By Saad Hafiz:
It is no big secret that since 9/11, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the support of allied agencies has been fighting a global ‘dirty war’ or applying state-sponsored violence, against al-Qaeda and its acolytes, encompassing both counterinsurgency and counter-terror tools. The elements of dirty war traditionally include murder, kidnapping, torture, disappearances or simply blowing up the opposition through the use of drone technology.
Drone strikes have been a sore point with the public and Pakistani politicians, who describe them as counterproductive and violations of sovereignty that produce unacceptable civilian casualties and creates more jihadists. Still, despite its public stance, it appears that Pakistan and its security services have quietly supported the drone programme as part of the counterinsurgency operations against the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan’s involvement includes providing local “spotters” on the ground who assist in pointing the drones to targets from a joint pre-agreed ‘priority list’.
The New America Foundation has estimated that since 2004, 2,551 people have been killed in the drone strikes in Pakistan, with 80% of those militants. Between 293 and 471 were thought to be civilians, including more than 160 children — approximately 17 percent of those killed. The Islamabad-based Conflict Monitoring Center (CMC) while agreeing that drones have killed over 2000 persons, has said that a majority of the killed people are ’unknown suspected militants’.
The drone program reminds one of the CIA‘s Phoenix Programme, a controversial counterinsurgency program that operated between 1967 and 1972 during the Vietnam war. The Programme was designed to identify the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) supporting the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF), more commonly referred to as the Vietcong (VC) and neutralize it through capture, coercion or killing its members. The Phoenix Programme was widely criticized by opponents of the conflict who called it little more than an “assassination program” utilizing “indiscriminate brutality” and a violation of international law.
The CIA also provided tacit support to Operation Condor, which was a notorious campaign of assassination and intelligence operations, launched by the right-wing South American dictatorships against leftist opposition in 1975. The infamous “death flights”, orchestrated in Argentina by naval chief Admiral Luis María Mendía — and also used during the Algerian War (1954–1962) by French forces — were widely used, in order to make the corpses, and therefore evidence, disappear by throwing them out of aircraft over the ocean. There were also many cases of the abduction of children of prominent dissidents during Condor, featured in the award winning 1982 Costa-Gavras film ‘Missing’.
Whether the subject is drones or past instances of state-sponsored violence, some basic questions need to be addressed: How are targets chosen? Under what legal authority are extreme methods employed? How successful are extreme methods in killing enemies and sparing civilians? Are extreme methods helpful in winning the war against would-be terrorists or enemies?
President Obama, who recently acknowledged that the United States has a secret drone programme aimed at terrorists in the AfPak region, also hinted as to how targets were chosen. He said: “Many strikes were carried out on Al-Qaeda operatives in places where the capacities of that military in that country may not be able to get them…For us to be able to get them in another way would involve, probably, a lot more intrusive military action than the ones we’re already engaging in.”
Judging from recent polls, US voters seem pretty gung-ho on the use of unmanned drones to go after terrorists, which makes it unlikely that the US will agree to stop or scale down drone operations in Pakistan, especially in an election year. Polls also suggest that more people feel that the president as commander-in- chief has the authority to use drones against terrorists in other countries compared to those who felt that the president should get congressional approval before drones are deployed.
The CIA claims that the drones programme has ‘decimated’ the al-Qaeda leadership and disrupted the leadership of the Tehrik–i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Among those killed by drones are nine of al-Qaeda’s 20 top commanders, including ‘high-value’ targets like Abu Hamza Rabia, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, Nek Muhammad and Baitullah Mehsud. However, even Admiral William McRaven, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, recognizing that there can be no purely military solution to the conflict, warned: “There is nobody in the U.S. government that thinks we can kill our way to victory.”
The problem with using the drone’s strategy in isolation is that the broader political, social, and even economic policies that could mitigate its pernicious consequences are ignored. Russell Baker’s quote: “Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things” may well describe drone warfare.