Assassination Drones: A New Type of Warfare

Assassination Drones: A New Type of Warfare By Pam Bailey

Noor Behram, a photojournalist from North Waziristan, has been documenting the effects of drone strikes for four years, focusing on the deaths and injuries of children and women. (Photo P. Bailey) January 21, 2013 "Death, destruction, disease, horror. That's what war is all about, Anon. That's what makes it a thing to be avoided. [But] you've made it neat and painless. So neat and painless, you've had no reason to stop it."    —Captain Kirk, "Star Trek" Warfare used to be an emotional, messy, painful exercise no matter which side you were on. The inevitability of death and destruction for the aggressor as well as the "targets" provided a strong incentive to end any war. But drones (also known as UAVs, or unmanned aerial vehicles) make waging war physically and emotionally painless for those who deploy them. This has enormous consequences for Americans, who must foot the bill as well as bear the consequences of the inevitable anti-U.S. backlash. But even more serious are the ramifications for the citizens on the "receiving end," whose own governments may or may not be complicit. In October of 2012, CODEPINK: Women for Peace organized a delegation to Pakistan, the country most in the "crosshairs" of the CIA's drone force, to protest what it considers an immoral and illegal expansion of traditional warfare; stand in solidarity with the families who have become "collateral damage"; and learn more about a country that few Americans understand, even as our government wages a virtual war against it. However, the issues at hand are just as applicable to the Gaza Strip (where U.S. ally Israel uses the same technology to target Palestinians), Yemen, Somalia and a growing list of other countries. Controlled remotely by "pilots" thousands of miles away, drones are used both to kill and for surveillance—keeping constant watch over a targeted community. Even the seemingly more benign surveillance has a deeply damaging psychological impact. One Pakistani father of three who is raising his family in Waziristan, the tribal territory most targeted by the CIA for suspected terrorist activity, explained it this way: "Drones are always on my mind. It makes it difficult to sleep. They are like a mosquito. Even when you don't see them, you can hear them, you know they are there." In Living Under Drones, a report produced by the Stanford International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, psychiatrists call this pervasive worry common to conflict zones "anticipatory anxiety." People are constantly worrying, "when is the next drone attack going to happen?" When they hear the sound of a drone, they run to seek shelter. Despite these insidious effects, the U.S. government increasingly is turning to drones as a way to continue intervening at will in "trouble zones," while appeasing a war-weary American public. A May 2012 AP/GfK poll found that 66 percent of Americans are weary of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and want U.S. troops home. Drones are offered as the ideal solution: fewer American "boots on the ground." This means that, increasingly, the human cost is mostly one-sided, with victims' deaths and injuries not even counted by the U.S. government (that's a job left to NGOs). In 2002, the U.S. drone fleet numbered only 167. Today, reports the Christian Science Monitor, it has expanded to more than 7,000—and that number is set to increase. As stated in the Oct. 18Washington Post, "the CIA is urging the White House to approve a significant expansion of the agency's fleet of armed drones, a move that would extend the spy service's decade-long transformation into a paramilitary force. The outcome has broad implications for counterterrorism policy and whether the CIA gradually returns to an organization focused mainly on gathering intelligence, or remains a central player in the targeted killing of terrorism suspects abroad." Just what is wrong with that? Consider: The definition and targeting of "terrorists" are alarmingly ambiguous and arbitrary. Drones aren't as precise as they have been advertised; civilians are increasingly "collateral damage." The result: "blowback"—a lesson we should have learned when we funded the mujahedeen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, only to have them turn against us. Drone strikes are a recruiting tool for the Taliban. Drone attacks undermine what little respect remains for international law. And just whom are we really killing? Increasingly, drone attacks in Pakistan and elsewhere are impersonally described as "signature" strikes; in other words, "patterns of life" are targeted rather than specific individuals. For example, in his article, "One Hell of a Killing Machine: Signature Strikes and International Law," published in the OctoberJournal of International Criminal Justice, Kevin Heller of the Melbourne Law School wrote: "Multiple media reports indicate that the U.S. considers all 'military-age males in a strike zone' to be justified drone targets, because 'simple logic' indicates that 'people in an area of known terrorist activity...are probably up to no good.'" In the vast majority of strikes today, the identity of the individuals targeted isn't known. As a result, reports Reuters, of the 500 "militants" killed by drones between 2008 and 2010, only 8 percent have been confirmed to be mid- to top-tier organizers or leaders. "If they think specific people have done something wrong, arrest them and bring them to court. That is a basic right you give to your own people," said Karim Khan, a Pakistani journalist whose compound was destroyed by a Hellfire missile from an American drone on Dec. 24, 2009. Only three persons were in Khan's compound when the drone fired six Hellfire missiles: a mason who was building a mosque nearby, Khan's 16-year-old son and his younger brother, who worked as a teacher and believed education was more powerful than the gun. Instead, the drones taught his students hatred. Although Washington announced shortly after the strike on Khan's compound that a "militant target" named Al Juma had been killed, no one by that name was present. Several months later, yet another strike allegedly killed the same man. "I think actually he is still alive today," Khan said with graveyard humor. Between June 2004 and September 2012, reports the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the U.S. has unleashed 346 drone attacks on Pakistan—292 of which were approved by President Barack Obama. Of the 2,562 to 3,325 people killed, 474 to 881 (176 of them children) have now been confirmed to be civilians. Blowback: Reaping What We Sow The Pew Research Center reported in June of 2012 that 74 percent of Pakistanis now consider the U.S. an enemy. "I interviewed young children from Waziristan and surrounding areas, all under the age of 21, who were being questioned by Pakistani authorities for having links with extremist organizations, including Taliban factions," Anum Abbasi, an associate with the Research Society of International Law (RSIL) in Islamabad, told the CODEPINK delegation. "What became clear from this empirical research [not yet published] is that a primary motivator is the U.S. drone strikes. They breed anger, hatred and desperation." And most certainly, anti-American sentiment. International law: Bending it to Fit The question of whether drone attacks are legal, in letter or spirit, under international law is a matter of much debate, and the answer depends on whether the U.S. can credibly make the case that the strikes are in self-defense, or carried out with the consent of the government of the targeted country. According to the authors of Living Under Drones, "The U.S. government's extreme reluctance to provide details about particular strikes or the targeted killing program in general has impeded much-needed democratic debate about the legality and wisdom of U.S. policies and practices....The U.S. has largely refused to answer basic questions about the drone program posed in litigation or by civil society, journalists, or public officials." There is a growing consensus, however, that the U.S. is on shaky ground. The attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001 was too long ago to trigger the self-defense clause, or to justify our presence in the region. And while Pakistani officials cooperated initially with the U.S. drone strikes, domestic outrage has grown so exponentially that they finally publicly filed a protest with the U.S. Embassy in October. Whether they are legal or not, perhaps the most important question is whether drone strikes that cause significant "collateral damage" are moral—especially given that they are used to kill people in countries against which Washington has not even declared war. Pam Bailey is a free-lance writer who travels frequently to Palestine and other "targets" of U.S. foreign policy. She was a participant in the CODEPINK delegation to Pakistan, and blogs at <paminprogress.tumblr.com>. Source