OBAMA 2.O / DRONE WARFARE
not all of the roughly 40 people
killed were civilians. The Associated Press investigation concluded that four of the dead may have
been affiliated with the Taliban.
That June, three months after
the Datta Khel attack, Brennan
boasted that in the drone attacks,
“there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional
proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”
But that one attack — among
350 or more drone strikes Obama
has authorized — captures what
critics contend is a lose-lose
proposition for the United States
as it confronts militant Islamist
insurgencies and terrorist organizations across much of the world.
Almost all of the “targeted assassinations” of alleged terrorist
leaders engaged in plots or operations against the United States
are conducted by drone strikes.
Others have been accomplished
with AC-130 aerial gunships or
by commandos.
Among the known, if not acknowledged, targets of drone
strikes so far have been people in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and
Somalia. Administration officials
are said to be eyeing drone strikes
against al Qaeda-linked insur-
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
gents in the mid-Sahara nation of
Mali and in north Africa. Predator and Reaper drones can carry
either Hellfire missiles with blastfragmentation warheads, or the
satellite-guided GBU-39 bomb,
which can glide 60 miles and
bears a carbon fiber composite
warhead to reduce lethal shrapnel.
The Air Force has bought 12,379
of these bombs from Boeing.
The accumulating problems
caused by these killings concern
even those who acknowledge them
as a legitimate weapon of war. As
U.S. troops are reduced in Afghani-
“When you kill a terrorist, even if you kill
no women and children, no combatants,
you’re still gonna enrage the population,
depending on how it’s done.”
stan over the next two years, for
instance, the United States may
find drone strikes increasingly useful against insurgent sanctuaries
across the border in Pakistan.
“The fact is, the U.S. might
need to maintain and sustain this
capability,” Micah Zenko, a fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations told The Huffington Post.
“But there needs to be significant
restraints and much more transparency” both in the legal justifi-