Under fire from afar: Harrowing exhibition reveals damage done by drones in

[fatman17]

Under fire from afar: Harrowing exhibition reveals damage done by drones in Pakistan


It reveals the human cost of unmanned weapons, argues Jemima Khan

Friday, 29 July 2011



If you want to understand the impact of the "war on terror" on America's ally, Pakistan, look no further than Noor Behram's photographs which show, he says, collateral damage as a result of US drone strikes in the tribal area. Behram, who is from Waziristan, has spent the past four years interviewing survivors of drone attacks, shooting video footage and close-up stills of the damage. The photographs – part of a new London exhibition – are gruesome.


Images of a severed hand, a child with half his head blown off, mangled body parts, demolished homes, a mosque reduced to rubble and the blood-splattered clothes of a woman held aloft by her widower have been converted to QuickTime films by the Beaconsfield gallery and projected, unedited, on to a giant cinema screen which plays on a loop. There is video footage of a lone drone hovering above a village in Miranshah, which resembles a fly on the camera lens. The background noise is of children playing and a rooster crowing.

There is another image, of an empty grave. Eighty mourners attending a funeral were struck by a missile and killed before they could bury the body. A local man who was digging the grave lies mutilated beside it. Similar images are regularly printed in local Pakistani papers, fanning the flames of anti-Americanism. A recent Pew poll found that 97 per cent of respondents viewed drones negatively and 69 per cent now view America as the enemy.

Here in the UK, we are more likely to read reports of how many militants have been killed from unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials. For foreigners, the only way to cover the Afghanistan conflict is to get permission from defence ministries and their press minders to be embedded with the Western armies.

Behram's work appears to reveal the truth about the US drone campaign in Pakistan's tribal region – that far more civilians are being killed than the Americans or Pakistanis will admit. His images cannot be independently verified but are backed up by credible documentation. It also raises questions about the ethics of this new video-game warfare. How likely is it that a "reachback operator" sitting at a video screen up to 7,500 miles away at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, will hit the right target in the middle of the night?

The New America Foundation, which tracks drone strikes, estimates non-militant deaths at 20 per cent of the total of 2,464 fatalities, though Behram believes the toll is far greater: "For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant."

Clive Stafford Smith, founder of legal action charity Reprieve, who together with Pakistani lawyer, Mirza Shahzad Akbar, has launched lawsuits on behalf of victims' families, believes that 95 per cent of those killed by drones are not legitimate targets. He says: "We need transparent figures. We know that the US is lying as they say no civilians are being killed by drones and we've seen pictures of dead women and children." He believes that Behram's photographs provide evidence.

There are other questions which the images raise. How can people surrender to a drone? Why is the US regularly bombing its ally Pakistan in the first place?

Since President Obama came to office, the use of unmanned aircraft has drastically increased. Bush used unmanned predator drones 45 times in his eight years in office, while Obama unleashed 118 drones on Pakistan last year alone.

It's not just America however that is reducing its military's dependence on human beings – within 20 years nearly one third of the RAF could be made up of remotely controlled drones.

Reprieve has called its anti-drone campaign Bugsplat – the official term used by US authorities when human beings are successfully killed with drone missiles. Who needs satire?

'Gaming in Waziristan', an exhibition including images of the aftermath of drone strikes in north Waziristan, is at Beaconsfield, Newport Street, London SE11. info@beaconsfield.ltd.uk.

PDF members living in London area shd visit this exibition

 

[DESERT FIGHTER]

And they ask why we hate them....

