Word: drones
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Cole in Yemen's Aden harbor in 2000 and killed 17 U.S. sailors, Washington had been looking to punish the ringleader of the attack, Qaed Sinan Harithi. More than two years later, after learning he would be traveling across the country in an SUV, the U.S. launched a Predator drone. Once in the open countryside, safely away from any civilians, the drone fired a Hellfire missile into the vehicle, instantly dispatching Harithi and five al-Qaeda colleagues to the ultimate highway rest stop. That marked the first time the U.S. had killed a foe using an unmanned drone...
...there any good news here? If there is, it mostly falls in the category of cold comfort. Al-Qaeda's high command in Pakistan is under pressure from the U.S.'s steady campaign of drone strikes, and the jihadists' indiscriminate cruelty has earned more revulsion than support from ordinary Muslims. And yet even if terrorists have been reduced to wearing explosives in their underwear, they are still able to find aimless, religiously fired or underloved young men to carry out suicide missions. And while al-Qaeda scientists in Yemen and western Pakistan have not fully mastered the chemistry of high...
...neither of those where American boots are on the ground. Beset by feckless leadership, preoccupied with its rivalry with India and infested with militant groups, Pakistan in 2009 became a viper pit of terrorist plots and political malaise. The death of Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in an August drone strike ratcheted up the stakes. After months of planning, Pakistan's Operation Path to Deliverance sent 28,000 troops to root out insurgents in South Waziristan in October. As threatened, extremists responded by unleashing attacks throughout the country...
...Qaeda shifted after 9/11 and the American invasion of Iraq, when the Yemeni government worried that it too might be on the receiving end of U.S. military action. Sana'a helped the U.S. with the assassination of an al-Qaeda leader in 2002 by missile attack from a Predator drone, even as it turned a blind eye to other extremists as long as they didn't cause trouble. (See why Yemen might be the next Afghanistan...
...Relations between Pakistan and the Obama Administration could be sharply strained if Washington decides to expand its covert air strikes on Pakistani soil. In recent years, Pakistani officials have publicly protested but privately acquiesced when CIA-operated drone strikes have targeted al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in the mountainous tribal areas - a program that has eliminated more than a dozen senior al-Qaeda operatives and even Baitullah Mehsud, the founding leader of the Pakistani Taliban. But the perceived violation of sovereignty has also enraged the Pakistani public. If the U.S. decides to expand the target range of such strikes beyond...