Yesterday, in a YouTube/Google Plus town hall, President Obama finally admitted to what the world has known for years: that the United States has been using drone aircraft to kill militants in among other places, America’s supposed ally, Pakistan. This editorial from Pakistan’s The Nation welcomes this admission of the obvious, but wonders how the president could claim that most of those killed in the strikes were militants, and calls for shooting down the drones whenever they are found in Pakistan air space.
The Nation editorial starts out this way:
President Barack Obama has at last acknowledged what has long been undisputed fact to even the most casual observer: CIA-operated drones have been carrying out missions in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. His claim that they targeted “al-Qaeda and its affiliates” and not civilians, however, raised more than a few eyebrows. After all, if all of the 2,661 people killed in the 303 drone attacks since 2001 were militants and their affiliates, the phenomenon of terrorism would have fizzled out long ago. The fact is that only a small number of those killed were confirmed as militants, while the rest were civilians posing no danger to the “U.S. and its citizens,” which is the cause of the drone strikes according to the American leader. Mr. Obama made his remarks in a discussion with Web users on Google Plus and You Tube. Before that, U.S. officials had refused to talk about the drones in public.
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