262 Revista del Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos Núm. 1/ 2013 tial palace. The Yemeni government admitted the error and anonymous source from the US government acknowledged that the strike had been carried out by an aircraft (without going into details as to whether it was manned or not) of the Defence Department, not the Central Intelligence Agency. The death of these innocent people aroused sympathy for AQAP and repulsion wards the Yemeni regime and against the United States.54 As we have already seen in earlier pages, in the case of Yemen the open sources differ by wide margins as to the number of deaths caused by the drone strikes. Even more complex is knowing the proportion of non-combatants killed or injured. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism quotes a figure of between 72 and 178 (a considerable range) in the number of civilians killed by American air strikes between 2009 and the end of January 2013, with number of young people varying between 27 and 37.55 Nonetheless, the degree of reliability of this information is hard to calibrate. This is why it is not possible to ascertain –with the information from open sources- to what extent the erroneous attack of September 2012 is an exception or, conversely, whether we have a common situation. In this second case, the air strikes campaign would be detracting from the counter-insurgent strategy. In order to gain the sympathies of the population, the Government has to improve the lives of its citizens, demonstrating that they have much more to offer them than the insurgency. The risk of the air strikes is that because of the errors and deaths of non-combatants, these send a message that is precisely contrary to what they want and they moreover convey the idea that the Yemeni government is a mere puppet of the ‘infidel’ Americans. On the other hand, the number of American air strikes is too small so as to assume it makes a significant contribution to the ‘kinetic dimension’ of the counterinsurgency. We should recall that there have been 58 of these in the last four years, a long way away, for example, from the 2,000 air strikes carried out by fixed wing NATO aircraft in Afghanistan in 2011; or the more than three hundred drone strikes in the same country during the first nine months of 2012.56 Conclusions Following the negative experiences undergone in Iraq and Afghanistan, the –Uni- 54 Raghavan, Sudarsan, “When U.S. drones kill civilians, Yemen’s government tries to conceal it”, The Washington Post, December 25, 2012; 55 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, US Covert Action in Yemen 2002–2013. http://www. thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/01/03/yemen-reported-us-covert-actions-2013/ 56 Chivers, C. J, , “Afghan Conflict Losing Air Power as U.S. Pulls Out”, The New York Times, July 6, 2012; Sahchtman, Noah, “Military Stats Reveal Epicenter of U.S. Drone War”, Danger Room, September 11, 2012.
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