As Pakistan spirals out of its grasp, the Obama administration is at last considering halt ting drone attacks there. Influential military officials such as Colonel David Kilcullen, a former adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq, have testified that, despite damaging the Taliban leadership and protecting US pilots, the strategy is backfiring. The Taliban's recent gains comeon the heels of President Barack Obama's intensification of remotely piloted air strikes - 16 strikes in the first four months of 2009 compared with 36 in all of 2008.

This scepticism about drones is well placed but a halt is not enough. Only a permanent end to the strategy will win Pakistani hearts and minds back to their government and its US ally. They, like Afghans and Iraqis, are struck less by the strategy's futuristic qualities than by its uncanny echo of the past: aerial counterinsurgency was invented in precisely these two regions - Iraq and the Pakistani-Afghan borderland - in the 1920s by the British.