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A flood of drone strikes[/h]
Barack Obama ordered his first drone strike against Pakistan just 72 hours after being sworn in as president. It seems a suitably macabre fact that,
according to a U.N. report on “targeted killings” (that is, assassinations) published in 2010, George W. Bush employed drone strikes 45 times in his eight years as President. In Obama’s first year in office, the drones were sent in 53 times. In the six years that drone strikes have been used in the fight against Pakistan, researchers at the New America Foundation
estimate that between 1,283 and 1,971 people have been killed.
hink of it this way: this summer, monsoon rains and floods submerged one-fifth of Pakistan, affecting 20 million people. It was the country’s
worst natural disaster in its history. Although the body count, under the circumstances, was considered comparatively low — 2,000 killed — the United Nations concluded that the destruction caused by the floods surpassed the devastating Asian tsunami of 2004, the Pakistan earthquake of 2005, and the recent earthquake in Haiti
combined. Two million homes were destroyed and the crucial food belt in the key agricultural provinces of Punjab and Sindh was ravaged. Millions of children were left homeless or at risk of contracting cholera, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases.
According to the World Heath Organization, 1.5 million potentially fatal cases of diarrhea and another two million cases of malaria are still expected.
During what U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon
termed the worst disaster he’d ever seen, with the country desperate and prostrate, the CIA launched its most extensive drone campaign yet. Over the 30 days of September, as Islamabad rushed to assure Washington that it would not divert too many troops from the war effort to help with flood relief, 20-odd drone strikes were called in. They would produce the
highest number of drone fatalities for a single month in the last six years.
