Word: droned
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Diego defense contractor. The Predator is the older of the two; the first one was delivered to the Air Force in 1994. By the end of the 1990s, the CIA was using it to track bin Laden. Capable of flying for up to 40 hours without refueling, the drone was a "brilliant intelligence tool," recalls Hank Crumpton, then the CIA's top covert-operations man in Afghanistan. Although the CIA was keen to weaponize the drone early on, the Air Force resisted the idea until 2000. Even then, firing the weapons was another matter. Crumpton remembers watching someone...
...drones are far from infallible, however. They can survey only small patches of territory at a time, and it would take thousands of them to cover every nook and cranny of Pakistan's long frontier. Several crashes have been reported. Thermal cameras are notoriously imperfect. Even under ideal conditions, images can be blurry. In one of several stills from drone video seen by TIME, it's hard to tell if a group of men is kneeling in prayer or the men are militants in battle formation. "The basic problem with all aerial reconnaissance is that it's subject to error...
That they do. Critics of the drones ask if it makes sense for the U.S. to use them when every strike inflames Pakistani public opinion against a pro-U.S. government that is at the point of collapse. "If we wind up killing a whole bunch of al-Qaeda leaders and, at the same time, Pakistan implodes, that's not a victory for us," says David Kilcullen, a counterterrorism expert who played a key role in developing the surge strategy in Iraq. "It's possible the political cost of these attacks exceeds the tactical gains." And yet Pakistani leaders like...
...quality in an ally. Kilcullen warns that if the U.S. hopes to eventually win over the tribesmen, as it did with Iraqi insurgents, "we can't afford to be seen as people who fight from afar, who don't even dare to put a pilot in our planes." The drones seem to be uniting militant groups against the U.S. and the Zardari government. Waziristan warlord Maulvi Nazir signed a nonaggression pact with the Pakistani military in 2007 and sent his fighters to battle Mehsud. But because he continued to mount attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he became the target...
...machay will grow louder in Pakistani skies this summer. The arrival of more U.S. troops in Afghanistan will make it all the more important to deprive al-Qaeda and the Taliban of their safe haven in Pakistan. Obama is widely expected to authorize a broadening of the drone attack to include the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan and its capital, Quetta, where the Taliban high command is thought to be hiding...