In the New York Times, David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum outline why the American use of drones to kill terrorists in Pakistan is counter-productive, and should be discontinued:
…on balance, the costs outweigh these benefits for three reasons.
First, the drone war has created a siege mentality among Pakistani civilians. This is similar to what happened in Somalia in 2005 and 2006, when similar strikes were employed against the forces of the Union of Islamic Courts. While the strikes did kill individual militants who were the targets, public anger over the American show of force solidified the power of extremists. The Islamists’ popularity rose and the group became more extreme, leading eventually to a messy Ethiopian military intervention, the rise of a new regional insurgency and an increase in offshore piracy.
While violent extremists may be unpopular, for a frightened population they seem less ominous than a faceless enemy that wages war from afar and often kills more civilians than militants.
Read the full op-ed here, and see a previous here & there discussion of the ethics of robotic warfare.