These three independent research–based studies, however, failed to have the same impact in Pakistan as the more alarmist, nonsourced findings of the two Pakistani journalists who wrote the aforementioned articles. Afghanistan-Pakistan–based journalist Dexter Filkins of the New York Times reported, “The overall perception is that America is massacring people.”154 The exaggerated statistic of fourteen dead al Qaeda for seven hundred civilians was picked up by Pakistani politicians on the right who used these numbers to galvanize popular support against the United States and the drones. One Pakistani writer complained of this trend: “From Imran Khan to Munawar Hasan, right-wing political parties and religious groups have used drone strikes to forward their agenda by misguiding people through erroneous, fabricated and fictional data. As a result, thousands of people have been mobilised across the country to oppose these strikes.”155 Another Pakistani from the FATA similarly complained of this trend among right-wing Pakistanis: “I would request them to stop throwing around fabricated figures of ‘civilian casualties’ that confuse people around the world and provide propaganda material to the pro-Taliban and al Qaeda forces in the politics and media of Pakistan.”156 A third Pakistani wrote,
Civilian deaths are not as high as Pakistani media, religious leaders, politicians, and other analysts have been claiming. The analysts question the claims of high civilian casualties because no media outlet or organization has ever published the names of those killed, their villages, dates, and the locations of the drone attacks. According to analysts, in a bid to minimize their losses, the insurgents try to conceal the identities of their associates killed in the attacks. They collect their comrades’ bodies and, after burying them, issue statements that all of the victims were innocent residents.157
Even though some Pakistanis had challenged the inflated, sourceless Pakistani media “statistics” on civilian deaths, the false numbers were subsequently used to galvanize opinion against the drones in America as well. In May 2009 David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum published an opinion piece in the New York Times that legitimized the sourceless, exaggerated Pakistani media claims: “Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent—hardly ‘precision.’”158 Kilcullen, who was an influential adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, then went before the House Armed Services Committee and further legitimized the sourceless statistics: “I realize that [the drones] do damage to the Al Qaeda leadership. Since 2006, 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 to the population. And they’ve given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism.”159
As the wildly inflated, sourceless claims of the drones’ civilian-to-militant kill ratio traveled from the Pakistani media to U.S. politicians, it became an article of faith in many circles that the CIA drones hunted not Taliban and al Qaeda, but innocent Pakistani civilians. Typical of this viewpoint was Maulvana Sami Ulhaq of the Pakistani Jamiat e Ulema e Islam (the Community of Islamic Scholars, an extremist Pakistani Islamist party), who announced at a conference in Lahore that the U.S. drone attacks kill “dozens of innocent people daily.”160 Muhammad Ahmed of the popular Buzz Pakistan website similarly wrote, “USA did more than 100 drone attacks in Pakistan in the past 3 years, if you read news about these drone attack you will see that in these drone attack only 1% terrorists was killed and other 99% people who died in these attack was innocent civilians of Pakistan. 75% of them were 10 to 15 year old teenagers.”161 The Pakistan Observer similarly reported, “The US drones or the predator planes which have been on the killing spree in Pakistan’s northern belt since August 2008 and have so far killed over fourteen hundreds people with the big majority as the innocent civilians (as admitted by the international watch dogs).”162 A similar finding was made by Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, a Pakistani who runs a website called Pakistani Body Count.163 His site, the only Pakistani site with sourcing, found that twelve hundred Pakistani civilians had been killed for forty terrorists. Usmani, however, came to this stunning conclusion by labeling all Taliban killed by drones as “civilians.”164 This even though the Pakistani government itself has recognized the members of Pakistani Taliban groups, who have killed thousands of Pakistani civilians, as terrorists. One Pakistani organization went even further than Usmani and claimed that 957 civilians had been killed in drone strikes in the year 2010 alone.165
Once again, these unfounded claims were not limited to Pakistan. A widely cited American article on civilian drone deaths by Daniel Byman of the Brookings Institution (without any sourcing or database to support his findings) claimed, “Critics correctly find many problems with this program, most of all the number of civilian casualties the strikes have incurred. Sourcing on civilian deaths is weak and the numbers are often exaggerated, but more than 600 civilians are likely to have died from the attacks. That number suggests that for every militant killed, 10 or so civilians also died.”166
Among other Westerners who joined the antidrone frenzy was antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan (to be discussed in a later chapter), who raised the number of civilian deaths even higher: “The drone bombings … are killing at least a hundred or more innocent civilians for every so-called terrorist that they get. We think that this is morally reprehensible.”167 Likening drones to land mines and cluster bombs, one of Britain’s most senior judges opined, “Unmanned drones that fall on a house full of civilians is a weapon the international community should decide should not be used.”168 Ted Rall, a writer for Commondreams.org, similarly wrote in an article titled “US Drone Planes Have a Nearly Perfect Record of Failure,” “Civilized nations should band together to renounce and outlaw these sloppy and obscene aerial assassination attempts, which send the terrifying message that killing civilians is acceptable in the pursuit of justice.”169 A U.S.-based website that was used to rally protestors to a march against drone strikes at CIA Headquarters in Langley claimed, “The primary and proven case against drone attacks is that they pose a public danger that can only be deemed as indiscriminate bombing.”170
It is easy to find antidrone comments from politicians, journalists, lawyers, bloggers, and activists who focus on the supposed mayhem being wreaked by drones on “thousands” of innocent Pakistani men, women, and children. The notion that robotic drones fly over Pakistani houses indiscriminately unleashing bombs on civilians has become familiar fodder for antiwar voices, as much a part of their discourse as CIA black sites, rendition, water boarding, and the Guantánamo Bay detention center.
