VIEW: Drone attacks — myth and reality — Muhammad Zubair

[Solomon2]

VIEW: Drone attacks — myth and reality — Muhammad Zubair

In comparison to the 297 drone attacks, taking out a significant number of the most dreaded terrorists, what is the result of 5,000 strike sorties and dropping of 11,600 bombs by the PAF?

Drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas are one of the contentious issues in the current standoff between Pakistan and the United States. Pakistan is demanding a complete stop to drone attacks as part of the new terms of engagement with the US, terming the same as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and resulting in the death of innocent civilians. On the other hand, the US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has recently responded to Pakistan’s demand by saying that the use of drones is essential for defending the Americans. One is doubtful whether Pakistan would press the demand if NATO agrees to a new price tag the former wants for overland deliveries of military supplies to Afghanistan.

However, it is time to rethink the myth and reality of drone attacks, presently clouded in the Pakistani rhetoric of sovereignty and civilian deaths. It is also important to make a comparative and objective analysis of drone attacks and the air campaign of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) in the tribal areas in terms of their numbers, effectiveness and its implications for the internal security situation. In this regard, it is imperative to hear the voice of tribal people that has been conveniently ignored so far.

Since 2004, 297 drone attacks have taken place in the tribal areas, mostly in South and North Wazristan (The Long War Journal). Undoubtedly, it has resulted in the elimination of the top al Qaeda leadership and weakening of its organisational structure and coordination capacities. It has also eliminated the most dreaded Pakistani militants like Baitullah Mehsud (leader and founder of the TTP), Qari Hussain (master of suicide bombers), Ilyas Kashmiri, and a score of other local and foreign militants. Many killed in drone attacks were involved in indiscriminate killing of thousands of innocent Pakistani civilians as well as attacks on the army, police and other law-enforcement organisations and their infrastructure.

On the other hand, Pakistan Air Chief Marshal (Retd) Rao Qamar Suleiman made a rare and startling revelation in his address to a conference of air chiefs in Dubai in November 2011. He claimed the PAF had flown 5,000 strike sorties and dropped 11,600 bombs on 4,600 targets in Pakistan’s troubled tribal areas since May 2008. While sharing the lessons learnt, the chief further revealed that until May 2009 when the PAF had acquired Goodrich DB110 electro-optical reconnaissance pods for its F-16s, it had to rely on Google Earth imagery for attacks against the militant targets.

Without having access to the tribal areas, print and electronic media in Pakistan has incessantly been giving high estimates of civilian casualties in drone attacks. In fact, no one from outside the tribal areas knows exactly the identity and number of those killed in such attacks. It is the standard operating procedure of militants to cordon off a targeted area after an attack, without allowing anyone to have access to the dead.

Quite contrary to the media’s unverifiable reports, the IDPs of South Waziristan and people of North Waziristan tell a different story about such attacks, albeit in whispers due to fear. The IDPs claim that drones did not disrupt their social life or cause infrastructural damage or killed innocent civilians because of the precise and targeted nature of their attacks. An old woman in the IDPs camp in D I Khan told me last year, “Son, bangbangane (local name for drones) go after the gunehgar (sinner) and not the innocent.” They recalled the dreaded, heavy and indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations and infrastructure by the heavy artillery of the Pakistan army and PAF jets and compared it with the targeted and precise attacks on individual militants by drones. They held the army/PAF responsible for turning thousands of their houses and hundreds of villages into rubble. Maybe, the use of Google Earth imagery by the PAF is responsible for that!

In comparison to the 297 drone attacks, taking out a significant number of the most dreaded terrorists, one might ask what is the result of 5,000 strike sorties and dropping of 11,600 bombs by the PAF? Why does not a single terrorist worth his name come to one’s mind having been eliminated by these operations? While parliament, the so-called free media and ghairat brigade of Pakistan keeps on shedding tears on the unverifiable killing of an unknown number of innocent civilians in drone attacks, do they have the courage to investigate honestly? How many innocent civilians have been killed? How many houses and villages have been destroyed in the army and PAF operations? Why are thousands of tribesmen, women and children languishing in settled areas as IDPs? Why has Pakistan failed to establish its writ in the tribal areas and provide security to common people with more than a hundred thousand troops on the ground?

