Former Pakistan official to release report critical of drone campaign, noon March 28

A former Pakistan official will release a report that asserts that America's war on terror is a misguided effort that is effectively a war on tribal Islam at a Newsmaker at noon Thursday, March 28, in the Zenger room.

Former Pakistan High Commissioner Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, now a professor at American University, has completed a new study that claims to expose the reality of the U.S. drone campaign and turn the paradigm of the war on terror on its head.

In "The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam," Ahmed argues that America has been fighting the wrong war, with the wrong methods, against the wrong enemy.

Presenting case studies from Waziristan – a mountainous region in northwest Pakistan bordering on Afghanistan that is a focal point of the U.S. drone campaign – Ahmed recasts the war on terror as a struggle between Muslim tribes motivated by tribal codes of honor and revenge and governments that rely on military force to establish their authority.