How US drones forge as many foes as they kill - Comment - Voices

How US drones forge as many foes as they kill | Patrick Cockburn (The Independent)
►http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/how-us-drones-forge-as-many-foes-as-they-kill-8229276.html

Drones do not change very much on the ground. They do provide political camouflage at home and abroad, concealing the US retreat in Afghanistan and Iraq. They store up trouble because they may create more enemies than they eliminate. They rely on a network of informants that can only be established in weak, failed or failing states. They also invite other states such as China and Russia to invest in drones to kill their dissidents beyond their borders. Secret assassination campaigns by drones, hot-air balloons, bombs or rare poisons all carry the risk that somebody, somewhere is plotting their retaliation. (...) Source: The Independent

How US drones forge as many foes as they kill - Patrick Cockburn
►http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/how-us-drones-forge-as-many-foes-as-they-kill-8229276.html

Many places where #drones are used are inaccessible to foreign or even local journalists. Civilian casualties can be minimised or denied. I reported in 2009 a US bombing raid on three villages in Farah province, south of Herat, which killed 147 people, according to locals. There were craters 30ft deep which a US spokesman cheerfully suggested had been made by Taliban fighters throwing grenades into houses. This was an obvious lie, but it was impossible for journalists to prove the opposite.

Of course, local people knew what had happened. They drove their tractors pulling trailers full of body parts to the provincial capital where government soldiers opened fire, killing three of them. I wondered at the time how many of the surviving young men of the three villages, and in the rest of Farah province, joined the Taliban because of that bombing raid.