By Saurabh Sahni:
Whenever there are talks about drone attacks, there is always a mention about the United States. A drone attack is associated with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that attacks an objective. The UAV, better known as Drone, is a machine that is controlled by a remote and is targeted towards an object in order to destroy it.
US initiated their first drone attack on Pakistan in the year 2004 and since then, the Government of US has been responsible for 290 drone attacks on Asian country till date, has killed a minimum of 1,753 militants and the real number is speculated up to a maximum of 2,733 militants. The main motive behind attacking Pakistan is to defeat Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants operating in the nation.
Drone attacks are a part of their War on Terrorism campaign and this is well supported by the US Government. Since the main motive of attacking the other countries is to defeat the terrorist groups hiding within them, this campaign of US is well-supported by the Governments of those countries as well. It goes in a way that the permission of the concerned country, where the drone attack is to be done, is taken first and then the attack is initiated. As part of the campaign, US have attacked six countries till now in order to defeat various terrorist groups, namely Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia.
The most recent drone attack has been on Yemen. Till date, there have been more than 15 drone attacks on Yemen by US, the most recent one occurred in the first week of March 2012, killing 17 suspects. The campaign in Yemen first began as an attempt to kill American-born Muslim cleric Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan. They were killed due to an air strike on their convoy. The mission was undertaken after it was confirmed that the Muslim terrorist hiding in Yemen was a threat to the Wall Street and the Washington city in the United States. This was the first time when US officials aimed to kill a U.S. citizen.
However, there have been cases when the concerned countries were not happy with the drone attacks by US in their country. For instance, Yemen had agreed to cooperate in the fight against Al-Qaeda but they stated that the US has misused the same permission. They attacked various provinces of Yemen on numerous occasions without informing which caused a security threat in the country. The same had been the case with a couple of other countries as well. The legitimacy of carrying such actions has been questioned all over the world; whether a collective opinion of the globe will bear fruit, we are yet to see.
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