There are many myths related to the drone campaign, but the greatest seems to be the notion that drones “invade” Pakistan and hover over the country’s civilians, slaughtering them indiscriminately while avoiding striking their actual terrorist targets with their state-of-the-art technology. An exploration of some of the other stories related to the drones found in the subsequent chapter will help shed some light on the CIA’s murky assassination campaign and expose some of the other myths related to it.
8
Spies, Lawyers, Terrorists, and Secret Bases
This is quite an awesome power, the power to label somebody as an enemy [then] wipe them out without judicial process of any kind.
—Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Many stories associated with the CIA’s extraordinary drone assassination campaign in Pakistan shed light on this murky war. Following are only a few of them that bring to life some of the more interesting episodes.
THE SHAMSI AIR BASE EXPOSURE
One of the earliest myths about the drone campaign was that the CIA drones were flying from bases in Afghanistan to carry out their deadly missions. The Pakistani media and politicians
frequently made references to “intrusions” or “violations” of Pakistani airspace by “Afghan-based” drones. In actuality, the majority of drones were flying from a remote airfield in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province, known as Shamsi, that had been given to the Americans after 9/11. This remote airstrip, which is 350 miles south of Waziristan, had originally been built by Arab sheikhs from the gulf states who used to fly to the region to hunt local birds. Its remoteness, proximity to the FATA, and distance from Taliban insurgents made it a perfect location for launching drone strikes with the Pakistanis’ “don’t ask, don’t tell” agreement.
Although many in Pakistan suspected that the government was covertly supporting the drone strikes “from Afghanistan,” even as it publicly condemned them, there seemed to be little official evidence of this until early 2009. The Pakistani government’s double game was finally exposed on February 12, 2009, when Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, dropped a bombshell in a conference when she said, “As I understand it, these [drones] are flown out of a Pakistani base.”1
American journalists treated the incident as if Feinstein had revealed a state secret, but media sources such as the BBC, the New York Times, and CNN had long before reported that the drones were based in Pakistan.2 Even though Western media had previously reported on the Pakistani bases, Feinstein’s public acknowledgment brought them to the attention of the Pakistani public for the first time.
In response, the Pakistani embassy in Washington announced, “There are no foreign bases in Pakistan.”3 Pakistani defense minister Ahmad Mukhtar similarly rebutted Feinstein’s incautious remark and added, “We do have the facilities from where they can fly, but they are not being flown from Pakistani territory. They are being flown from Afghanistan.”4
But the truth came out five days later, when London’s Times published an article that featured satellite images obtained from Google Earth that clearly showed Predator drones on a runway in Shamsi.5 Pakistan’s Dawn subsequently reported the news and claimed, “The existence of drone bases inside Pakistan suggests a much deeper relationship with the United States on counter-terrorism than has been publicly acknowledged.”6 Shireen Mazari of the Pakistani News went even further and published a scathing opinion piece on the Shamsi revelation:
What many of us had suspected seems to have now been revealed by no less a person than the Chairperson of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein—that US drones operating in Pakistan are in fact flown from an airbase in Pakistan. …
Official sources have lost all credibility. After all, we have been officially briefed on more than one occasion that no drone flew without the knowledge of the Pakistani military. …
The brazenness with which the government has chosen to lie not only to its people but to Parliament shows how little it cares for either. … In retrospect it is a sick mind that will continue to harp publicly on how the drone attacks are encouraging extremism and must be stopped while covertly there has always been a Pakistani acquiescence to these drone violations of our sovereignty.7
Tempers were soothed somewhat when it was revealed that the United States had created a base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border, to fly drones into the FATA. Many drones were shifted to Jalalabad, where they were said to take off almost hourly. The issue of the secret CIA drone base at Shamsi was, however, brought up again in 2009, when the New York Times reported that the CIA had hired contractors from the firm Xe Services (formerly known as Blackwater) to guard the base’s perimeter and load bombs and missiles onto the drones.8 Xe/Blackwater had gained great international notoriety after several of its armed contractors in Baghdad gunned down seventeen civilians in 2007. News of the massacre made its way to Pakistan and other Muslim countries in the region. When Pakistanis heard that contractors from the notorious company were operating in their country at Shamsi, there were howls of rage, and the CIA was forced to end its contract with Xe in 2009.
