Now more than a quarter-century later, ‘Star Wars’ has seemingly once again been pushed to the forefront of modern warfare. No more will Stinger missiles launched by the mujahideen bring down million dollar war machines. Black Hawk Down and incidents like it will cease to exist. The monotony of trench warfare and victories during Normandy and the 100-hour blitzkrieg in the Gulf will only be experienced leafing through history texts. Drone attacks aimed within North Waziristan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa have become synonymous with the art of war. When U.S. President Ronald Reagan launched his Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, nuclear missiles en route from the former U.S.S.R. were the globe’s greatest cause for concern. Four presidents later, President Barack Obama is beginning to utilize his own version of ‘eyes in the sky’ to focus squarely on men in turbans traversing their way throughout mountainous and cavernous terrain. So what changed in the span of a generation from a science-fiction-like strategy to one of the most controversial aspects in the ‘war against terror’? With 20/20 hindsight, in the scope of aerial bombardment, absent is the criticism of Harry Truman’s decimation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as Nixon and Johnson’s carpet bombing of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. History has been kind to the ‘victors’ of warfare, unfortunately failing to heed the advice of Supreme Court Justice and Chief Prosecutor of the Nuremburg Trials, Robert H. Jackson, who warned of the unequal standards that apply to victors and losers. On Sept. 12, in the latest attack, three men associated with Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a Pakistani warlord sympathetic to al-Qaeda, were killed in the border regions. News like this will continue to filter the wires, with little or no uproar in the Western media. What rankles people’s feathers is the daily casualty list provided by the Department of Defense (DoD) in a small column tucked in on A9 of The New York Times. One concern about the drone attacks is that some MIT alumnus is sitting at their desk at the DoD thousands of kilometres away and controlling these drones on low consequence (low casualty), high probability missions. How this differs from impaling a soldier with a bayonet or shredding his innards with a standard issued assault rifle baffles me. A human life is being lost either way. The difference in analyzing casualty numbers for drone attacks is that a face is never put to a name, and therefore the greatest war machine in history can continue to kill without its conscience being affected. In effect, it is a robot behaving with robotic emotions. However, the second issue of contention is that the Pakistani and U.S. governments have entered into some kind of collective agreement – similar to a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ attitude. In other words, we’ll let you patrol our skies, as long as you kill anything and everything that gets in our way towards normalcy. The trouble is, the overriding consensus of the ill-informed and perhaps a bit naïve Pakistani population is that they are against this initiative. It is an ‘invasion of their privacy’. It ‘stampedes on their rights’. It is a Christian nation trying to wipe out a Muslim one and its certain plans for the inception of a worldwide caliphate. The unfortunate reality is that 30 years ago, Pakistan, and more specifically, the ISI, was part-in-parcel with this idea. They started to venture upon this dangerous slippery slope, when it could have been arrested. The ISI colluded with the U.S. government during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, fuelling the mujahideen with, but not limited to, the aforementioned Stingers. One of the resulting effects was global jihad and we all know how that turned out. The best intelligence is often not utilized to its maximum potential concerning drone attacks. Civilian casualties, crimes against humanity, missed opportunities are all within the scope of this burgeoning field. However, what must be realized is that this is the war of the future: The entering of co-ordinates, the push of a button, satellite confirmation. War is messy and to paraphrase Plato, only the dead see the end of it.