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Drone strikes are carried out with the collaboration and encouragement of local governments, and make those countries safer.

US drone strikes help countries fight terrorist threats to their own domestic peace and stability, including al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan, al-Shabaab in Somalia, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, and al Qaeda in the Maghreb in Algeria and Mali.

On Aug. 21, 2020, for example, acting in cooperation with the Somali National Army, a US drone strike killed a “high-ranking” al-Shabab bomb and IED maker. [144]

Yemen’s President, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, has openly praised drone strikes in his country, stating that the “electronic brain’s precision is unmatched by the human brain.” [34]

In a 2008 State Department cable made public by Wikileaks, Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani asked US officials for more drone strikes, and in Apr. 2013 former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf acknowledged to CNN that his government had secretly signed off on US drone strikes. [35] [36] In Pakistan, where the vast majority of drone strikes are carried out, drones contributed to a major decrease in violence. The 41 suicide attacks in Pakistan in 2011 were down from a record high of 87 in 2009, which coincided with an over ten-fold increase in the number of drone strikes. [37]

After the Jan. 2020 strike that killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Major General Soleimani in Iran, President Donald Trump stated, “Soleimani has been perpetrating acts of terror to destabilize the Middle East for the last 20 years… Just recently, Soleimani led the brutal repression of protestors in Iran, where more than a thousand innocent civilians were tortured and killed by their own government… The future belongs to the people of Iran — those who seek peaceful coexistence and cooperation — not the terrorist warlords who plunder their nation to finance bloodshed abroad.” [145]

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