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Philip Alston's report on targeted killings, delivered to the United Nations' Human Rights Council this week, has received a lot of attention for being the first big takedown of the United States' clandestine drone program.

Alston makes a measured and reasoned legal attack on the general use of targeted killings by governments against non-state actors, but he specifically criticizes the American drone campaign in the Middle East, expressing doubt that the U.S. can claim to be in an armed conflict with Al-Qaeda and concluding that, "[o]utside the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal." 

But Howard Koh, the top Obama administration official to attempt a public legal defense of the use of drones, has invoked America's "armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces" as a justification for taking out individual fighters and leaders. So who's right when everybody's wrong?

Police responding to protests over alleged civilian deaths during an overnight NATO raid in eastern Afghanistan shot and killed at least one demonstrator on Friday, according to the head of a local provincial council.

Hundreds of protesters burned tires and American flags and threw rocks at government buildings to express anger over what locals allege were the deaths of a handful of innocent civilians during a Thursday-night NATO raid in the Surkhrod district of Nangarhar province.

During Afghan President Hamid Karzai's first 48 hours in Washington, D.C. -- the first half of a four-day visit that comes at a momentous time in his country's history -- the recently re-elected leader chose a distinctly non-Afghan issue to emphasize: a visit he paid on Tuesday morning to injured American troops at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

During brief remarks after the trip, before his meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Karzai spoke only of the visit, calling it "an extremely painful moment." Later that day, at a reception in his honor, Karzai brought it up again. "That was a moment of immense thinking for me as a person," he said. On Wednesday, during a joint press conference after meeting with President Obama, the Walter Reed visit -- "a very difficult moment" -- was on the tip of Karzai's tongue, to the exclusion of more controversial issues, such as Karzai's April diatribe against alleged Western interference in the October presidential election that he won.

That Karzai was reportedly "visibly moved" by the sight of devastated American soldiers is understandable and even laudable, but Karzai's repeated public mentions of the visit seemed to deliver a political message as well: I understand your sacrifice, I am your friend, but I still need you to be there for me.

CNN's "Afghanistan Crossroads" blog points us today to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where a hearing is underway to discuss Operation Moshtarak, NATO's much-ballyhooed February offensive in the southern Afghan hamlet of Marja.

John Kerry, chairing the committee, opened with a prepared statement that praised U.S. soldiers for pushing the Taliban out of a poppy-production stronghold, but he acknowledged that NATO has failed to follow through:

Unfortunately, the initial word from hundreds of villagers of Marjah suggests the full measure of our challenge. A recent survey conducted by the International Council on Security and Development showed that a vast majority of villagers felt negatively about foreign troops and that more young Afghans had joined the Taliban over the last year.

The most fragile aspect of President Obama's surge strategy to reverse the Taliban's momentum and remake Afghanistan (in fewer than two years) has always been on the Afghan side. It's comparatively easier for the U.S. military to defeat the Taliban in every encounter than it is for the corrupt Afghan government to reform or for the green Afghan police and army recruits to train up in time. Most of the reporting I've seen since the beginning of the year hasn't done much to inspire confidence in either of those latter two efforts, and yesterday, Reuters added more fuel to the fire:

NATO commanders scrapped a helicopter assault by hundreds of U.S. and Afghan troops last week because the Afghans weren't able to take charge, a U.S. military officer familiar with the planning said.

A little more than a week after firing -- under pressure from the West -- the chief and deputy chief of Afghanistan's Independent Electoral Commission, President Hamid Karzai appointed at least one of their replacements, while also naming two foreigners to the watchdog Electoral Complaints Commission.

I just read Steve Coll's blog post at the New Yorker about the upcoming NATO offensive in Kandahar. In it, he mentions a bit of news that I missed from earlier this week: a senior U.S. military official told Reuters' Adam Entous on Tuesday that President Hamid Karzai's half-brother, reputed Kandahar mafioso Ahmad Wali Karzai, could be placed on NATO's Joint Prioritized Effects List, or J-PEL, to be captured or killed, should the West ever put together "smoking-gun" evidence of his criminality.

