The long term effect has been gruesome
During his first term, President Obama launched more than six times as many drone strikes as President Bush did throughout his eight years in office, all the while keeping the CIA-run drone programme away from the scrutiny of Congress and the courts. The US is now using drone strikes to kill terrorist suspects in at least four states (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia), although drone strikes are rumoured to have been used in other places like Libya and Mali.
The campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia are run by the CIA, with little congressional oversight, and their existence has even been denied by the Obama administration in the courts. Most Americans remain unaware of the scale of the drone programme operating in these countries and of the destruction it has caused in their name. The US government has classified almost all the details of the drone programmes and has never provided definitive tallies of the number of strikes or the casualties from these strikes.
According to widely cited data collected by the New America Foundation, 334 drone strikes were conducted in Pakistan between June 2004 and October 2012. President Obama is responsible for a vast increase in the number of drone strikes, with 288 strikes (86 per cent of the total) conducted in Pakistan alone between January 2009 and October 2012. No precise casualty figures are available for each strike, only estimates based on often conflicting news reports. The casualty range is between 1,886 and 3,191 deaths for the period 2004–2012, which suggests an average of 5.6 to 9.5 people killed per strike. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has compiled its own data on strikes in Pakistan and found that 346 drone strikes were conducted between June 2004 and October 2012. They have arrived at a death toll of 2,570–3,337 deaths, which indicated an average of 7.4 to 9.6 people killed per strike. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) also reported that between 1,232 and 1,366 Pakistanis have been injured in drone strikes during this eight-year period.
Most of these drone strikes are concentrated in ungoverned spaces of Pakistan where the central government has only limited ability to monitor attacks or investigate their effects. As a result, most of the casualty estimates are educated guesses, varying significantly in both numbers and types of victims. Moreover, casualties from drone strikes are removed from the area of the attack and buried by sunset in accordance with Muslim law, which makes verification of the numbers killed and the identity of the victims nearly impossible.
The deliberate targeting of civilian events like funeral processions, and the attacks on emergency services coming to the aid of victims, are neither proportionate nor justifiable, and would constitute war crimes if conducted in an active theatre of war. The anti drone strike activists in Pakistan can even try and help the victims to sue the American forces within US courts through the alien torts claim act 1789. Moreover, no voice has been raised on the floor of the UN General Assembly or the UN Human Rights Council for the innocent victims of the drone strikes.
On 21 June 2010, Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad told a judge in a Manhattan federal court that he placed a bomb at a busy intersection in Times Square as payback for the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and for its worldwide use of drone strikes. When the judge asked how Shahzad could be comfortable killing innocent people, including women and children, he responded: ‘Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims.’
In a videotape released after his arrest, Shahzad revealed that among his motives for the attack on New York City was revenge for the death of Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani Taliban leader killed in a drone strike in August 2009. The deaths caused in drone strikes may lead those connected to them by family and tribal ties to seek revenge, thus swelling the ranks of Al-Qaeda and its affiliate groups.
More generally, arguments in favour of drones tend to present only one side of the ledger, measuring the losses for groups like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban without considering how many new recruits they gain as a result of the escalation of drone strikes. They ignore the fact that drones have replaced Guantánamo Bay as the number one recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda today.
The gruesome mathematics of assessing drone strikes, especially when measured only in the dead bodies of those associated with terrorist movements, ignores the impact that drones are having on how the US is perceived among the populations of these states. Drone warfare may be considered ‘effective’ only if one operates with an attenuated notion of effectiveness that focuses on short-term tactical successes, that is, dead terrorists who might someday have posed a threat to the United States while ignoring or underplaying long-term strategic costs.
The escalation of drone strikes in Pakistan to its current tempo one every few days directly contradicts the long-term American strategic goal of boosting the capacity and legitimacy of the government in Islamabad. Drone attacks are more than just temporary incidents that erase all traces of an enemy. They have lasting political effects that can weaken existing governments, undermine their legitimacy and add to the ranks of their enemies.
These political effects come about because drones provide a powerful signal to the population of a targeted state that the perpetrator considers the sovereignty of their government to be negligible. Pakistan has been operationally compliant with drone strikes and has not ordered its air force to shoot down drones in Pakistani airspace. Despite official denials, it has been revealed that the Pakistani government has permitted the US to launch drones from at least one of its own airbases.
The long term effect of allowing these drone strikes have been gruesome, with the suicide attacks on unarmed innocent civilians in Pakistani cities especially in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province and assassination of political persons because of their aggressive but unclear stance on the “American War on Terror”.
The consequence of a drone-first counterterrorism policy has only heightened the hypocrisy of this already poisonous relationship, with untold consequences for the future of a nuclear-armed country seething with anti-American sentiment. The newly elected government approaching towards completion of its 90 days in government have failed to come up with a clear stance on the drone strikes. It is now time to take the Pakistani nation in confidence and reveal the truth behind the counter-productive policies of the governments in the past.
A state bears a right in international affairs to act for the safety of its citizens; the previous drone policies adopted by the Pakistani governments have clearly failed in this regard. The new government if it continues with the same policies will be committing a political suicide which might even turn into a bloody revolt.
Note: Most of the facts in this article are cited in, Michael J. Boyle “The Costs and Consequences of Drone Warfare” 89:1(2013) International Affairs, 1-29.
The writer is a PhD scholar in international law in University of Salzburg, and can be reached at: [email protected]
