Drone Strike in Pakistan Kills Al-Qaeda No. 2

Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, Al Qaeda's second-in-command and operational leader was killed August 22 in Waziristan, Pakistan, the same day a missile launched by a U.S. drone struck the region. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta commented that Al Qaeda could be defeated soon with a "string of successful attacks on the weakened leadership" (AP). The region in which al-Rahman was killed was a lawless tribal area of Pakistan, where the U.S., led by the C.I.A., launches many of its civilian-piloted unmanned drone strikes due to the difficult-to-navigate mountain terrain along the Afghanistan - Pakistan border. Al-Rahman had a close relationship with the assassinated Osama bin Laden, and had served as the terrorist leader's emissary to Iran. The C.I.A.'s Special Activities Division has been conducting drone attacks on targets in Pakistan since 2004, although UAV strikes have been stepped up under the Obama administration. Comments on the success of these attacks vary from organization to organization, ranging from 385 civilians killed with 10 civilians killed for every militant, to 600 militants killed without any civilian casualties. Pakistan has publicly denounced the attacks on several occasions, declaring that they are an infringement on sovereignty and cause the needless deaths of civilians, but its intelligence agency has passed on information regarding the locations of Taliban and Al Qaeda figures, while Pakistan's top military leader General Ashfaq Kayani, according to Wikileaks, asked for more drone missions over Waziristan. In addition, the U.S. had been launching drones out of Shamsi air base in Pakistan up until April 2011, when its 150 American personnel withdrew. Al-Rahman had previously stated in a tape found in Bin Laden's compound that the drone strikes are killing Al Qaeda operatives faster than they can be replaced, and residents of Waziristan who were interviewed stated that they felt safer with drones in the sky in comparison to the indiscriminate Pakistani military, because they knew that the drones did not deliberately target civilians.

If the tribes of Waziristan largely believe that the drone strikes are beneficial in their killing of the Islamist militants occupying their land, even going as far as to comparing the drones with swallows sent by God to repel foreign invaders, then is it okay for nations to conduct attacks on foreign soil without declaring war on the national that occupies that soil? Can civilians be the ones flying remote-controlled planes and launching missiles at targets that may or may not be legitimate combatants? Who decides the borders?

A border can take the form of a wall or a fence, a length of concertina wire, or a magical invisible line that results in immediate death upon crossing it. Generally however, a border is a continuous perimeter around a nation's territory, theoretically marking the end of a nation's reach and the beginning of another's. A physical feature such as a body of water or mountain range might serve as the border between two or sometimes three countries. However, like how the lines on a map differ between each version, the borders are contested over, with some governments coming up with their own ideas of how large their territories are. So how does one define a border? Surely in the time of hunter-gatherers there were no borders, only loosely-drawn territories claimed by each tribe, or no territories at all for those who roamed the lands. Yet now in this time of modern technology we can rely on global positioning systems to mark out exactly where one country lies and where begins another country, can't we? The GPS data may be very accurate and make all the difference between a commercial airliner landing safely and it getting shot down, but global positioning is still based on a series of numbers and calculations plotted by people. Hiding behind the technology is once again the human factor, which cannot be trusted to be absolutely correct. By which version of the map is this particular GPS positioning itself by? There is no single global positioning system that the entire world follows, and it can be certain that some deranged dictator has the entire African continent marked as his. A fence with the sign US-Mexico border is basically just a fence in the middle of the desert with some words on it. So really there are no defined borders, especially in the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan region that so many of these drone attacks occur. Perhaps the best way to define a border as closely as possible is by the distance one can travel before being threatened or attacked.

Related issues include the contested Kiska islands, an oil-rich area that has been claimed by China, Russia, and Japan on historical bases, or even the island of Taiwan.