Predators

by Williams, Brian Glyn

  In an article for the Daily Times, Taj came out strongly in support of the drones:

  They [the people of Waziristan] want al Qaeda along with the Taliban burnt to ashes on the soil of Waziristan through relentless drone attacks. The drone attacks, they believe, are the one and only “cure” for these anti-civilisation creatures and the US must robustly administer them the “cure” until their existence is annihilated from the world. The people of Waziristan, including tribal leaders, women and religious people, asked me to convey in categorical terms to the US the following in my column.

  This was the view of the people of Waziristan. I would now draw the attention of the US to the Peshawar Declaration, a joint statement of political parties, civil society organisations, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, labourers and intellectuals, following a conference on December 12–13, 2009, in Peshawar. The declaration notes that if the people of the war-affected areas are satisfied with any counter-militancy strategy; it is drone attacks that they support the most. Some people in Waziristan compare drones with the Quran’s Ababeels—the holy sparrows sent by God to avenge Abraham, the intended conqueror of the Khana Kaaba. …

  The overpowered people of Waziristan are angry. They believe no one in their entire history has inflicted so much insult on them as al Qaeda. In our native land, they say, al Qaeda has killed so many of us.97

  Taj made a similar comment in an article posted on Viewpoint:

  It is in this context that contrary to the wider public opinion in Pakistan, people of FATA welcome drone attacks and want the Americans to continue hitting the FATA based militants with the drones till their complete elimination. I know all this because of my close association with the area. The same is true about Amn Tehreek, those who passed the Peshawar Declaration as well as the Pakhtun journalists working with radio Mashal. I would encourage the researchers and journalists around the world, who care for professional standards of their work, to also get to know the FATA people’s support for the drone strikes through their investigative skills and direct access to people from the drone hit areas.98

  Even those tribesmen who have given the Taliban sanctuary in their hujras out of fear or a feeling of melmastiia seem to be tiring of the Taliban. The Taliban’s brutal spy witch hunts and subsequent executions, suicide-bombing attacks on civilians, burning of local schools, propensity for violence, policy of forbidding polio vaccinations, and tendency to act as a magnet for drone strikes and Pakistani army invasions has turned many tribesmen against the organization. One tribal elder said of the Taliban, “They are swarming our place. We gave them shelter because we thought they were fighting infidels but now they are dictating what to do in our own land. They set up check posts on the main roads and then ask us about our identity. Who are they to ask us such questions?”99

  In response, across the FATA tribesmen have formed lashkars to fight against the Taliban.100 The Taliban have responded with suicide bombings of civilian jirgas that have killed hundreds in the region, but the battle goes on between the majority who do not support the terrorists and the Taliban.101 In this sentiment the Pashtuns reflect a trend in their country. In 2008 only 33 percent of Pakistanis held a negative view of the Taliban; by 2009 it had gone up to 70 percent. As for the drones, one Pashtun source known only as “Khan” (to hide his identity from the Taliban) has written, “Another excitement is the sighting of a drone. People and children do not rush indoors, they look at them and discuss and argue about the distance at which they must be flying. The general impression is that they are close. They feel the happiness of something close, friendly and powerful against evil.”102

  As for the notion that Pakistan proper, on the other side of the Indus (Punjab and Sindh), is seething with fury and mass protests against the drones, although it is true that these regions’ inhabitants are more inclined to dislike the American campaign than those in the FATA, the antidrone protests have been small and limited. Even Imran Khan, a former world-class cricketeer-turned-politician who has attacked the “hypocrite” Zardari government for allowing the drones, has failed to mobilize the masses based on their hatred for the strikes. A recent article in Dawn, titled “US Drone Strikes Fail to Mobilise Pakistan Masses,” said, “Campaigners condemn US drone strikes in Pakistan as extra-judicial assassinations that kill hundreds of civilians, but popular protests against them are conspicuous by their rarity. … Rallies protesting the CIA-run operation against Taliban and al Qaeda allies in Pakistan’s tribal areas on the Afghan border are few and thinly attended.” One Pakistani quoted in the article dismissed the efforts of Imran Khan (known as Taliban Khan by his critics) to rally Pakistanis based on violations of sovereignty: “Imran Khan and others are demonstrating against drones and their victims. … But can any of these people go to North Waziristan and come back alive?”103