Coll's feelings on the need to remove Wali Karzai are a bit muddled, in my opinion; I can't tell if he would rather see the United States pressure President Karzai into removing his relative or send a black ops team to put a bullet in Wali Karzai's head. The threat to Wali Karzai relayed via Reuters seems to belong to the former category: letting him know how short his leash is. It also puts a slightly different gloss on President Karzai's recent tirade; in Coll's view, he may have partially intended to provide cover fire for his half brother.

In a "rambling" speech to members of the country's Independent Election Commission today, Afghan President Hamid Karzai lashed out at what he characterized as Western interference in last year's presidential election, saying "foreign embassies" had tried to bribe Afghan officials to prevent him from winning the race outright.

The fiery remarks seemed to come out of nowhere, just four days after President Obama paid Karzai an unannounced nighttime visit and extended an offer for him to visit the White House. Karzai even singled out two Western officials by name -- the United Nations' Peter Galbraith and French Gen. Philippe Morillon.

The New York Times' Rod Nordland had an interesting article on Saturday about NATO's decision not to raze poppy fields in and around Marja, the township in the Helmand province that coalition forces recently liberated from Taliban control.

Opium, produced from the poppies grown all around Afghanistan, is the main livelihood for 60 to 70 percent of Marja's farmers, and U.S. Marines are currently under orders not to eradicate their fields, Nordland reports.

Four explosions struck the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Saturday night, killing at least 35 and wounding around 45, according to Al-Jazeera.

Three of the bombs appeared to be a diversion to a larger blast at a prison that had been targeted during a successful jailbreak two years ago, Reuters reported.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks and called them a "message" to NATO commanders who have announced an impending offensive in Kandahar this summer, similar to the just-completed operation in Marja.

Multiple news outlets are reporting that a NATO airstrike killed at least 5 civilians in the Uruzgan province on Sunday.

According to the New York Times, U.S. Special Forces helicopters attacked a convoy of two Land Cruisers and a pickup truck carrying 42 people. A statement released by the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan today said that the troops believed the convoy was carrying insurgents, but that when a ground force arrived, they found women and children and took them for medical treatment.

A statement from the Afghan government said that of the 27 dead, 4 were women and one was a child. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in keeping with NATO's rapid-response public relations policy, has promptly apologized to President Hamid Karzai and explained the strike in a video released to the public and translated into Dari and Pashto.

The coalition leadership in Afghanistan spent months publicizing the just-launched offensive to clear and hold the alleged Taliban stronghold of Marja. This intense flag-waving left us pondering the benefits of hyping such an offensive: Given the overwhelming NATO force brought to bear, wouldn't the drawbacks of a possibly prolonged, bloody fight outweigh the public-relations benefits of a victory everyone saw coming?

A British press release (flagged by the Long War Journal yesterday) offers a concise if unsurprising justification, courtesy of U.K. spokesman Major General Gordon Messenger:

There were three reasons for signalling the operation in central Helmand in advance. First, to give the Taliban a choice. Second, to make the population aware that the operation was about to unfold. Third, it allowed a much greater level of Afghan involvement and ownership, and subsequently Afghan participation.

But I think there's a fourth, unspoken reason.

Update (2/16/10 11:40 a.m.): The New York Times, quoting a NATO spokesman, says today that fighting in Marja has slowed to "sporadic" gun battles with the Taliban, and that coalition forces have not suffered any more deaths after a U.S. Marine and a British soldier were killed on Saturday, the first day of the offensive.

The Los Angeles Times' Tony Perry and Laura King, reporting from Kabul and Marja, report that Marines were "inching their way forward" on Monday, sometimes through knee-deep muck, as teams painstakingly cleared IEDs. Perry and King say that some 5,000 residents of Marja have fled town. Marja is an agricultural township with an estimated population of somewhere around 80,000.