 

[fatman17]

Drones in Pakistan

Out of the blue
A growing controversy over the use of unmanned aerial strikes

Jul 30th 2011

This programme does not exist, and Pakistan does not help it


ONE day in March an American drone circled above Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal area, zeroed in on a gathering of village men, some of whom were armed, and unleashed three missiles in quick succession. It turned out to be a meeting to settle a dispute over a chromite mine. Most of the 40 or so killed were civilians, according to accounts, though a dozen Taliban also died in the attack, including a local commander, Sherabat Khan. The Taliban nowadays often adjudicate quarrels in the tribal areas, a wild buffer zone that runs along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

The attack illustrated two problems with the drone war in the tribal regions: the risk of civilian casualties, and Pakistan’s ambiguous attitude towards America’s use of drones. Pakistan’s army chief, Ashfaq Kayani, called the strike a “complete violation of human rights”. For Pakistan, the difficulty went beyond civilian casualties. Khan was a lieutenant of a notable warlord, Gul Bahadur. But Pakistan considers Mr Bahadur to be a “good Taliban”, ie, one who has agreed to fight only in Afghanistan, not on Pakistani soil. After the strike, he threatened to tear up the deal.

Relations between the governments in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, and Washington, DC, are deeply troubled by the issue of drones. Though it publicly denounces the drone strikes, Pakistan certainly does not want all of them stopped. Indeed, the co-operation of Pakistani intelligence is crucial to employing the drones. But the army wants the number of strikes reduced, concentrating on targets both countries can agree on. America has told Pakistan bluntly it must either flush the Taliban and other jihadists out of their safe havens in North Waziristan, or it will continue with what amounts to an assassination campaign there. Pakistan says it cannot launch a ground offensive in North Waziristan because its armed forces are already stretched.

The drone attacks, a supposedly “secret” programme started by the CIA in 2004, have been ramped up over the past three years, with a record 118 strikes last year and 50 so far in 2011. The drones started under President Pervez Musharraf, the former military ruler. There were just nine strikes from 2004 to the end of 2007. According to Pakistani officials, it was supposed to be a highly selective programme for eliminating terrorist leaders in the tribal areas, under an understanding that gave the Americans the use of at least one remote Pakistani air base for the drones. The drones also take off from Afghanistan, but are operated thousands of miles away by a “pilot” at a desk in America, watching a video feed from the aircraft. A successful hit is known in the CIA as a “bugsplat”. It is all horribly like a video game.

The New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, found that up to 2,551 people have been killed in the strikes since 2004. Based on press reports, it estimates that 80% of them were militants, rising to a pretty astonishing 95% in 2010. In recent months, there has been a move away from blowing up compounds to targeting vehicles, where militants can more easily be hit without killing civilians. Even for compounds, smaller missiles are used to try to limit the damage to the separate male living quarters. Perceptions on the ground, however, are often different. The foundation’s own poll in the tribal areas last year found only 16% believe the drones accurately target militants. But many locals privately support the strikes against extremists who have overrun their homeland.

Accepting the figure for the success rate in killing militants nevertheless means that fully 500 or so Pakistani civilians have been killed since 2004. Unlike, say, in the war in Afghanistan, there is no investigation of civilian casualties, and no compensation paid. Transparency and accountability are absent, and some question the legal basis of the attacks. The programme is a charade because the CIA never admits to it and Pakistan pretends that it does not co-operate. A legal action launched this month, initially in Pakistan, with the backing of Reprieve, a campaigning group, seeks the arrest of a former CIA lawyer, John Rizzo, who boasted in a magazine interview this year that he used to approve a monthly list of some 30 individuals to be targeted by the drones.

Whatever the outcome of that case, a debate will grind on about whether the strikes are harming al-Qaeda and related groups, or spurring on Afghanistan’s powerful insurgency. According to the New America Foundation, out of the 2,600-odd deaths, 35 were recognised militant chiefs, or just 1.3% of the total. Among the successes was the fearsome leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, who was the country’s number one public enemy. Still, the vast majority of targets have been low-level fighters. All the while, the number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan, many launched from Pakistan, has soared over the past year or more.

from the print edition | Asia

 

[salmakh84]

And Pakistan Army / Govt fully supports these drones.. (not in public).. by providing cover/inteliigence/bases... how can we win people's hearts if we do the same kind of terrorism the terrorist do?

Edit: Any pics from these exhibitions?