The rhetoric of violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty by drones may be a luxury for those who enjoy the comforts of the big cities of Pakistan but it only extracts a wounded smile from the face of a tribesman. They ask a simple question: have the terrorists not violated Pakistan’s sovereignty by flocking into the tribal areas from all around the world, occupying their houses and making them live a miserable life of IDPs in their own country? They think the only effective weapons used against these foreign occupiers are the drone attacks.

By not cleansing the tribal areas of terrorists on the one hand, and by demonising the drone attacks as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty on the other, we are only helping the terrorists have safe havens and perpetuating the miseries of the tribal people. It is also the height of ingratitude to the US for taking out terrorists like Baitullah Mehsud and others, who have the blood of thousands of innocent civilian Pakistanis on their hands. I am sure the US would not want to carry on a drone campaign if the military of Pakistan cleans the tribal areas once and for all as it did in Swat.

The writer is an assistant professor of Law at the University of Peshawar, Pakistan. Presently, he is a PhD scholar at the Maurer School of Law, Indiana University, Indiana, USA. He can be reached at zubairfata@yahoo.com and mzubair@indiana.edu

 

[Jango]

Tell that to the guy i met who had his hand blown off in a drone attack!

 

[Solomon2]

Tell that to the guy i met who had his hand blown off in a drone attack!

How were you certain he was telling you the truth, either about how his hand got blown off or about his true feelings?

 

[Jango]

How were you certain he was telling you the truth, either about how his hand got blown off or about his true feelings?

I don't think a white beard man will be telling me lies.

Or are you suggesting he was an ISI agent telling lies to people??

ANd what is the credibility of the woman that the author allegedly quoted? Some woman says this. What is the authenticity. Just as you are saying that the man could be telling me a lie, I could say the same for the woman that the article quoted.

As for the second thing about PAF sorties, there is a war going on there, and the residents are told by various means to leave the area, and there is a warning that an operation is going to be started. So people leave. The crops, the houses, the infrastructure does take a beating, because it is a war. And that infrastructure is built again by various organizations and state institutions. If a journalist wants to go to SW or Mohmand during an operation and sit right beside a air strike, then fine, but they don't go because it is a war-zone, and dangers are there.

People are told to evacuate the area, and if people don't leave it, then you can't really be blaming anybody.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Since 2004, between 2464 and 3145 people are reported to have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan, of whom up to 828 were civilians (535 under Obama) and 175 children. Some Pakistani estimates put the civilian death toll much higher - plausibly, given the tendency to claim as ''militants'' victims later demonstrated to be nothing of the sort.

Obama insisted recently that the civilian death toll was not a ''huge number''. Not on the scale of Iraq, perhaps, where hundreds of thousands were killed; or Afghanistan, where tens of thousands have died. But it gruesomely includes dozens killed in follow-up attacks after they had gone to help victims of earlier strikes - as well as teenagers such as Tariq Khan, a 16-year-old Pakistani boy decapitated in a strike last October after he had travelled to Islamabad to protest against drones.

These killings are, in reality, summary executions and widely regarded as potential war crimes by international lawyers - including the UN's special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Philip Alston. The CIA's now retired counsel, John Rizzo, who authorised drone attacks, himself talked about having been involved in ''murder''.

The drones of Washington plough the soil for terror reprisals

In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that after the U.S. kills people with drones in Pakistan, it then targets for death those who show up at the scene to rescue the survivors and retrieve the bodies, as well as those who gather to mourn the dead at funerals: “the CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals.” As The New York Times summarized those findings: “at least 50 civilians had been killed in follow-up strikes after they rushed to help those hit by a drone-fired missile” while “the bureau counted more than 20 other civilians killed in strikes on funerals.”

This repellent practice continues. Over the last three days, the U.S. has launched three separate drone strikes in Pakistan: one on each day. As The Guardian reports, the U.S. has killed between 20 and 30 people in these strikes, the last of which, early this morning, killed between 8 and 15. It was the second strike, on Sunday, that targeted mourners gathered to grieve those killed in the first strike:

At the time of the attack, suspected militants had gathered to offer condolences to the brother of a militant commander killed during another US unmanned drone attack on Saturday. The brother was one of those who died in the Sunday morning attack. The Pakistani officials said two of the dead were foreigners and the rest were Pakistani.

