The morality of using drones to kill people in a country the U.S. is not engaged in battle has been a troubling issue for some time. Now a Pakistani official has said that while U.S. military trainers will be welcomed back to Pakistan, US. drones will not be allowed back.
Pakistan Says No More Drones
An anonymous official in Pakistan said the country may allow U.S. military trainers back into the country this spring, but won't ever allow drones to operate there again, reports Fox News. "They will never be allowed back, at Shamsi or anywhere else," the official tells Fox.
The U.S. took a hiatus in its secret targeting of militants with unmanned drones after a NATO aerial attack killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November and relations between the two countries took a turn. Who knows how Pakistan's demand that the drones never return will be received by the U.S., especially after reports that the hiatus was actually broken last week (something the Fox News report weirdly doesn't mention.)
For a excellent in depth discussion of drones and their morality see the New Yorker's
The Predator War
The advent of the Predator targeted-killing program “is really a sea change,” says Gary Solis, who teaches at Georgetown University’s Law Center and recently retired from running the law program at the U.S. Military Academy. “Not only would we have expressed abhorrence of such a policy a few years ago; we did.” In July, 2001, two months before Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington profoundly altered America’s mind-set, the U.S. denounced Israel’s use of targeted killing against Palestinian terrorists. The American Ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, said at the time, “The United States government is very clearly on record as against targeted assassinations. . . . They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.
Earlier this week it was reported that the head of the Pakistani Taliban Hakimullah Mehsud had been killed by a previous drone strike.
Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud killed in U.S. drone attack: report
I have to wonder if the timing of this ban was linked to the news of Mehsud's killing being made public.