Drones return

The normally-verbose Donald Trump has had precious little to say about Pakistan, either on the campaign trail or sign assuming the presidency. There was the notorious phone call with Nawaz Sharif where he called Pakistan a “fantastic country” but other than that his focus has been elsewhere. Now, with the Trump administration having carried out its first drone attack in Pakistan in Kurram Agency, we are seeing that a new dispensation in Washington rarely leads to new policies. Details so far are scarce but the drone attack killed two people, invariably described by the authorities as militants. Given the way the US government works, it is hard to ascertain what this drone strike signifies about Trump’s policy towards Pakistan. Drone strikes are requested by the US military based on its intelligence and the president routinely authorises whatever targets are presented to him. The deep state in the US has a way of always getting its way, which is why US foreign policy has stayed consistently militaristic no matter who the president is. Trump, it seems, will simply continue the policies put in place by George W Bush and Barack Obama before him.

There is the worry that Trump, who has based his whole persona on aggression and xenophobia, may decide to take the drone war to another level. In the last year of his presidency, Obama ordered only three drone strikes in Pakistan. This was a steep decline from the peak year of 2010 when there were close to a hundred drone attacks on Pakistani soil. The US was perhaps finally realising that drone strikes are counter-productive. That Pakistan itself was taking on militants in Fata with Operation Zarb-e-Azb also reduced the need for the US to strike unilaterally. But Trump is nothing if not unilateral. He has shown no regard for alliances and friendships, and has been effusive about American interests being aligned with India’s right now. Trump is really the capricious wild card in all this. That the US carried out a drone strike in Pakistan was very predictable. It’s what Trump may do next that will have everyone guessing.