain of being cheated. Yet Pakistan remains a major non-NATO ally, and the two states continue to seek ways to overcome their differences to fight terrorism. U.S.-Pakistan relations frayed considerably in the last eighteen months of the Obama administration. With President Donald Trump's entry into the mix, Pakistanis sensed an opportunity to work with an administration that seems to have no preconceived South Asia policy. But progress will not be easy. The roots of U.S.-Pakistan tensions in recent years lie in the most canonical principle of interstate relations: a fundamental divergence of priorities and self-perceived interests. Each country's policies in pursuit of its interests, perfectly rational in its own mind, have been antithetical to the other's vision for South Asia. But both sides have been reluctant to acknowledge this situation—perhaps concerned that doing so would unleash the dangers associated with a total rupture in ties. This essay will examine the divergence in U.S. and Pakistani interests and consider the prospect for improved relations during the Trump administration. Real Divergences, Real Consequences Since September 11, the United States' most urgent priority in Pakistan's neighborhood has been to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Its principal long-term strategic interest lies in cementing its burgeoning alliance with India as a means of checking China's rise. Pakistan's foreign and security policy, on the other hand, is shaped by the perennially hostile relationship with India. Throughout the country's 70-year history, the Pakistani military has tried to ensure a semblance of parity with its eastern neighbor. This has been Pakistan's insurance policy against any Indian aggression that could threaten the state's collapse. [End Page 46] During the Cold War, Pakistan used the United States to bolster its economy and military capability against Soviet-leaning India. Pakistan's India calculus has not moved since this time, but the United States' strategy has flipped. And herein lies the problem. The United States and India are now engaged in a multifaceted strategic partnership that is reinforcing India's rise. In Afghanistan, the United States has invested trillions of dollars to transform the country from a safe haven for anti-U.S. terrorist groups responsible for the September 11 attacks to a peaceful, democratic state. To achieve this goal, it created the NATO-trained and -backed 350,000-strong Afghan National Security Force, partnered with political forces opposed to the Taliban, and leveraged international economic support for Afghanistan. India has emerged as a key partner. It has pledged over $2 billion in assistance, making it Afghanistan's fifth-largest donor, and was the first country to sign a security pact with Afghanistan.1 Pakistan was pivotal for this U.S. vision in Afghanistan—without Pakistan, no victory was possible there. Pakistan provided the United States with subsidized transit facilities, deployment of over 100,000 troops to its western frontier to fight anti-U.S. terrorists who had crossed into Pakistan's border regions after the September 11 attacks, and significant intelligence cooperation on groups like al Qaeda. But this cooperation did not extend to the Afghan Taliban. U.S. policymakers offered several incentives to gain Pakistan's full support in Afghanistan while simultaneously trying to ensure Pakistan's internal stability. These included over $30 billion in monetary assistance, support to Pakistan's internal counterterrorism operations, direct use of aerial power through drone strikes against militants in the border regions, and signals of a long-term commitment to Pakistan that entailed broadening the conversation beyond Afghanistan and terrorism to economic and development issues through a "strategic dialogue" process. Such U.S. assistance helped Pakistan immensely—from critical budget support in times of economic crisis to much-needed resources to fight domestic terrorists. But behind the veil of the two countries' crucial tactical cooperation remained...