The US military has been busy this past month. They have killed innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In Iraq, US troops shot and killed a 12 year old girl. There were several other reports of US killing of civilians, even though the majority of killings do not make it into any media outlet. The ACLU requested records under FOI in 2007, and many more deaths came to light.
But one Iraqi blogger reported on the shooting of her great uncle by US troops in March 2006. That death never made any news outlet.
And this month, in Afghanistan, the US military admitted killing a mother and her children. One of the deceased was a tiny baby.
At least it wasn't a wedding party.
In Pakistan, they have issued a report on the drone strikes in their country:
Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent.
Figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities show that a total of 701 people, including 14 al-Qaeda leaders, have been killed since January 2006 in 60 American predator attacks targeting the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Out of the total dead, 152 Pakistani innocents were killed in 2009. Here's their report:
Of the 14 strikes carried out in the first 99 days of April 2009, only one proved successful, killing two most wanted senior al-Qaeda leaders - Osama al Kini and Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan. Both had lost their lives in a New Year’s Day drone strike carried out in the South Waziristan region on January 1, 2009.
The last predator strike on [April 8, 2009] was carried out hardly a few hours after the Pakistani authorities had rejected an American proposal for joint operations in the tribal areas against terrorism and militancy, as differences of opinion between the two countries over various aspects of the war on terror came out into the open for the first time. The proposal came from two top US visiting officials, presidential envoy for the South Asia Richard Holbrooke and Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen.
Part of the blow back from these drone attacks is an increase in deadly plans to murder even more innocents by al Qaeda or the Taliban. In Pakistan, the Taliban recently pledged to do suicide bombings inside Pakistan in retaliation. See first comment below for a report on how Islamabad is getting ready for those attacks. The recent bomb threat in England was reportedly came from Pakistani cells. This one has a twist though:
In November 2008, one of the many US drone strikes in North Waziristan killed five people. This was not unusual. What was is that the US claimed the killing of British citizen Rashid Rauf in the attack. Rauf was previously arrested in 2006 in connection with the "liquid explosives" plot in Britain.
Now, Britain’s MI5 is calling Rauf al-Qaeda’s "Director of Operations" in Europe and claims he was behind a reported plot to bomb shopping centers in Manchester, England.
Link to that article (with links to background articles is here.
I would say that this approach is not working.
Video of Islamabad preparing for invasion by the Taliban:
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