  The same paradigm can be found in Yemen. As for the idea that drones drive Yemeni tribesmen to join the terrorists, Christopher Swift, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University who carried out fieldwork in Yemen the summer of 2012, found that “to my astonishment, none of the individuals I interviewed drew a causal relationship between drone strikes and Al Qaeda recruiting. Indeed, of the 40 men in this cohort, only five believed that U.S. drone strikes were helping al Qaeda more than they were hurting it.” Swift also reported that the primary factors driving young men to join the insurgency in Yemen were “overwhelmingly economic,” not drone-based. A tribal militia commander from one of the provinces that had been taken over by militants who were trying to create a Taliban-style shariah law state summed up his feelings on drones as follows: “Ordinary people have become very practical about drones. If the United States focuses on the leaders and civilians aren’t killed, then drone strikes will hurt al Qaeda more than they help them.”104 It would thus seem that in Yemen, as in Pakistan, many who live in the drone-targeted areas have come to have pragmatic views of the drones. It is primarily among Western drone activists and elites in towns in Yemen and Pakistan that the “drones create more terrorists than they kill” paradigm prevails.

  Finally, Professor Amitai Etzioni of Georgetown University makes an interesting argument against the “drones make more enemies than they kill” paradigm:

  Such arguments do not take into account the fact that anti-American sentiment in these areas ran high before drone strikes took place and remained so during periods in which strikes were significantly scaled back. Moreover, other developments—such as the release of an anti-Muslim movie trailer by an Egyptian Copt from California or the publication of incendiary cartoons by a Danish newspaper—led to much larger demonstrations. Hence stopping drone strikes—if they are otherwise justified, and especially given that they are a very effective and low-cost way to neutralize terrorist violence on the ground—merely for public relations purposes seems imprudent.105

  10

  The Argument against Drones

  We need to be extremely careful about undermining the longer-term objective—a stable Pakistan, where elected politicians control their own national-security establishment, and extremism is diminishing—for the sake of collecting scalps.

  —Peter Godspeed, National Post

  The problem with the Americans is that the only instrument up their sleeve is the hammer, and they see everything as a nail.

  —Anonymous American official quoted in the Guardian

  During her October 2009 visit to Pakistan, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton was frequently criticized in conferences by Pakistanis who strongly resented the killing of their compatriots on Pakistani soil by Americans prosecuting the war on terrorism. On one occasion an angry Pakistani audience member told Clinton that the drone strikes amounted to a form of “execution without trial.”1 The Pakistani Observer said, “Instead of tactical gains or strategic advantage, the daily slaughter of some militants, heavy collateral damage of civilian lives, homes and property will leave long lasting scars, which will never heal.”2 The majority of Pakistanis seem to agree th
at the distrusted Americans are carrying out a campaign of extrajudicial execution of their countrymen in a unilateral hunt for anti-American terrorists.

  DRONE STRIKES ARE A PUBLIC RELATIONS AND STRATEGIC DISASTER IN PAKISTAN

  The prevalent Pakistani belief that the majority of those who are being executed by drones are civilians only deepens the distrust of America. A 2010 Pew opinion poll in Pakistan found that “there is little support for U.S. drone strikes against extremist leaders—those who are aware of these attacks generally say they are not necessary, and overwhelmingly they believe the strikes kill too many civilians.” Specifically the Pew report stated, “Nearly all (93%) of those who are familiar with the strikes say they are a bad thing. Most Pakistanis (56%) who have heard about the drone attacks say they are not necessary to defend Pakistan from extremist groups, while about one-in-three (32%) believe they are necessary. Nine-in-ten think these attacks kill too many innocent people.”3 A subsequent 2011 Pew poll found that the number of Pakistanis who viewed the drone strikes negatively had risen to 97 percent.4 A 2012 Pew poll found that “about 75 percent of Pakistanis surveyed regard the United States as an enemy. … A key reason for the ongoing ill will appears to be America’s use of drone strikes as a tactic against Islamist militants based in Pakistan.”5

