[Assassination using drone aircraft was perfected by the Israelis in cooperation with the U.S.  The experimental population used are the Palestinians, used to test out a whole variety of anti-insurgency warfare techniques as well as population surveillance and control.]

Pilotless “drone” aircraft deliver
a silent, deadly payload that has proved effective in killing
militants, but has also killed civilians when intelligence goes awry or
in “collateral damage” from a successful strike.

In Pakistan,
strikes were infrequent – every few months – until August, when there
was a sudden and dramatic increase in the drone attacks. Since then
there have been at least 20 strikes – more than one a week – possibly
in a stepped-up attempt to kill Osama bin Laden before George Bush
leaves office on January 20 next year.

The intensity of the
bombardment now has made the drone attacks a highly emotive political
issue in Pakistan, feeding anti-Americanism. Pakistan’s government and
army protest loudly after each strike. And yet it is thought that
Islamabad is secretly cooperating with the attacks, providing much of
the human intelligence that allows the drones to target safe houses in
the tribal area where al-Qaida militants are suspected of hiding out.
The country even goes as far as hosting CIA agents in Pakistani army
compounds in the tribal area, who call in the strikes.

Drones are
operated by pilots who sit thousands of miles away, manning their
controls from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, in the US. The drones
send back video images of the area they are flying over, which,
together with human intelligence from agents on the ground, allow the
pilots to pick out their targets. The Predator drones used by the US
are each armed with two Hellfire missiles but are used mostly to spy on
activity on the ground.

The drones that hover over the tribal
belt are usually operated not by the US military but by the CIA, giving
American generals plausible deniability that they are behind the
strikes. Such is the perceived success of the clandestine drone
programme that there is now a rush to train hundreds more US Air Force
pilots to fly the remote-control planes.

Drones were originally
deployed in Afghanistan before 9/11, as part of a then secret operation
to get Osama bin Laden, and it seems they twice had him in their
sights. But it is in Pakistan that the drones have become most
notorious, as a seemingly constant presence flying high over the
country’s wild tribal belt, known as a haven of al-Qaida and Taliban
militants. Terrified tribesmen regularly try to shoot them down but the
planes fly too high.

The current campaign can be dated back to
2006, when on two separate occasions the drones targeted a village in
the Bajaur part of the tribal area, on intelligence that al-Qaida
number two Ayman al-Zawahiri was present. But it is thought that they
managed to kill dozens of civilians instead, fuelling the tribal
uprising against both the Pakistani army and international forces in
neighbouring Afghanistan.

The drones have hit major al-Qaida
operatives in the tribal area, especially this year, which has seen
them kill Abu Laith al-Libi, a charismatic senior military commander,
and Abu Khabab al-Masri, the terror group’s chemical and biological
weapons expert.