This chapter examines issues of factual misinformation and misperception in the case of the US drone campaign in Pakistan. It first shows that, while the drone campaign is empirically quite precise and targeted, it is largely seen as indiscriminate throughout Pakistani society. In other words, there is a pervasive factual misperception about the nature of the drone strikes in Pakistan. Second, the chapter shows that this misperception is consequential. Notably, it shows that Pakistani perceptions of the inflated civilian casualties associated with the strikes are among the strongest drivers of opposition to them in the country. It also provides evidence suggesting that this anti-drone backlash fuels broader political alienation and violence in Pakistan. Finally, the chapter shows that these misbeliefs about drones (and the reactions they inspire) are not shared by local civilians living within the tribal areas where the incidents occur. In sum, the chapter demonstrates that factual misperceptions about US drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan are generally widespread and consequential in the country, but not in the areas that actually experience the violence.

Is my theory generalizable to other cases of British and Spanish colonial rule beyond India? I use historical data to show that the mechanisms of land and natural resource extraction and lower development seen in Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh in India are found in other cases. The British used indirect rule in the "frontier" areas in Pakistan and Myanmar, which created structural conditions for insurgency. Within Pakistan, the Tehrik-e-Taliban insurgency since the mid-2000s in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) has occurred in areas of erstwhile British indirect rule. In Myanmar, there have been multiple ethnic secessionist insurgencies in the periphery that were frontier areas of indirect rule. My theory can also be generalized to Spanish colonialism in Latin America. I briefly describe two cases of Spanish colonial land tenure institutions creating land inequalities and leftist insurgency, one is the case of Spanish rule in Mexico, which created conditions for the Zapatista insurgency, and another case is of Spanish and then American rule in the Philippines that resulted in the New People’s Army (NPA) insurgency.