Why focused air strikes don’t always work

You never know if you killed the guy you were after or not. My colleague Eli Lake has the goods:

A key al Qaeda military planner thought dead by the United States and Pakistan gave an interview this week to a Pakistani reporter, illustrating the uncertainties of a military strategy based on air strikes by unmanned drones.

Major U.S. news media reported that Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri was killed Sept. 7 by a predator drone strike, quoting U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials. But some of those officials are reassessing their judgment after a man identified as Kashmiri gave an interview to the Asia Times.

“While there were preliminary indications that Kashmiri may have been dead, there is now reason to believe that he could be alive,” a senior U.S. official told The Washington Times on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing intelligence matters. “It’s not always an open-and-shut case.”

Look: I get that people want to pull troops out of Afghanistan because it’s a lost cause or whatever — largely for all the same reasons they wanted to pull troops out of Iraq before the surge (largely) pacified that country. But we shouldn’t pretend, as withdrawal advocates are wont to do, that we can achieve anything near what we want to through airpower alone. Air strikes are relatively unreliable, especially when they aren’t accompanied by boots on the ground to check in on the end result.

Interestingly enough, the completely derivative and silly (and, admittedly, kind of fun) movie “Eagle Eye” made this point: the events in that movie are set into motion by a failed airstrike that targeted the wrong person. I don’t think we should take our military cues from the entertainment industry, but it’s a helpful illustration of an oft-ignored fact: airstrikes against individual terrorists are a questionable strategy. Having men on the ground is far preferable.