Drones remain the most effective weapon in the US’s counter-terror arsenal. Critics of the remote-controlled missile will do well to reconsider their contention the attacks lead to high civilian casualties and violate Pakistan’s sovereignty
On November 21, a US drone strike in the Hangu district of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province killed six people including a senior leader of the Haqqani network and at least one more militant from the Al Qaeda-affiliated group. The strike came exactly 20 days after a similar drone attack took down another high-profile terror target, Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud, in Miranshah, North Waziristan. In the intervening days, the Haqqani network’s main financier Nasiruddin Haqqani was shot dead by unidentified assailants in Islamabad. His brother, Sirajuddin, currently heads the network and was reportedly the target of the November 21 attack in Hangu, since he was seen at the seminary where the drones struck thrice last week. Also, the senior Haqqani leader who was killed in the strike, Maulvi Ahmed Jan, was Sirajuddin Haqqani’s trusted right-hand man.
Apart from the obvious observation that the attacks have put both the Haqqani network, and to a lesser extent the Pakistani Taliban (the two are affiliated but work independently) “on notice”, as a US official said recently, their relative success in eliminating high-profile targets has underlined the fact that America’s remote-controlled predator drones remain one of the most potent weapons in its counter-terrorism arsenal — their reputation as ‘joysticks’ used to play ‘video-game wars’ notwithstanding.
As expected, the Hangu strike has been usurped by the Government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as yet another opportunity to play to the gallery and whip up oodles of anti-American sentiment. Ruling party chief Imran Khan, always the showman, has kicked up a huge fuss about the strikes and blocked Nato supply routes into Afghanistan that run through the Province. Given Pakistan’s previous experience with this pressure tactic — remember, the routes were also shut after a US-Nato attack on the Salala outpost killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November 2011 but re-opened later without Islamabad being able to squeeze so much as an apology from Washington, DC — it is clear that Mr Khan’s passionate outbursts on the matter are, well, just that. He had responded in exactly the same manner when Mehsud was killed, no matter that the Pakistani Taliban has not only been responsible for the death of an estimated 43,000 Pakistanis but also does not recognise the democratically-elected, Government structure of which Mr Khan himself is a part!
But Mr Khan is not alone in his opposition to US drone strikes. There are many within Pakistan and outside who share his views, and criticise drone strikes based on a whole host of issues — legal, moral, political and strategic. It is difficult to do justice to the whole debate here but essentially, the anti-drone club puts forth two major arguments: First, drones strikes cause enormous civilian casualties without promising enough returns; second, they are a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. Both arguments are problematic.
In the first case, the number of civilian casualties caused by drone strikes is unclear and varies widely between a few hundred to several thousands. This is because of the covert nature of the drone strikes programme which makes it extremely difficult to put together verifiable data on the matter. The US Government does not officially release information on drone strikes while the Pakistani Government sometimes denies it, sometimes acknowledges it.
That leaves us with reports from external agencies such as the UN, think-tanks and advocacy groups, and the media — almost all of them are usually just as vague and unreliable, as foreigners have no direct access to the tribal areas of Pakistan where these attacks take place. Special permission is required from the Government, and even after such access is granted, journalists can only travel with official escorts. In fact, even Pakistani citizens cannot travel to these areas without permission and unless they have proven families ties to the region. This leads to a veritable information black hole, and ultimately a debate that is based on half-baked facts and mostly just fiction.
Occasionally, though, this black hole has been penetrated with reporters being able to conduct first-hand interviews of villagers in these remote areas. But even then they have found it near impossible to ascertain the exact number of civilians, when any, who are killed in a drone strike. There are two reasons for this. One, after such a strike occurs, the militants seal the area, remove the bodies and secretly bury them. Then, they slap the label of ‘martyr’ on all the deceased. Two, the locals live in an environment of constant and violent intimidation. Therefore, their testimonies, on the rare occasion that they are available, are often tainted.
Mr Guillaume Lavallee of the Agence France-Presse reported earlier this month that any local who dares to speak in support of drone strikes is abducted, tortured and murdered by the militants — their last moments caught on tape and distributed in the area. The news report quotes Gul Wali Wazir (not his real name) from South Waziristan tribal area who says: “They (the militants) will cut his throat or shoot him, they will film his false confession, kill him and leave the body on the road with a DVD and a note saying that anybody who supports America and drones will face the same fate. I have seen a dozen such dead bodies.”
That despite these circumstances, Mr Lavallee’s interviews have led him to conclude that “a sizeable number of people in the country’s tribal areas support them (drone strikes)” must be noted. The report quotes Safdar Hayat Khan Dawar, former head of the Tribal Union of Journalists, from the militant-infested North Waziristan who says that the missiles were the preferred solution to the problem of militancy, as opposed to Pakistani Army’s operations. “The military option, people hate it because the army don’t kill militants but civilians”, says Mr Dawar. His opinions are echoed by Nizam Dawar, director of the Tribal Development Network, who asks: “Those people who became internally displaced persons due to the military operation, those people who are victimised by the Taliban and the militants, all the families whose family members are beheaded because they were accused of spying for America — why would they oppose drone attacks?” A recent Pakistani Government report has also noted that only a small percentage of those killed are civilians.
If the civilian casualty argument stands on thin ice, the one on Pakistani sovereignty holds no water at all. We now have enough evidence to say with certainty that Pakistan’s military and political establishment bartered away the country’s sovereignty years ago when it gave the US explicit permission to carry out these attacks. Former President Pervez Musharraf had said at that time that the drone strikes would be no big deal “as things fall out of the sky in Pakistan all the time”. In fact, his Government even took credit for some of the early drone strikes, pretending that they had been carried out by the Pakistani Air Force.
Over the years, as relations between Washington and Islamabad have become relatively tenuous, the degree to which Pakistani support now extends to the US drone programme may have dipped. But it has not diminished entirely. The drones do not just sneak into Pakistani airspace, point and shoot, and then flee. They study their targets for hours, sometimes days, before they attack; in the November 21 case, locals said that they knew about the hovering drones for days. This cannot be done without insider support. The Pakistani establishment may feign ignorance and even froth at the mouth over the drone strikes for domestic consumption, but that does not change the facts.
(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on November 28, 2013)
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