Note that there is no suggestion, even from the “officials” on which these media reports (as usual) rely, that the dead man was a Terrorist or even a “militant.” He was simply receiving condolences for his dead brother. But pursuant to the standards embraced by President Obama, the brother — without knowing anything about him — is inherently deemed a “combatant” and therefore a legitimate target for death solely by virtue of being a “military-age male in a strike zone.” Of course, killing family members of bombing targets is nothing new for this President: let’s recall the still-unresolved question of why Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone attack in Yemen two weeks after his father was killed.
U.S. again bombs mourners - Salon.com

Two suspected US drone strikes killed up to 12 civilians in the south of Yemen on Tuesday.

Reports vary but between 14 and 15 people have been killed in a double air strike on the southern city of Jaar. Of these, as many as a dozen are being reported as civilians. Up to 21 civilians have also been reported injured.
Suspected drone strikes kill 12 civilians in Yemen | NewWORLDLiberty

Nobel Peace Prize-winning Yemeni opposition activist Tawakul Karman said on Wednesday U.S. drone strikes were ineffective because they were hitting mainly civilians in south Yemen rather than their intended target, al Qaeda-linked militants.
Yemeni Nobel laureate says drone strikes ineffective - Chicago Tribune

"If you go to the village of Al-Majalah in Yemen, where I was, and you see the unexploded clusterbombs and you have the list and photographic evidence, as I do--the women and children that represented the vast majority of the deaths in this first strike that Obama authorized on Yemen--those people were murdered by President Obama, on his orders, because there was believed to be someone from Al Qaeda in that area. There's only one person that's been identified that had any connection to Al Qaeda there. And 21 women and 14 children were killed in that strike and the U.S. tried to cover it up, and say it was a Yemeni strike, and we know from the Wikileaks cables that David Petraeus conspired with the president of Yemen to lie to the world about who did that bombing. It's murder--it's mass murder--when you say, 'We are going to bomb this area' because we believe a terrorist is there, and you know that women and children are in the area. The United States has an obligation to not bomb that area if they believe that women and children are there. I'm sorry, that's murder."
Jeremy Scahill Says Obama Strikes In Yemen Constitute 'Murder'

====

Yep - keep deluding yourselves that somehow the drone strikes magically 'only target militants and spare civilians'.

Call it what it is - cold blooded murder and terrorism by the US Government and Military, with no accountability whatsoever.

How were you certain he was telling you the truth, either about how his hand got blown off or about his true feelings?

A better question to ask would be 'how do we know that the US Government and Military are telling us the truth on the drone strikes given the depraved US criteria of posthumously proving the innocence of those killed in drone strikes'?

 

[Solomon2]

I don't think a white beard man will be telling me lies.

Or are you suggesting he was an ISI agent telling lies to people??

No, sir. I was questioning your judgment, not the handicapped citizen.

ANd what is the credibility of the woman that the author allegedly quoted?

I do find it suspicious that a law professor would employ hearsay (an unverifiable witness report) in a newspaper article, but what do I know, isn't he trying to convince Pakistanis, not Americans?

 

[Jango]

By Chris Woods, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

LONDON -- Two U.S. reports published Tuesday provide significant insights into President Obama’s personal and controversial role in the escalating covert U.S. drone war in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

In a major extract from Daniel Klaidman’s forthcoming book Kill Or Capture, the author reveals extensive details of how secret U.S. drone strikes have evolved under Obama – and how the president knew of civilian casualties from his earliest days in office.

The New York Times has also published a key investigation exploring how the Obama Administration runs its secret 'Kill List' – the names of those chosen for execution by CIA and Pentagon drones outside the conventional battlefield.

The Times' report also reveals that President Obama personally authorised a broadening of the term "civilian", helping to limit any public controversy over "non-combatant" deaths.

As the Bureau's own data on Pakistan makes clear, the very first covert drone strikes of the Obama presidency, just three days after he took office, resulted in civilian deaths in Pakistan. As many as 19 civilians – including four children – died in two error-filled attacks.

Until now it had been thought that Obama was initially unaware of the civilian deaths. Bob Woodward has reported that the president was only told by CIA chief Michael Hayden that the strikes had missed their High Value Target but had killed "five al Qaeda militants."


World News - Report: Obama embraces disputed definition of 'civilian' in drone wars

No, sir. I was questioning your judgment, not the handicapped citizen.

