Good Reads: Weighing the tactics in battles over drones, hackers, and abortion rights

In America, US citizens fret about what they see as the decline of their nation and its influence in the world. The economy is ho-hum, confidence is shaken, and smaller nations like Iran, South Africa, and Venezuela are increasingly talking back. Here in Afghanistan, the Obama administration is planning to gradually draw down military forces as it did in Iraq a few years back.

But the US hasn't halted its use of military force against US enemies abroad. Instead, the US is making greater use of new tools, such as the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, commonly known as a drone. Once used primarily for surveillance, drones now carry smart bombs and other precision weapons, and they are increasingly used against certain individuals seen by the US as dangerous, often in places where the US is not technically at war.

While drones can be incredibly effective, on a mission-by-mission basis, killing suspected radicals such as Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen, for instance, they can also be equally controversial. Pakistan’s government, for instance, has come close to breaking its military cooperation because of the US use of drones inside Pakistani airspace. And in a persuasive opinion piece in Foreign Policy, David Rohde (who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, one as a former Christian Science Monitor correspondent in Bosnia), writes that excessive reliance on drones may actually backfire politically on the Obama administration.

For every suspected terrorist killed by a drone, there may be dozens of others who are drawn to open hostility toward the US, or in worst cases, to terrorist causes because of what they see as overbearing US power. Mr. Rohde is no tie-dye-wearing peacenik. Captured and held by the Taliban for seven months, he says he believes that “drone strikes should be carried out -- but very selectively.”

“For me, the bottom line is that both governments' approaches are failing. Pakistan's economy is dismal. Its military continues to shelter Taliban fighters it sees as proxies to thwart Indian encroachment in Afghanistan. And the percentage of Pakistanis supporting the use of the Pakistani Army to fight extremists in the tribal areas -- the key to eradicating militancy -- dropped from a 53 percent majority in 2009 to 37 percent last year. Pakistan is more unstable today than it was when Obama took office.” 

How dangerous are hackers?

Unlike Taliban or Al Qaeda militants, computer hackers generally don’t carry weapons. But in the eyes of the US government, they are no less dangerous. A US National Security Council assessment warned last year that computer hacker organizations had the potential to shut down America’s electrical power grids. Technically speaking, the Security Council is right. A well-designed computer virus can do a lot of damage. Ask the Iranians, whose nuclear power development system was nearly destroyed by a computer worm called Stuxnet.

1 | 2

Next