'MERE words cannot match the depths of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts … These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.'' Every parent can connect with what Barack Obama said about the murder of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut. There can scarcely be a person on earth with access to the media who is untouched by the grief of the people of that town.

It must follow that what applies to the children killed there by a deranged young man also applies to the children killed in Pakistan by a sombre American President. These children are just as important, just as real, just as deserving of the world's concern. Yet there are no presidential speeches or presidential tears for them, no pictures on the front pages of the world's newspapers, no interviews with grieving relatives, no minute analysis of what happened and why.

'Obama does not kill children deliberately. But their deaths are an inevitable result of the way his drones are deployed.' Credit:Reuters

If the victims of Obama's drone strikes are mentioned by the state at all, they are discussed in terms that suggest they are less than human. The people who operate the drones, Rolling Stone magazine reports, describe their casualties as ''bug splats'', ''since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed''. Or they are reduced to vegetation: justifying the drone war, Obama's counterterrorism adviser Bruce Riedel explained that ''you've got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.''

Like George Bush's government in Iraq, Obama's administration neither documents nor acknowledges the civilian casualties of the CIA's drone strikes in north-west Pakistan. But a report by the law schools at Stanford and New York universities suggests that during the first three years of his time in office, the 259 strikes for which he is ultimately responsible killed between 297 and 569 civilians, of whom at least 64 were children. These are figures extracted from credible reports: there may be more that have not been fully documented.