U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came face-to-face Friday with Pakistani anger over U.S. aerial drone attacks in tribal areas along the Afghan border, a strategy that U.S. officials say has succeeded in killing key terrorist leaders.
I confess I never thought we'd keep this up this year. I thought we were just trying to keep the jihadis off balance during the presidential transition to give whoever won some breating space to get set to take over the war effort. I thought that the price we'd pay in alienating Pakistanis and risking their (imperfect) help would be too high to pay for killing al Qaeda leaders.
Instead we keep going. On the bright side, any anger in Pakistan has not kept their government from waging war against the domestic and imported jihadis in Swat and South Waziristan.
I hope we continually run cost-benefit analysis on this tactic.
