Death in the skies

It’s a rare combination: the American neocon and the Pakistani liberal, and one would think the twain would never meet. Or, for that matter, whether any force in the world could meet the neocons halfway. Because, as the past 15 years show us, neo-conservatism is fundamentally stupid: wishing to enslave the world on one hand, while wearing rancher jeans and railing against big government on the other.

The Pakistani liberal, too, has an uphill task: to promote free thought in shrinking spaces. In a land where children are fed the Lore of Ghaznavi — in all his fire-breathing, temple-sacking glory — the Pakistani liberal is meant to push for the value of life.

Which is what makes the two gentlemen’s agreement — over the utility of the drone strike — so ugly. An ugliness thrown in sharp relief this past week, when we learned that a drone had murdered Warren Weinstein, an American, along with Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian, last January.

The man who had ordered the strike — the 44^th President of the United States — seemed remorseful. Or at least, about as remorseful as White House bureaucratese would allow him to be, “It is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war … mistakes — sometimes deadly mistakes — can occur.”

Barack Obama was a constitutional law professor in a past life, and vowed to cut through that very fog: the black sites and the torture memos, the phony wars and Cuban prisons.

Yet in office, he embraced what his campaign had been built to break; a cliche as stale, perhaps, as ‘the fog of war’. If the stats are to be believed, the president loves drone strikes: they’re light, lethal, and relatively new. Above all, we are told, they’re precise.

So precise, in fact, that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates up to 962 civilians have been murdered in Pakistan thus far, the vast majority during this presidency. Of those 962, up to 207 are children (unlike in Yemen and Somalia, the president has waived ‘imminent threat’ requirements for Pakistan).

And last week raises questions all the more disturbing. Having slaughtered civilians the President was finally forced to own, the cycle has come full-circle: Warren Weinstein’s death means Mr Obama has now killed eight Americans via drone strikes. It is testament to their ‘precision’ that just one of them — al Qaeda’s Anwar al-Awlaki — was knowingly targeted.

One in eight: might we draw a similar conclusion — too terrible to imagine — from the near-4,000 ‘militants’ the programme claims to have ‘neutralised’ rightfully?

Yet few care for numbers when there’s catharsis at hand. Closing his statement, the president prayed that God “watch over and comfort (the) families” his Predator missiles had torn apart. There was no apology for the thousands of Pakistani lives taken, no prayer to their God.

And so the world moves on, not a lesson learned. Drone strikes still receive widespread support among the American public, as well as across the aisle in Congress (a rare achievement in itself). Even in Pakistan, resented as they are by the vast majority, the drone is cheered on by a vocal elite that would like nothing better than a running body count of dead terrorists.

But that’s not what drones provide. Consider the case for: drone strikes, it is argued, make Pakistan (and America) safer, with a bare minimum of civilian casualties, and an ethical way to avoid boots on the ground. Yet the beauty of the ‘signature strike’ means none of that: it means blind firing based on ‘behavioural observations’ — not the identity of the victim. In signature strikes, the identity is learned after the murder.

The alternative to imprecise ground wars, then, is to ‘precisely’ drone people — without knowing who they are.

Best also to forget the piles of data that point in the opposite direction: after a nine-month joint study by the Stanford Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic and the NYU Global Justice Clinic, it was found that drone strikes regularly kill civilians, that they hover over northwest Pakistan 24 hours a day terrorising citizens, that evidence that strikes have made the US safer is ‘ambiguous at best’, and that they undermine international law.

Findings supported in a brilliant study by Notre Dame Law School’s Mary Ellen O’Connell, who concluded, “The US use of combat drones in Afghanistan … appears to fall far short of meeting the international law rules governing resort to armed force ... The US has used drones in Pakistan to launch significant military attacks, attacks only lawful in the course of an armed conflict.”

But international law, as we know, is meant to be glossed over: in a leaked Department of Justice paper, the Obama Administration’s lawyers pointed to Nixon and Kissinger’s bombing Cambodia as precedent. This is stupefying: the bombings were not only lawless, they were an utter failure besides — leading to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, a band of psychopaths that hacked down a fourth of the population.

And the president is well on his way to an encore performance: despite skyrocketing drone attacks — including Leon Panetta’s infamous massacre of civilians hours after Raymond Davis’s release — conditions deteriorated to the point of Operation Zarb-e-Azb’s launch last June.

Let’s not even start on Yemen, where drone strikes oversaw the spectacular rise of al Qaeda, and the as-spectacular collapse of the US-backed government. We are now witness to a three-way battle royale between losers and losers.

Yet in all this, the original sin is not America’s cavalier attitude; a rogue elephant in Muslim lands. It is Pakistani complicity, by the government and the security establishment. Our ‘tacit consent’ is known to all; a Wall Street Journal report in 2012 even alleged Pakistan received CIA faxes outlining areas to target, before clearing airspace to avoid midair collisions.

Pakistan, in the words of anti-drone Congressman Alan Grayson, could stop the drones tomorrow. Which is, perhaps, where the tragedy lies: not that Pakistan cannot stop drones murdering its citizens. But that it chooses not to.

In October that same year, Nabila Rehman’s grandmother, Momina Bibi, was teaching her grandchildren to pick vegetables when a Predator drone murdered her in front of Nabila’s eyes. Nabila tried to run, but she’d been burned too badly. She was eight-year-old.

In his testimony before Congress, Nabila’s father said Momina Bibi “was the string that held our family together. Since her death, the string has been broken and life has not been the same. We feel alone and we feel lost.” The translator would break down to weep mid-testimony.

It’s time, for Pakistan’s sake, that drone strikes came to an end.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 28^th,  2015.

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