If the Terminator Was an Unmanned Drone: A U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle at Joint Base Balad, Iraq, in 2008. Larger and more powerful than the MQ-1 Predator, the Reaper can carry up to 3,750 pounds of laser-guided bombs and Hellfire missiles. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Erik Gudmundson)
Hardly a week goes by without another report of a Predator drone attack on suspected Taliban or al-Qaeda targets, usually in Pakistan, usually in Waziristan, occasionally with success. The most successful attack to date was August's decimation of a house in Northwest Pakistan where Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was assassinated, along with bodyguards and members of his family, by a Predator missile strike as he was lounging on his roof. Another attack in December killed a high-ranking al-Qaeda leader, according to American officials.
Obama ordered the stepped up attacks in line with his unspoken but evident strategy in Afpak: less footprint on the ground, more special operations and guided attacks by drones from the air. Far more. In many cases the attack blur or obliterate the line between legitimate acts of war and war crimes, or outright defiance of international law. Those attacks for the most part are taking place in Pakistan, a sovereign nation with which the United States is not at war, and which, publicly at least, has never granted permission for Predator attacks. (Privately it's another story: the Pakistani government of Asif Ali Zardari welcomes American intervention, because it relieves him of the pressure to do more against the Taliban on Pakistan's flanks. In mid-December, five Predators fired 10 missiles at a suspected Taliban compounds on the Pakistani side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, killing at least 15 people, according to a report in The Times. The attack was the 40th of the year. Barely a week earlier, The Times was reporting that
The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.'s drone program in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president's decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time -- a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas -- because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.Clearly, President Obama thinks the way to win, and eventually find and kill Osama bin Lade or Ayman al Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's Number 2, is by Predator. So is the way to decapitate the Taliban in Pakistan and, by extension, in Afghanistan. He'll be disappointed. The Taliban is a hydra-headed monster. It'll keep producing warlords. That doesn't mean al-Qaeda and the Taliban aren't feeling the sting of Predator strikes--or Obama's order to hunt down suspected terrorists all the way to Yemen, where an air strike killed some 30 people earlier this month, alleged by the Yemeni government to be al-Qaeda militants and terrorists. It was supposedly in response to that attack that 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was sent to bomb a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas day.
In the United States, conservatives are blaming Obama for doing too little against the terrorist threat. In reality, he's doing too much--and provoking the backlash, the last of which may be yet to come, according to The Times of London. ("Hundreds of al-Qaeda militants are planning terror attacks from Yemen, the country's Foreign Minister said today," The Times reports today, though there's a whiff of opportunism in the foreign minister's urgency: The United States contributes about $80 million in counter-terrorism funds to Yemen. Yemen wants more.) Obama, in sum, is doing what George Bush claimed to be doing but never actually did. He's "taking the fight to the enemy." The response is predictable, if potentially bloody.
And it's not about to ebb--on either side. Predators are buzzing.
Read a complete article on "Predator Drones and other Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)."
See Also:
- Pakistan Fumes: Predators Among Them
- What Are Pakistan's Tribal Areas?
- Air & Space Predators
- What Is Waziristan?
- Why Killing Baitullah Mehsud Won't Stop The Taliban
- Operation Enduring Folly: US Kills 60 More in Pakistan Air Strike
- Predator UAV Proves Its Worth
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