t is certainly possible that drone strikes could inspire terrorist strikes on U.S. soil. Faisal Shahzad, who tried and failed to detonate a bomb in New York City’s Times Square in 2010, reportedly claimed he acted to avenge a 2009 drone strike that killed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. But I have interviewed terrorists for some 15 years, and I’ve found that rather than a single source of motivation, there are invariably a combination of factors—emotional, social, financial, ideological—that push people to engage in terrorist violence.