DRONES

Are drones legal under international law? In principle, they could be, if their targets were genuinely military ones. The problems are first, that not all those whom the U.S. considers to be genuine military targets would be classed by others as such. Secondly, and more seriously, drones are not precise enough that they can hit their targets without also hitting a lot of innocent civilians. Amnesty International's recent report on American drone attacks in the badlands of Northwest Pakistan concludes that a number of them could be classed as war crimes.

Given U.S power, that idea is unlikely to gain much traction (though it may well make disenchanted Pakistanis and others anti-American). However, as international law expands in the incremental, lowest-common-denominator way it has over the last 50 years, it is possible, if not probable, that  binding rules will be developed to cover drone strikes. After all, they have for chemical weapons, and I can't see that drones are materially different in the way they affect non-combatants.

Walter Blotscher