I do find it suspicious that a law professor would employ hearsay (an unverifiable witness report) in a newspaper article, but what do I know, isn't he trying to convince Pakistanis, not Americans?

and how is my judgment flawed, you see pictures of handicapped children every day, handicapped by drone strikes. Or are they ISI??

And I am not convinced by the article. It does not provide any credible information either, I have seen much more information on strikes than this, and first hand at that.

 

[Solomon2]

and how is my judgment flawed, you see pictures of handicapped children every day, handicapped by drone strikes.

You wrote you judged credibility by hoary old age. If he told you anything other than what he did, how likely would it be that he or his family would be subject to some sort of retaliation?

 

[Jango]

You wrote you judged credibility by hoary old age. If he told you anything other than what he did, how likely would it be that he or his family would be subject to some sort of retaliation?

Retaliation as in.....ISI ganging up on his family, ransacking his house?? Getting him killed.

Come on now. And what about the picture I saw some days ago (Dawn I think, not sure), of a child injured because of a drone strike, and a old man and two children holding shrapnel in front of their destroyed house, shrapnel of a Hellfire? They are lying eh?

 

[Solomon2]

And what about the picture I saw some days ago (Dawn I think, not sure), of a child injured because of a drone strike, and a old man and two children holding shrapnel in front of their destroyed house, shrapnel of a Hellfire?

Either link to your source or don't cite it as evidence.

Retaliation as in.....ISI ganging up on his family, ransacking his house??

Or the Talibs, or LeT, or whatever combination of letters Pakistani terrorists might employ nowadays.

 

[swathi]

I don't think a white beard man will be telling me lies.

Or are you suggesting he was an ISI agent telling lies to people??

ANd what is the credibility of the woman that the author allegedly quoted? Some woman says this. What is the authenticity. Just as you are saying that the man could be telling me a lie, I could say the same for the woman that the article quoted.

As for the second thing about PAF sorties, there is a war going on there, and the residents are told by various means to leave the area, and there is a warning that an operation is going to be started. So people leave. The crops, the houses, the infrastructure does take a beating, because it is a war. And that infrastructure is built again by various organizations and state institutions. If a journalist wants to go to SW or Mohmand during an operation and sit right beside a air strike, then fine, but they don't go because it is a war-zone, and dangers are there.

People are told to evacuate the area, and if people don't leave it, then you can't really be blaming anybody.

So Your point is that Collateral damage conducted by pakistan forces is acceptable and if it is conducted by US forces it is not acceptable. has pakistan evacuvated civilians in khyber , kurram, orakzai agencies before conducting military operations?

 

[Jango]

Either link to your source or don't cite it as evidence.

I had been trying to find it but cant.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

So Your point is that Collateral damage conducted by pakistan forces is acceptable and if it is conducted by US forces it is not acceptable.

Yes, because Pakistani forces can be held accountable by their government and the courts for any civilian casualties/damages - so unless the US agrees to allow its personnel involved in drone operations to be summoned, investigated and punished (if necessary) in Pakistani courts, there is no comparison between Pakistani military operations in Pakistan and illegal and unaccountable US military operations in Pakistan

has pakistan evacuvated civilians in khyber , kurram, orakzai agencies before conducting military operations?

Yes.

 

[Jango]

So Your point is that Collateral damage conducted by pakistan forces is acceptable and if it is conducted by US forces it is not acceptable.

Yes, my point is exactly that. US does not do it's operations in a declared zone. They just shoot a hellfire and blow things up anywhere they want. Mosque, Bakery , anyplace they want. No warning to the people, and boom.

PAF and PA does it's operations in a identified area, after evacuating the people, and then they rebuild the area afterwards as well, as much as possible.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

And the latest, from the 'super, duper miraculously accurate with no civilian casualties NATO technology':

Nato air strike kills at least 15 civilians: Afghan officials

AFP | 4 hours ago

KABUL: At least 15 civilians including women and children were killed in a Nato air strike on a home in Afghanistan’s Logar province south of Kabul, Afghan officials said Wednesday.

Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said “multiple insurgents” were killed in the air strike, which was ordered after troops came under fire from insurgents.

Nato air strike kills at least 15 civilians: Afghan officials | DAWN.COM