Thursday 14 April 2011

Drone Strikes

When I first heard about drone strikes, I was a little bit concerned and I definitely shared an anti-US government sentiment regarding them.

Why? Because the prospect of another country using "bots" to bomb people out of nowhere is downright scary. And for Pakistanis, drone strikes are just a part of everyday life. How unfortunate they must be, how terrified, they must feel.

Only... apparently it only happens in the tribal areas. In fact the more I read about it, the more apathetic I feel towards the issue. Wikipedia seems to think that drone strikes are ok; they seem to be only hitting military (ie taliban) targets and civilian targets who spend a suspiciously large amount of time with said military targets.

And so far they have only killed a couple of thousand people (so the estimates say), which is nothing in the grand scheme of wars and such.

The counter argument to this is that whoever wrote or contributed to this wikipedia article has a strong bias. That may indeed be the case.

Nevertheless, I must congratulate the US on the ingenuity of using UAV's. It certainly keeps their own casualties down...

3 comments:

  1. This is a very controversial topic, we can either use the droids to save our own lives, or we can use them and risk not only killing innocents, but it will could evolve into a much greater industry, which could be potentially dangerous. IMO, we should stop using them because of the terror we cause by using them, and I'd really hate to see us become what we're fighting against.

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  2. UAV's are pretty much essential to keep our casualties to a minimum. Drones are insane things as well!

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  3. we will have to wait more to see what happens

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