Shamsi came up again in June 2011, when the Pakistanis announced that they were closing the base to punish the United States for withholding promised funds.9 The United States, however, announced that it had already ceased operations at the base and transferred them across the Afghan border to the base at Jalalabad. But this move did not seem permanent, and in December 2011 the Pakistanis again announced they were closing the base after U.S. Apaches and AC-130 gunships accidentally killed twenty-four Pakistani border troops during a firefight in a place called Salala. Regardless, the existence of secret CIA bases and Xe contractors on Pakistani soil created a sense among many Pakistanis that the United States was attempting to occupy their country.
THE ARREST OF RAYMOND DAVIS AND THE DATTA KHEL STRIKE OF MARCH 17, 2011
Rumors of CIA and Xe agents running around Pakistan became even more widespread after a CIA contractor named Raymond Davis was arrested for gunning down two Pakistanis trying to rob him in the eastern city of Lahore on January 27, 2011. Subsequent reports indicated that the two men killed were actually ISI spies tracking Davis.10 When the Pakistanis arrested Davis, an ex–Special Forces soldier, they found a pathrai drone tracking chip on him. He was also found to have traveled to the FATA region twelve times without official permission.11 If this were not enough, his mobile phone was found to have made calls to Waziristan.12 The Pakistani media reported that Davis’s main task was “to keep CIA network intact in the tribal agencies as well as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.”13 One Pakistani official said, “This is not the work of a diplomat. He was doing espionage and surveillance activities.”14 For their part, the Americans claimed that Davis was a “diplomat” and therefore had immunity.
As a result of the embarrassing affair, which led to widespread anti-American protests and exposed the CIA’s covert operations in Pakistan, the Pakistani government demanded that hundreds of U.S. operatives in the country leave. Tensions rose between Islamabad and Washington, and in an effort to placate the Pakistanis during the nearly two-month period that Davis was in custody, the CIA called a monthlong halt to the drone strikes. A Taliban commander said of Davis’s arrest and the resulting lull, “The arrest of this guy is a very positive thing for us. Our forces used to be hit by attacks every other day. Now we can move more freely.”15
Davis was released on March 16, 2011, following a diyya (blood money) payment of $2.3 million to the slain robbers’ families, and the drone strikes began in force the very next day. The drone attack in Waziristan on March 17 had been strongly opposed by the new U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, who felt that a strike coming so close on the heels of Davis’s release was insensitive and would infuriate the Pakistanis.16 The CIA, however, overrode Munter’s concerns, and the ensuing strike turned out to be a greater mistake than Ambassador Munter could have predicted.
The March 17 strike killed between twenty-six and forty-four people in Datta Khel, a Taliban-controlled village in North Waziristan.17 Although news sources initially claimed that those killed in the strike were “militants,” the New York Times subsequently reported that as many as fifteen of the people killed in the strike were actually tribal elders.18 Others killed in the strike were described as merchants and tribal police. It became apparent that the elders had been engaged in a jirga designed to settle a dispute between two tribes over a chromite mine. Since the territory in question was controlled by the Taliban, a high-ranking commander loyal to Taliban leader Hafiz Gul Bahadur was officiating at the jirga. While the elders and Taliban militants were meeting, as many as four missiles slammed into the jirga, killing the high-ranking Taliban leader, ten of his followers, and numerous civilians. A BBC account of the Datta Khel strike reported, “Officials say two drones were involved. One missile was fired at a car carrying suspected militants. Three more missiles were then fired at the moving vehicle, hitting it and the nearby tribal meeting, or jirga.”19
Regardless of the intended target, the local population was infuriated by the deaths of so many respected elders at the hands of
the CIA. One survivor said, “It wasn’t a militant gathering, but a meeting of tribal elders from Ismail Khan village to sort out some differences over a business deal. One of Bahadur’s commanders, Sharabat Khan, was also present at the meeting as he is also a local elder, but they were discussing business.” The surviving elders demanded blood money from the Americans for their slain family members, and one elder said that the attack “will create resentment among the locals and everyone might turn into suicide bombers.” Another elder who survived said, “We are a people who wait 100 years to exact revenge. We never forgive our enemy.”20
A Pakistani government source said, “The Pakistan Army condoles with the families whose dear and near ones have been martyred in this senseless attack.” But an American official caustically rejected Pakistan’s account of the civilian deaths and claimed those who were killed in the strike were Taliban militants: “These people weren’t gathering for a bake sale. They were terrorists.”21 Another U.S. source in a similar sarcastic tone said, “There’s every indication that this was a group of terrorists, not a charity car wash in the Pakistani hinterlands.”22
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