Drone warfare: top 3 reasons it could be dangerous for US

Is the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone warfare campaign – secretly ordered targeted killings in countries like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia – making America safer? Here are the top three dangers of drone warfare to America, according to new studies.

2. Killing innocent civilians

K. Pervez/REUTERS/File
Activists of Pakistan Tehreek-e-insaf hold up a burning mock drone aircraft during a rally against drone attacks in Peshawar on May 13, 2011.

Drone strikes are often described as “surgical” in their precision. But investigations estimate that civilians are being accidentally killed in large numbers.

A new joint study from New York and Stanford Universities, "Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma  to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan," estimates from an analysis of public records that as many as 881 civilians, including 176 children, have been killed since the US covert drone program began.

The report also cites an example from Afghanistan, in which two US troops were killed by drones after being mistaken for insurgents.

In Yemen, 8.5 percent of the more than 530 people that have been killed as of this June might be civilians, the New America Foundation estimates.

Analysts often argue that covert drone strikes create radicals, with an unofficial rule of thumb suggesting that each drone strike produces about 10 more terrorists, Holewinski points out.

While such formulas remain speculation, it’s clear that “You see protests in street with people chanting ‘Death to America,’ ” she says.

“Then there was the Yemeni doctor who tweeted, ‘President Obama, if you kill any children with your drone strikes, we will come after you, and we have nothing to do with Al Qaeda,’ " Holewinski adds. “And that creates the kind of environment sympathetic to terrorists.”

2 of 3

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.