American killing fields

For decades, the US has anointed itself as global guardian of human rights

For decades, the US has anointed itself as the global guardian of human rights. Its State Department issues an annual report on alleged human rights violations by various countries. The American Congress imposes sanctions on the so-called worst offenders. Mostly these are countries that are not US allies or are small and weak states that cannot retaliate. What is worst in such double standards is, of course, the fact that there is no acknowledgment for America’s own flagrant and repeated human-rights violations at home and abroad. A primary example is the continued killing of innocent people in America’s war on terror, especially in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, where extra-judicial killings are dismissed as “acceptable collateral damage”. But the truth about these human rights violations cannot remain hidden and occasionally come to the surface — even in the US.

The latest is a report in The New York Times magazine of November 16^th titled ‘The Uncounted’ by Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal on the ongoing US air strikes against ISIS in Iraq. According to the report the Pentagon’s claim to have put in place an elaborate system to minimise civilian casualties before an attack is completely false. As compared to the claimed ratio of civilian deaths to air strikes currently in Iraq of one for every 157 strikes, the report establishes on the basis of on-ground investigations that the actual ratio is one civilian death for every five air strikes — more than 31 times the Pentagon’s claim. The New York Times editorial, therefore, commented that “a system intended to ensure transparency and accountability appears, instead, to be enabling the Pentagon to fool itself as well as the rest of us about the true cost of the strikes.” This will only get worse since the Trump administration has even reversed the limited regulatory measures that its predecessor had imposed, by giving full authority to local commanders with no checks for ensuring transparency or accountability.

Such a high rate of civilian casualties due to US air strikes is not new nor confined to Iraq. The Costs of War project at Brown University estimates that over 200,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan alone since 2001 when America’s war on terror was launched. Americans have exacted a high price indeed from innocent civilians around the world to avenge those killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has also reported extensively on extra-judicial killings by the US in several countries, including Pakistan. In its report of July 2017, the ACLU claims that over 400 drone strikes have been carried out since 2004 in Pakistan in which over a 1,000 civilians have been killed. Another ACLU report of March 2013 maintains that for the Pentagon ‘all military age males’ in a strike zone are automatically considered as combatants who can be targeted without verification. Then there are ‘double-tap’ strikes that are conducted after the initial drone strike to ensure all individuals that have gathered at the site are in the ‘kill-box’, even though they may be innocent family members, rescue workers or just by-standers.

Such a callous American approach explains the completely unacceptable and unjustifiable attacks on hospitals, such as in Kunduz, Afghanistan, in October 2015, following which there was no investigation to bring the guilty to justice. Similarly, there have been several air strikes on Afghan wedding parties simply because the convoy of guests was mistaken for terrorists without any ground check. In none of these incidents have any investigations been carried out, let alone punishing those guilty or compensating the victims.

Apart from the murder of innocent non-combatants, the Pentagon and the CIA have also violated human rights by using torture on a massive scale for which they use the Orwellian term ‘advanced interrogation techniques’. Such methods became so pervasive that the US Senate Intelligence Committee was forced to conduct an investigation and published its report in December 2012, in which it called for putting the accused on trial. However, this was never done.

More recently, in response to the Khan-Gopal report, a US Senator, Patrick Leahy, has accused the Pentagon of not doing all it can to avoid killing and wounding civilians. He maintains that the targeting of civilians is too often the result of skimpy, outdated and inconclusive intelligence gleaned from informants of dubious reliability and surveillance conducted from high attitudes or from a video analysed half a world away by people without expertise about the country or its culture. What Leahy should have also recognised is that Pentagon/CIA officials are just trigger happy, especially since there is no transparency nor accountability.

Since the US is a powerful country, the Pentagon and the CIA literally get away with murder. Only a few brave souls such as the UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteurs Christopher Heyns and Ben Emmerson have raised their voices against these blatant human-rights abuses. Both have argued that US policies violate the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the laws of war, and that indiscriminate killing of civilians amount to state-sponsored extra-judicial killings.

Emmerson also wrote a report on the negative impact of the use of drones on human rights in February 2014 which became the basis of the resolution by Pakistan in the Geneva-based Human Rights Council during its June 2014 session. As the Permanent Representative, I confronted strong opposition by the US and its cronies but the resolution was adopted by the 47 member council, with 27 in favour, six against and 14 abstentions.

Even so, the US continues to remain intransigent despite international opprobrium. This underscores American double standards on human rights. The lesson for Pakistan as for other countries is not to let the US pontificate to us about human rights and fundamental freedoms. We should tell them to clean up their own killing fields before they can afford to be sanctimonious with others.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 1^st, 2017.

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