Small Wars Journal: The Drones Take Over

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2009/08/this-week-at-war/

Back to work

There’s a new episode of my history podcast up at The World’s website. Check it out: Moscow in 1993, revisiting the Taliban, finding out who Curtis LeMay was.

Lots on my mind–more apparent drone attacks still have me thinking about how bombing works/doesn’t work. I took out a whole pile of library books on the history of bombing which I look forward to perusing. Yesterday’s Jeffrey Gettleman NYT/IHT piece on male rape victims in Congo jolted me back to that topic too. Adam Hochschild has an overview of the Congo situation in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books which I found really helpful. It’s not getting better. I’ve got lots of news to catch up on from two weeks-plus vacation including this CNN report from last week on nursing in Malawi by Christine Gorman.

More on yesterday’s apparent drone strike-NYT

It may have killed 60 people attending the funeral of a Taliban fighter in South Waziristan:

Details of the attack, which occurred in Makeen, remained unclear, but the reported death toll was exceptionally high. If the reports are indeed accurate and if the attack was carried out by a drone, the strike could be the deadliest since the United States began using the aircraft to fire remotely guided missiles at members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The United States carried out 22 previous drone strikes this year, as the Obama administration has intensified a policy inherited from the Bush administration.

Here’s the link to the full piece.