‘N’ hoist by its own rhetoric petard
The PML-N is being haunted by the stand it had taken in the past. It over-emphasized the issue of drones by irrationally linking it to the rise in terrorist attacks. It accused the previous government of criticizing drone attacks publicly but supporting it in private. The issue continued to be blown out of proportion even after the formation of the PML-N government. An example is the written answer submitted before a National Assembly sitting on Aug 27 which pointed out that 400 civilians have died in 339 drone attacks since 2004. There was no mention of why the year 2004 was chosen as a base year or whether the civilian casualties were on the increase or otherwise. The purpose was to produce a casualty figure big enough to shock the listeners and heighten the negative perception. The focus of the response was on how the present government was different from the previous one, for it disapproved of the attacks and termed them a violation of the country’s sovereignty. Soon after Nawaz Sharif returned from Washington a perception was created that there might be a moratorium on drone strikes during the talks with the militants which the US had approved.
As relations of the PML-N leadership with the US are improving, Nisar wanted to deemphasize the negative perception of the attacks when he spoke in the senate. He therefore selected 2008 as the base year and maintained that more than two thousand terrorists have been killed since 2008 while only 67 innocent civilians have died in these attacks. The statistics are presumably correct but the sudden volte face was bound to create apprehensions. While in London on Wednesday a confident Nawaz Sharif declared that anything which hurts Pakistan’s sovereignty will not be accepted. Till recently drone strikes in Waziristan were referred to as an ‘attack on Pakistan’s sovereignty’ by the PML-N. Hours later a US drone strike left three dead in Miranshah. Despite Sharif’s high-sounding rhetoric, he is not likely to react differently from Gilani after similar incidents.
There is a need to be realistic. Drone strikes are bad. But much worse are the terrorist attacks that have killed nearly 50,000 civilians and 5,000 soldiers besides bombing mosques, churches, shrines, schools, the Sri Lankan cricket team and a five-star hotel and attacking military establishment and destroying highly prized air force and navy assets. The emphasis must be on annihilating terrorist outfits. Once that is accomplished, there would be terror threat and drone strikes will become redundant anyway.
