Notable scholar Akbar S Ahmad on Saturday said that the United States’ drone paradigm is not working as aerial operations in pursuit of elusive al-Qaeda are fuelling militancy and adding to the woes of marginalised tribal societies.
Ahmed was speaking at the launch of his latest book The Thistle and the Drone at the Brookings Institution, where Pakistani writer Mowahid Hussain Shah and Editor-in-Chief of Washington Post Sally Quinn participated in a colloquium. Khalid Aziz, a Pakistani official, formerly in charge of Waziristan, offered recorded remarks via video.
In the book, Akbar Ahmed, who is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, draws on 40 case studies representing the global span of Islam to demonstrate how the US had become involved directly or indirectly in each of these societies.
“The United States has not been able to understand the tribal societies that in return do not understand the US,” he said. “The drones have become symbol of America’s war on terror but the Obama paradigm is not working,” said Ahmed, a former Pakistani high commissioner to the UK.
He disputed the claims that drone strikes were precise and did not kill many civilians and pointed out that the world was not paying attention to the sufferings of tribal people who were caught in chaos on the periphery.
In the book – which is the third volume of Ahmed’s trilogy examining relations between America and the Muslim world – the author argues that if there is a clash it is not between civilizations based on religion. “The war on terror has been conceptualised as a triangle formed by three points—the United States, the modern state within which the tribes live, and al Qaeda,” he said.
Mowahid Shah, who is a US Supreme Court attorney and Middle East expert, said by relying solely on the employment of force, the United States had lost the war on terror.
“Instead of fighting endless wars, Washington and other world powers need to address Kashmir and Palestinian disputes since they are at the heart of conflicts and turmoil besetting the world,” he said.
The two Pakistani scholars also reflected on the looming 2014 drawdown and future American engagement in the region. “The US cannot pack up and leave from Afghanistan,” Akbar Ahmed stressed, while explaining such an exit would hand over victory to the Taliban. “We need to rebuild structures that can contain violence,” Akbar added, while underscoring the need to approach the unrest with a political solution. He informed the gathering that the terrorists had killed 400 leaders in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
