Seventeen people have been killed
in two US drone attacks in North Waziristan, a tribal area and Taliban
stronghold in Pakistan. The body count is still growing from the
attacks, targeted at a compound alleged to be a militant training camp.

These
latest attacks are part of an expansion authorised by Barack Obama last
month, in line with the troop surge in Afghanistan. It's a policy that
is anything but transparent.

For the uninitiated -- what is going
on? Well, the first attacks were launched by George Bush in 2004 as
part of the "war on terror". They feature unmanned aerial vehicles
firing Hellfire missiles (that's actually what they're called, I'm not
embellishing) at militant targets (well, vaguely), and have increased
in frequency since 2008.

Top US officials are extremely
enthusiastic about the drone attacks. They stated in March 2009 that
the strikes had killed nine of al-Qaeda's 20 top commanders.
High-profile successes such as the death of Baitullah Mehsud, the former Taliban commander in Pakistan, have no doubt given further encouragement. The attacks' status in international law is dubious but, hey, when has that ever been a concern?

Yet
in terms of how the Pakistani public might receive it, it is an
incredibly reckless policy for the US to pursue, and for the
discredited Islamabad administration to allow.

Since the strikes
were stepped up in mid-2008, hundreds of people have been killed, many
of them civilians. The American think tank the Brookings Institution released a report
in July 2008 saying that ten civilians perished in the attacks for
every single militant killed. The UN Human Rights Council, too,
delivered a highly critical report last year. The investigator Philip Alston called on the US to justify its policy:

Otherwise
you have the really problematic bottom line, which is that the Central
Intelligence Agency is running a programme that is killing significant
numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of
the relevant international laws.

Islamabad has
publicly criticised the attacks on Pakistani territory as being
counterproductive (though reports abound about the level of its
complicity). Pakistan's foreign ministry today issued an angry statement saying that US and Nato forces "need to play their role inside Afghanistan".

Pakistan
is a state on the verge of collapse. Amid poverty, the instability
engendered by frequent terrorist attacks, and a corrupt and fragile
government, the very extremism that the west's cack-handed Af-Pak
strategy aims to counter has fertile ground on which to grow.

The Pakistani public is overwhelmingly and consistently opposed to the drone attacks. A poll for al-Jazeera
in August 2009 showed that 67 per cent of respondents "oppose drone
attacks by the United States against the Taliban and al-Qaeda targets
in Pakistan". A poll in October for the International Republican Institute
found that 73 per cent of respondents opposed US military incursions
into the tribal areas and 76 per cent did not think that Pakistan and
the US should partner to carry out drone attacks.

The "war on
terror" is an increasingly meaningless phrase. But one thing is
certain: as young Britons travel to Pakistan expressly for to attend
training camps (frequently spurred on, I would argue, by their anger at
western foreign policy) and the Taliban continue to expand across the
country, we cannot -- to employ another overused phrase -- afford to
lose any more "hearts and minds". The escalation of drone attacks does
just that.

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