CIA drone attacks in Pakistan killed at least 581 militants last year, according to independent estimates. The number of those militants noteworthy enough to appear on a U.S. list of most-wanted terrorists: two.
Despite a major escalation in the number of unmanned Predator strikes being carried out under the Obama administration, data from government and independent sources indicate that the number of high-ranking militants being killed as a result has either slipped or barely increased.
Even more-generous counts - which indicate that the CIA killed as many as 13 "high-value targets" - suggest that the drone program is hitting senior operatives only a fraction of the time.
After a year in which the CIA carried out a record 118 drone strikes, costing more than $1 million apiece, the results have raised questions about the purpose and parameters of the drone campaign.
Senior Pakistani officials recently asked the Obama administration to put new restraints on a targeted-killing program that the government in Islamabad has secretly authorized for years.
:focal(1285x1016:1286x1017)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/d1/4e/d14ed238-3b62-4506-9f53-fc2178dade60/nov2025_d17_prologue.jpg)
In the fall of 1945, a bit more than six years after Nazi Germany invaded Poland...
In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial...
On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities,...
The last plane carrying U.S. forces left Afghanistan on Monday, meeting an Aug. 31 deadline to withdraw...