There have been contradictory reports about the artillery fire that killed 12 civilians on Sunday in Marja. Initial accounts, including from the New York Times' C.J. Chivers, who was on the scene, said that at least one rocket fired from a base dozens of miles to the north hit a house around 300 yards away from the intended target.

But Wired's Noah Schactman says that NATO is now saying those rockets hit their intended target and that troops didn't know there were civilians inside the house.

Afghan officials said three people in the house were Taliban militants firing on American troops, but Chivers reports in today's Times story that the Marines he was with "complained to an embedded New York Times reporter that they had not ordered the rocket strike and that it hit the wrong house."

A swarm of U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles launched what may have been the heaviest single bombardment in the history of the pilotless drone program today in Pakistan's North Waziristan province.

"Up to eight US drones fired some 18 missiles at multiple militant targets in Datta Khel village," a senior security official told the AFP. The report didn't say if the official was American or Pakistani. The attack "was the heaviest ever in terms of the number of missiles fired," according to Reuters. It left at least 10 suspected militants dead, including three foreigners, though that toll could rise.

Today's attack in Datta Khel, the stronghold of Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur, is the 13th drone strike in Pakistan or Afghanistan this year and the 14th since a Dec. 30, Taliban-led suicide bombing killed seven CIA agents at a Forward Operating Base in the Afghan town of Khost. So far in 2010, the United States has launched a drone attack around once every two-and-a-half days.

As the Jan. 28 London conference on Afghanistan approaches, the government of President Hamid Karzai is playing up its ambitious new plan to lure "moderate" Taliban fighters away from the Islamist movement and toward reintegration with Afghan civil society.

But bringing the Taliban in from the cold and securing the movement's political participation is fraught with obstacles, including the potential recalcitrance of perceived hardliners such as Mullah Mohammed Omar and the need to balance the desires of various and competing power centers, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Karzai's own government and the U.S. military.

Dozens of Taliban fighters snuck into central Kabul on Monday morning and unleashed a brazen assault on government ministries and busy marketplaces, the worst attack in the city in almost a year.

Afghanistan's parliament adjourned today for the winter, leaving 10 seats in President Hamid Karzai's cabinet unfilled, according to the AP. Karzai has the authority to call parliament back, but he will likely leave the current ministers in place or select caretakers of his own to keep the government running until lawmakers return at the end of February.

Correction (1/10/09 5:54 p.m.): I originally wrote that the United States has launched three drone strikes over the weekend. In fact, there were two, making five total since Jan. 1.

Original Post: Heading into 2010, all indications pointed to an increase in the frequency of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal border regions. President Obama and his national security team seem to favor them; there were 56 percent more drone attacks in 2009 than in 2008.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that America is set to blow the 2009 number out of the water. Granted, it's still early, but with the two strikes since my last post on Jan. 6, we're now at five since the New Year, a pace that if kept would yield around 183 in the next 12 months.

Update: Exum responded to me by e-mail, but I don't have permission to use it yet. However, I think it is safe (and important) to tell readers this: Exum did not advise the Obama campaign on Afghan issues. That renders moot most of my concerns regarding conflicts of interest and re-judging Exum's writings in context. More to come later.

Jeremy Scahill, the bane of Blackwater's existence, has a post up noting the arrest and charging of two former Blackwater contractors for second-degree murder and other charges. The federal grand jury indictment accuses Justin Cannon, 27, and Christopher Drotleff, 29, of shooting two unarmed civilians to death in Kabul in May.

Scahill reports that Drotleff and Cannon were with a group of off-duty contractors, some of whom were drinking and carrying guns, a violation of their contract with the Department of Defense. "While stopped for the vehicle accident, the contractors were approached by a vehicle in a manner the contractors felt threatening," according to the U.S. military. They opened fire, killing two and wounding another.