Despite Administration Promises, Few Signs of Change in Drone Wars
So read a New York Times headline last week. The article begins:
There were more drone strikes in Pakistan last month than any month since January. Three missile strikes were carried out in Yemen in the last week alone. And after Secretary of State John Kerry told Pakistanis on Thursday that the United States was winding down the drone wars there, officials back in Washington quickly contradicted him.
More than two months after President Obama signaled a sharp shift in America’s targeted-killing operations, there is little public evidence of change in a strategy that has come to define the administration’s approach to combating terrorism.
What “sharp shift” in drone policy is the Times referring to? The reference is to a speech Obama gave back in May. As the Times reported at the time, Obama “wanted to institutionalize what in effect had been an ad hoc war, effectively shaping the parameters for years to come”–not to change the policy, but, on the contrary, to institutionalize it.
Now the Times is suggesting that the continued drone strikes in Pakistan are contrary to some supposed “Promises”. But at the time, the Times reported how officials made clear “‘signature strikes’ targeting groups of unidentified armed men presumed to be extremists will continue in the Pakistani tribal areas.” So the attacks aren’t continuing “Despite Administration Promises” but in accordance with them.
I wrote about how the media invented this mythical “shift” that was supposed to have been announced but wasn’t in this post. Read more about it there.
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