It’s a peaceful morning. The sun is beginning to rise, and people are waking up to another normal day. The children are, perhaps, walking to school. Without warning, the eerie noise of a jet pervades the air and shatters the tranquil silence. A split second later, an enormous missile slams into the ground and explodes with a deafening, ear-splitting roar, hurling flaming debris for miles and erasing most traces of the families who were just about to start their day.

This situation is a reality in the remote areas of Northwestern Pakistan, where United States-commissioned unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, pummel the soil with missiles on a regular basis.

Today, this issue has been brought into the spotlight by the Senate confirmation hearings concerning the nomination of the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Brennan, who is regarded as the chief architect behind the government’s notorious drone policy.

What bothers me, however, is that the current uproar is solely because the victims of one attack two years ago were American, not because of the loss of life. Maybe if those victims weren’t U.S. citizens, drones wouldn’t have surfaced in the news this past month.

As expected, once this topic spread through the mainstream media, debate ensued. Many organizations, such as Amnesty International and the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism have released reports with the number of alleged civilians who were killed by the strikes during the Obama administration. The United States government argues the numbers to be far lower.

There’s always debate in the media about the exact number of civilian casualties, but why does it matter anymore? Isn’t the killing of any number, even one, of innocent bystanders, American or Pakistani, not only a tragic occurrence but also a moral issue? Is wiping out about ten harmless people justified when it kills one insignificant militant (The Guardian, Jul 2011)? It has been nine years, but these attacks continue unabated.

The U.S. is now setting a dangerous precedent by carrying out these strikes. Currently, both the U.K. and Israel have deployed drone technology, and Iran is surely not far behind as one of our drones crash-landed in their desert. President Obama “asked for it back,” but, er, that didn’t really work. If multiple nations put overseas drone attacks into effect, what would happen then? Right now, what we’re doing is conveying to other nations the message that we have no qualms about carrying out drone attacks upon foreign soil.

Let’s say (for example) Russia decided they have identified an enemy on U.S. soil as an “imminent threat” and fire upon their target. In the process, twenty civilians are wiped out as well, but it is merely excused as “collateral damage.” I don’t think our government would fail to act or at least denounce the action. Yet we still wonder why Pakistanis don’t approve of the strikes.

Needless to say, attacks like these fuel major anti-American sentiments in the region of northwest Pakistan, which is completely understandable considering the devastation the strikes wreak upon their victims. Many of the survivors even join militant groups after the events occur.

In fact, these deaths are exploited by extremist groups as reasons to join. It is entirely possible that in these attacks, less terrorists are killed than people who join terrorist groups after the occurrence, rendering the strikes counterproductive. Let’s face it, who would side with a country that sends missile-firing aircraft over your home?

Even Pakistani citizens of higher socioeconomic backgrounds who were educated in the U.S. are now as horrified with Washington’s policy of clandestine warfare as they are with the deeds of extremist organizations.

Many Pakistanis of privileged backgrounds are even counteracting the force of terrorism by helping alleviate poverty in these remote areas. For instance, my grandmother, the first woman architect in Pakistan, has come out of retirement to design and fund houses for underprivileged people in remote areas that are low-cost and economical to construct. Other humanitarian organizations are establishing schools and improving the quality of medical care in poorer regions. This educates residents of the area, reducing, if not eliminating, the chance of them joining militant groups.

Drone strikes merely undermine these efforts.

I visit Pakistan every year; it isn’t the terrorist-harboring wasteland where militants run amok that the Western media depicts it as. Washington needs to realize that firing missiles upon congregations of people ends weddings or funeral processions (held for the last civilian killed by a strike), not plots to breach our national security. Children and their families should not have to pay with their lives for the death of one low-level militant who is probably not an international threat. Pakistanis despise violence and terrorism as much as we do, but they know that drones aren’t paving the way for peace.

Any solution to the ongoing crisis in the Middle East is not going to include the word “drone” in it.

If both Pakistan and the United States really want to eradicate terrorism in the world, then the billions of dollars spent annually on military equipment could be better served setting up schools that improve the life of the locals there. The reason we’re against terrorists in the first place is because they kill civilians; yet we have been doing exactly that for almost a decade.