Predatory strikes

A Predator drone over the Kandahar airfield in southern Afghanistan. Missile strikes from the drone have killed hundreds of civilians in Pakistan's tribal areas.-KIRSTV WIGGLESWORTH/AP

PRESIDENT Barack Obama's off-colour joke about using Predator drones (remotely piloted vehicles, or RPVs) to target the favourite pop group of his two daughters earned him a lot of guffaws at the annual White House Dinner on May 1. On the same day, Faizal Shahzad, an American citizen of Pakistani origin, allegedly tried to explode a car bomb at Times Square, New York City's famous landmark. Media reports have said that one of the major factors that motivated him to plant a bomb was the death of hundreds of civilians in U.S. drone attacks in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Quereshi said that the attempt was a blowback for the countless U.S. drone attacks.

The U.S. military has been using drones extensively since the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Drone technology has been used with devastating effect in the counter-insurgency tactics adopted by the U.S. In both countries, civilians have borne the brunt of the attacks. In documented cases in the Iraqi cities of Falluja and Haditha, the U.S. military used drones to target civilians. Many prominent resistance leaders also were killed in drone attacks, but the collateral damage to unarmed civilians and their property was immense. It was only after the 15th attempt that U.S. drones could successfully target Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader. More than 300 people were killed in the process.

The Pakistani authorities have released statistics showing that more than 700 civilians were killed in drone attacks in 2009 alone. The New York Times has reported that since the beginning of 2009, Predators and the larger version of the drone, the Reaper, have fired at least 184 missiles and 66 laser-guided bombs at suspected militants in Afghanistan. Numerous attempts have been made against Baitullah's successor, Hakimullah Mehsud. He was pronounced dead by the American and Pakistani authorities, but he resurfaced publicly after the bombing attempt in New York, in the first week of May.

The indiscriminate killings that have occurred as a result of drone strikes seem to have only strengthened the ranks of the Taliban on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in their struggle against the occupation forces. Militants have used the drone attacks on civilians to justify their recent suicide attacks in Pakistani cities such as Karachi and Lahore, which are situated far away from the tribal areas. Hakimullah Mehsud, in his latest statement, has said that the Pakistani Taliban will continue with its suicide attacks until U.S. drone attacks are stopped in the tribal areas.

As the American counter-insurgency thrust shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S. started using drones even more liberally. The marked increase in the use of the killer drones was noticeable immediately after Obama stepped into the White House. The tactics adopted by the Obama administration have been described as a remote-controlled campaign against terrorism. American military drones are now proliferating over the skies of other countries, including Yemen and Somalia.

Israel, U.S.' ally, pioneered the use of drones in attacking civilian and military targets in the occupied Palestinian territories and in neighbouring countries like Syria and Lebanon. Washington used to condemn Tel Aviv formally for targeting civilians with drones. Now the U.S. itself has adopted the policy of targeted killing. Thousands of civilians have died in drone attacks in the last decade and a half. Some experts have estimated that up to 90 per cent of those killed in drone attacks are civilians.

The Indian Home Ministry is also reportedly contemplating the use of drones to counter the Maoist upsurge in central India. India has brought drone technology from Israel. The U.S. has promised the Pakistan Army access to drones.

The escalation of drone attacks started in the last years of the Bush administration as U.S. military casualties mounted in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the Pentagon's point of view, using pilotless drones to bomb targets is a less costly and more effective way to wage war than using conventional planes. Very frankly, it is the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the Al Qaeda leadership, Leon Panetta, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), told the American media recently. The U.S. now spends $2.2 billion for the purchase of Predator aircraft. More missiles were fired in the past 15 months of the Obama presidency than in the eight years of the Bush presidency. Scott Horton, a prominent human rights lawyer and contributing editor of Harpers Magazine, has written that the Obama era drone warfare looks like the Bush-era drone warfare on steroids. The U.S. defence establishment is planning to train more drone pilots than fighter pilots. Drone pilots, sitting in an American base, can, with a click of their computer buttons, send missiles into thickly populated civilian centres as they hunt for fugitives.

According to reports in the American media, the Obama administration has given secret permission to the CIA to attack a wider range of targets in the tribal regions, including suspected militants whose names are not on the wanted list of terrorists. This has led to the dramatic escalation of drone strikes inside Pakistani territory. The number of Predator and Reaper drones put into service over Pakistan doubled last year. In the past two years, unmanned aircraft have carried out multiple missile strikes on a weekly basis, targeting any house or gathering that the CIA deems as suspicious and as a threat to U.S. security interests. Many analysts and commentators in the U.S. have said that allowing the CIA to kill individuals whose names are unknown raises a lot of ethical questions and increases the risk of killing innocent people.

Is it right for a democratic, constitutional state to kill with a click of a mouse? the German magazine Der Spiegel has questioned. An American lawyer recently told the U.S. House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs that though the U.S. had a right to use drones, the CIA personnel launching the attacks could be guilty of war crimes. Another lawyer argued that the drone attacks were illegal because the U.S. military was using civilian contractors to launch them. The American Civil Liberties Union is of the view that the U.S. administration's targeted killings, outside of the armed conflict zone, are illegal.

The drones are piloted more than 13,000 km away in the American state of Nevada by civilian contractors. The U.S. also relies heavily on six private contracting firms for information on the ground along the Af-Pak border and inside Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa).

These civilians are usurping traditional military functions, writes Horton. Kenneth Anderson, Professor of Law at Stanford University, told a U.S. Congressional Oversight Panel that the use of drones was arguably against international law and raised the possibility of top U.S. administration officials being indicted by the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

This is the first time in American history that the CIA has been given paramilitary powers. The current drone warfare programme marks the first time in U.S. history that a state-of-the-art, cutting edge weapons system has been placed in the hands of the CIA, marking the continued evolution of the CIA as a paramilitary force with advanced technical weaponry, Horton has written in a recent issue of Harpers Magazine. He observes that the White House took such a momentous decision without taking Congress and the national security establishment into confidence. Horton also emphasises that the CIA was a civilian agency and therefore not entitled to privileged combatant status under the Geneva Conventions.

David Kilcullen, a top U.S. counter-insurgency expert and adviser to the Pentagon, told Congress in the first week of May that the drone strikes in Pakistan were counterproductive and should be stopped. Since 2008, we've killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we've killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating the population. The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population, Kilcullen told the Congressional panel. Kilcullen, in a New York Times article co-authored with Andrew Exum, published late last year, wrote that for a single terrorist killed in drone attacks, 50 civilians perished alongside.

The American use of drone technology has taken the concept of targeted killings to a new and more dangerous level. More and more states will no doubt be tempted to emulate the American example. The United States has to decide now whether it wants to legitimise a broader right of sovereign states to assassinate their enemies using drones. The consequences of such a step to the world as a whole will be severe, Horton said in a lecture delivered at the New York University Law School in the first week of May.