7 strikes in 9 days, 40 dead

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The seventh US drone strike in 2013 that killed at least five people, came as if to announce the impending arrival at the CIA of the drone campaign’s chief advocate.
While the statistical sample is small, it’s starting to sound like the drone campaign over Pakistan is ticking back up after a recent decline. A trio of drone-fired missile strikes between Wednesday and Thursday killed a Pakistani Taliban commander and at least 19 others. Another on Sunday reportedly killed another 17 people, while the most recent one on Thursday killed five, bringing the estimated death toll in this young year to 40. The US launched 43 drone strikes in 2012 in Pakistan, according to the tally kept by the New America Foundation, reflecting a two-year downward trend from 2010’s high of 122 strikes. The average time in between strikes last year was 7.7 days. But eight days into 2013, there have already been six deadly drone strikes, for reasons that remain unclear. It’s worth noting that senior Obama administration officials recently reversed their earlier rhetoric that the US was on the verge of defeating al Qaeda and have returned to describing a protracted shadow campaign. The drone strikes are likely to play a central role in the Senate confirmation hearing of John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism official whom President Barack Obama nominated on Monday to lead the CIA. Brennan, a CIA veteran, has been at the center of the drone campaign in Obama’s first term, even providing Obama with the names of suspected militants marked for a robotic death. But even if the White House doesn’t know a target’s name, he can still be marked for death. Obama has provided the CIA with authority to kill not only suspected militants, but unknown individuals, it believes, follow a pattern of militant activity, in what it terms “signature strikes”. The drone programme has killed an undisclosed number of civilians. A recent study conducted by Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s human-rights branch explored how they’ve torn the broader social fabric in tribal Pakistan, creating paranoia that neighbours are informing each other and traumatising those who live under the buzz of Predator and Reaper engines. Those traumas are raising alarm bells from some of the US’ most experienced counter terrorist, US Magazine Wired said.