WASHINGTON — In the mountains of northwest Pakistan, the psychological impact of America’s drone strikes can be measured by this: Some locals have given up drinking Lipton tea, out of a growing conviction that the Central Intelligence Agency is using the tea bags as homing beacons for its pilotless planes.

But in Pakistan’s cities there is a different impact: a sense that the gizmos, created to instill fear in America’s enemies, only reveal the fears of Americans to take casualties themselves. There, a song of protest taunts the world’s most powerful country for sending robots to do a man’s job:

America’s heartless terrorism

Killing people like insects

But honor doesn’t fear power.

Even as the C.I.A. crosses names off its list of Al Qaeda leaders with each successful strike in Pakistan, Washington is struggling to understand the long-term implications of a push-button conflict. One question is whether the robot wars are only a holding action in a far more complex political and ideological war, against an enemy whose resilience America still doesn’t fully understand.

President Obama and his advisers acknowledge that it will take years, and billions of dollars, before Afghanistan’s own army and police can secure that country’s hinterlands from the now-resurgent militants of both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, the militants are likely to remain part of the fabric of Pashtun culture in the tribal lands on both sides of the mountainous border, where the governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan have proved unable to exert control.

Given this complexity, the drone strikes are a seductive tool. They have delivered body blows to Al Qaeda’s leadership in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan without risking a single American soldier on the ground. And last week, Mr. Obama was reported to be considering widening their use to include killing Taliban leaders who direct insurgents in Afghanistan from other sanctuaries, near Quetta, in southwestern Pakistan.