Bin Laden's Dead; Now Let's Kill His Recruiters: Predator Drones

Barrack Obama announced on Sunday that Osama bin Laden is dead, and that he met his demise at the hands of Americans in Pakistan.  "A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability," the president said.  He went on to say that no Americans were wounded and that the team "took care to avoid civilian casualty," but didn't elaborate.  A jubilated America took to the streets.

Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a well-off city near the Pakistan Military Academy.  His body has since been buried at sea.

The president was quick to publicly acknowledge the mission.  Obama, however, rarely discusses covert US missions in Pakistan, which happen regularly.  The difference, of course, is who this mission killed -- and how the killing was done.

The US routinely carries out covert, targeted attacks in Pakistan.  Predator drones -- unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) armed with Hellfire missiles -- carried out 118 such attacks in Pakistan in 2010 alone.  The drones are flown by CIA operatives back in the states, half a world removed from the carnage.

However clandestine, the drones have not gone unnoticed by Pakistanis, who are increasingly voicing their opposition to the strikes. Imran Khan, a Cricket Hall of Fame inductee and Pakistani politician, has taken to direct action, orchestrating and participating in a sit-in that blocked a NATO supply route to Afghanistan.  He has promised similar action in the future if the drone strikes continue.

Collateral damage -- civilian deaths and injuries -- is the chief remonstration of the protesters, and rightfully so.  Since 2004 drone strikes have taken the lives of no less than 293 innocent Pakistanis, according to the New America Foundation.  These numbers are very conservative; the actual number is undoubtedly much higher.  The pernicious, contradicting logic of Operation Enduring Freedom and the War on Terror gives the family, friends, and compatriots of these now-dead innocent Pakistanis the right to bring the killers to justice, to avenge their dead -- through violence.

To demonstrate how counterproductive and ineffectual drone strikes can be, let's presume that each of the 293 drone victims had at least two young males (42 percent of the population is under 14 years old) with whom each was close and who will likely take action against the killers (the US government): that's 586 justified soldiers if we are to follow the eye-for-an-eye logic of the US government and many Americans.  Now, many of these 586 brave, honorable soldiers will die heroically fighting the cold, mechanical killers of their loved ones, sparking yet another line of young men to fight just as heroically in their stead -- only to end up just as dead.  So it goes.

There is no endgame.  So-called terrorists and insurgents are not a fixed number; they cannot be identified from the air with certainty; they are a symptom of the problem, not the ultimate problem; and most important, they cannot be exterminated like mice in a weekend.  They are fluid, adaptive and can be created as easily as they can be killed -- and are often created by those tasked with killing them.

War begets terrorism.  It must stop, for there are innocents breathing as a write this who will be directly killed by US/NATO forces tomorrow and the next day and every day this wanton war is waged.