Huffington Magazine Issue 33 | Page 74

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-