US President Barack Obama`s speech on drones and counterterrorism at the National Defence University in Washington on Thursday falls far short of my expectations. To be blunt, his arguments were deeply flawed and full of contradictions.
In what has been described as his new policy to restrict the scope of these counterterrorism operations, Obama continued to justify the drone strikes, or target killing, as `effective` and `legal` although that kind of legality is widely challenged both in the United States and abroad, and that kind of `effectiveness` is contradicted by his own admission that drones have come at a severe cost to the US relationship with Pakistan, citing the backlash among the Pakistani public over encroachment on their territory. Keep reading >>>