The routes, shut down in 2012, are the main artery for food, fuel, and supplies for NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and were closed following a US drone strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November 2012. Actions such as the November strike, are what continue to jeopardize the US mission in the Middle East.(Leiby) The Obama rarely asks permission when conducting drone operations, portrayed in the 2010 assault on the Bin Laden compound. A RQ-170 Sentinel, the newest drone in the American arsenal, orbited over Abbottabad undetected for several months, causing the resignation of a Pakistani general because of "failures to detect or prevent a U.S. operation that he described as a "breach of Pakistan's sovereignty," again increasing tension in an incredibly fragile relationship.(Miller).
Public opposition is also growing as the program continues to claim more civilian lives. While the official number is unknown, independent reports suggest over 98 percent of casualties are civilians. Also the program has recently added "double-taps" to its list of strikes, in which a strike occurs and the drone fires a second missile at the rescuers within the strike area.(Taylor) When the math is worked out the number of strikes within Pakistan alone reaches over 280 strikes with roughly 2,173 kills and 305 reported, injured civilians.(SATP.org) Civilians like Zubair Rafiq, the first strike victims to be heard by congress, tell of the strike the killed their mother and grandmother. Zubair says "We hear the noise 24 hours a day," referring to the US drones overhead, going on to tell of the attack that killed his mother.(Khan) Rafiq becoming a face to the drone program that affects so many like him in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. These faces add to the discontent of the local peoples, studies report that the strikes breed hatred towards Americans, even suggesting that it creates extremists.
