Bush and Obama, Wars and Economy: Power and People in an Age of Limits and Loss 579Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner, continually has assured the
world that the U.S. drones strike only terrorist targets, but the evidence of
young children, wedding parties, or funerals being attacked, like violations of
international law, proves otherwise. The drones have also alienated large
majorities of people throughout the world, and have made Pakistan less stable
and more volatile.
While Pakistan may have become the most dangerous area in the world,
Afghanistan remained a problem throughout the Obama years. In May 2014,
Obama announced that he would remove all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by
2016, but would reduce the 32,000 there to 9800 at the present [at its height,
there were 101,000 American troops there]. Those plans to finally get out of
Afghanistan, however, were not a signal of success or even that the U.S. was
leaving the country in the rearview mirror. The Afghan government has con-
tinued to exist only because of American soldiers, with over 2200 killed there,
and aid. The U.S. built, trained and equipped a huge army and police forces
consisting of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and has continued to fight off
FIGuRE 11-8 A drone flies above a Navy aircraft carrier in a simulated
aerial reconnaissance flight off the coast of southern California