A Predator Unmanned Drone - Death From the Sky!
Sunday, December 6, 2009 at 12:51PM
Kandahar, Afghanistan. As it left the ground, I barely heard it. In fact, I barely saw it at all except for the fact that I was looking toward the Kandahar Airfield. It caught my attention as it reached into to the sky, a Predator unmanned drone. The Predator, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, carries Hellfire missiles that reign down death upon those unlucky enough to be caught in its sites.
The Hellfire missile was originally designed the be a tank killer. It has become a person killer. You see, here in Afghanistan, it is being used more and more frequently against people. And there is real fear. Because the Predator can stay in the air for hours and hour at about 5,000 feet, too high to hear, it can strike when it sees fit. Unfortunately, it has seen fit to hit innocent men, women and children in this country.
While these Predators have the benefit of being unmanned which means no risk of life of those pilots, the risk to civilians, is terribly real. In fact, it has been one of the biggest problems that the Americans face. While it has undoubtedly been effective at taking out some of the baddies, the real question is whether the cost has been far too high. Just ask the surviving family members who must bury their children, their parents, their friends. And yet, President Obama is using these weapons more and more in this country. In fact, President Obama is using them more and more in neighboring Pakistan as well.
And people here and in Pakistan have been begging the Secretary of State and President Obama to stop. However, based upon what I saw in the last couple of hours at the Kandahar Airbase, those calls remain unheeded. And death from the skies continues.
Reader Comments (2)
Jack, do you sense widespread popular anger against these strikes? Could these strikes nullify the population-centric, people-focused strategy Obama is using? If they are causing more harm than good, in a way that only prolongs the conflict, pressure should be brought to bear on the relevant congressional and administrative principles to rethink it.
FYI: General Deptula responds to Danger Room's Noah Schactman about civilian casualties resulting from air strikes.(On the blog "Wired" 12/8/09:
"It is curious that it appears there is more ink spent on casualties from air attacks than there is on the criminality and violation of the ethical tenets of Islam that occur daily as a result of Taliban actions...Because the Taliban cannot directly affect Allied force applications from the air, they try to accomplish the same effects by purposely mingling with non-combatants and civilians in an attempt to draw attacks on these positions. This is done to create the conditions where Allied commanders put restrictions on themselves to limit the most effective instrument of power that causes the Taliban their greatest concern."
Also, referring to a Georgetown Univ. study, the General notes, "There appears to be an almost complete lack of indication to support the conventional wisdom, popularized in the media, that air attacks have been provoking deep hostility toward the U.S. and Kabul government. Instead, when Afghan people were polled about the reasons for their growing disillusionment with Kabul, insecurity and corruption overwhelmingly dominated their complaints. 'Too many innocent people being killed' barely registered. Intuitively, that makes sense in a country of a thousand villages separated by thousands of mountains and valleys where tribal institutions are the paramount determinant of communication - not the International Herald Tribne or the NYTimes or CNN or Twitter...The conclusion of this initial research is...there is little reason based on the admittedly limited data available in open source to expect that drastically reducing the civilian casualty issue would produce game changing results on the political battlefield. And if doing so depended on seriously constraining military operations such that there was a significant increase in Afghans' insecurity or Allied Casualties, it would likely be a counterproductive exchange."
What do you think?