Great way to get recruits for your enemy!

The price: Villagers mourn their dead after a drone attack in Miranshah, North Waziristan. Photo: AP

Now this a great way to have your enemy recruit its foot-soldiers. Ben Doherty, South East Asia correspondent for Fairfax Media reports on how people are recruited to join the Taliban in Pakistan. Quite easy actually - with the valuable assistance of US drones!

"For all its noisy rhetoric, the Taliban has never had a recruiter like the US drones. ''I spent three months trying to recruit and only got 10 or 15 people,'' former Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud once said.

''One US drone attack and I get 150 volunteers.'' Mehsud is dead now, killed, predictably, by a drone strike in South Waziristan.

But more have taken his place, and the hostility towards the drones festers. Disquiet is also emerging outside Pakistan about the drones' legality, their civilian death toll and their ultimate effectiveness.

The emergence of new US tactics has soiled the drones' putative reputation as clean, ''surgical'' killers of the worst of the worst. Two in particular are resented - ''signature strikes'', in which unidentified men are targeted simply because of the way they appear to behave, and ''double-tap'' assaults, in which targets are hit twice in quick succession, often, it's alleged, as rescuers try to save the injured.

General James Cartwright, formerly US President Barack Obama's vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is the latest insider to suggest the drones might be creating more terrorists than they kill."

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