Death is clearly not what it used to be.

Or perhaps the people who were killed in the other attacks were not Kashmiri, Sangeen or Mehsud. Indeed, the attack on a funeral procession on June 23, 2009, which killed Sangeen was supposedly aimed at the TTP chief. It killed 83 people who certainly were not who they were supposed to be.

These are not isolated events. At the end of 2009, the Pakistani daily Dawn calculated that, of the 708 people killed in 44 drone attacks that year, only 5 were known militants. Earlier that year, The News, Pakistan's other major English-language daily, had calculated that between January 14, 2006, and April 8, 2009, 60 drone attacks killed 701 people - of whom only 14 were known militants.

The US has come a long way since July 2001 when it rebuked the Israeli government for its policy of "targeted assassination", which it said were really "extrajudicial killings". In September of that year, CIA director George Tenet confessed that it would be a "terrible mistake" for someone in his position to fire a weapon such as the predator drone. By 2009, such qualms were obsolete. Indeed, the new CIA director Leon Panetta declared predator drones "the only game in town". The catalyst was 9/11 - and lifting the ban on extrajudicial killings was just one of the many illegal policies it licensed.

Many of the post-9/11 criminalities were eventually rolled back, yet the policy of extrajudicial killings not only survived the Bush years, it was intensified. During his eight years in office, Bush ordered a total of 45 drone strikes in Pakistan; in fewer than three years, Obama has ordered more than 200. On his third day in office the president ordered two drone strikes, one of which incinerated a pro-government tribal leader along with his whole family, including three children. Obama has since also expanded the drone war in Afghanistan.