  Unlike the poll by the Aryana Institute (discussed in chapter 9), which demonstrated support for the drone strikes among tribesmen in the FATA, a survey by the New America Foundation found the opposite. The New America Foundation reported, “More than three-quarters of FATA residents oppose American drone strikes. Indeed, only 16 percent think these strikes accurately target militants; 48 percent think they largely kill civilians and another 33 percent feel they kill both civilians and militants.”6 Although members of the Aryana Institute have argued that Taliban intimidated many average tribesmen into speaking out against the drone strikes when polled by outsiders, it is also clear that some people in Pakistan proper and the FATA strongly oppose the drone strikes. Their main concern is that the strikes kill too many civilians.

  This was a concern I noticed while conducting research in Pakistan in 2010. Although many Pakistanis supported the killing of terrorists—just so long as it was done cleanly—they felt that there was no such thing as an “acceptable” number of civilians being killed in the process. For this reason, most thought the drone strikes were bad for Pakistan. Although, as has been pointed out in previous chapters, the drone campaign is unprecedentedly accurate and leads to relatively few civilian deaths, this was not the perception in Pakistan. Perception can be more important than reality. I found that even anti-Taliban, English-speaking secular elites in Islamabad, Peshawar, and Lahore believed that the drones were killing more civilians than terrorists. They could not tolerate the idea of a distrusted foreign intelligence service killing large numbers of Pakistani men, women, or children who were uninvolved with terrorism, even by accident as collateral damage.

  With the Pakistani media banging a steady drumbeat of anti-Americanism, Americans have little power to change this perception. The three separate U.S. studies, discussed in chapter 8, that demonstrate that the drones kill only a small percentage of civilians in their strikes have not altered the Pakistani perceptions that the CIA is brutally killing large numbers of civilians in their country. Few Pakistanis are aware of these studies, and even if they were, they would probably distrust them because they were conducted by Americans. When U.S. officials such as Hillary Clinton visit Pakistan to engage the Pakistani people and present America’s softer side, they are drowned out by the voices asking about civilian deaths in drone strikes. This makes it impossible to “sell” America to the Pakistani people.

  America is clearly losing the war of perceptions and with it the war for the hearts and minds of millions of Pakistanis, and the drones strikes don’t help. The false number of “700 dead civilians for just 14 terrorists” propagated by the antidrone voices in Pakistan is typical of this exaggerated rhetoric. This disinformation is the public relations collateral damage of the drone war, and it may far outweigh the tactical gains that clearly come from the killing of hundreds of Taliban and al Qaeda operatives and the disruption of their terror-insurgency campaign. In its most benign form this growing distrust of the United States and its drone campaign simply leads to anti-American rallies and American flag burnings. At its worse it can lead to Pakistanis, both Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns in places like the Punjab, joining or actively supporting the militants. The drones that kill terrorists may thus be inadvertently recruiting new ones to replenish their ranks. Few issues excite the fury of the Pakistanis more than stories of innocent Pakistani children killed in their homes by drone strikes; this can incite issues of ghairat (honor) and badal (revenge).

  In the larger sense this failure in the war of perceptions undermines not just the Americans’ image but also the image of the Pakistani government, which is tied to it. Most Pakistanis see the Zardari government as either complicit in the murder of fellow citizens or too weak to prevent the bullying Americans from carrying out the drone assassination campaign. The Zardari government is forced to continually release public statements criticizing the drone strikes as violations of sovereignty in order to come off as defenders of Pakistan’s territorial integrity. The revelation that the CIA drones were being secretly flown from the Pakistani air base at Shamsi in southeastern Pakistan, with the obvious compliance of Pakistani authorities, seriously undermined the government’s credibility with its own people. Many Pakistanis felt that the government, which had issued many public criticisms of the drone strikes in the past, was being duplicitous.

  For this reason, although there are clearly prodrone voices in the Pakistani government, as seen in chapter 8, one cannot write off all the official protests against the drone campaign as mere pro forma sop for the Pakistani masses designed to put daylight between Islamabad and the infamous CIA drones. The Pakistanis, for example, complained about the strikes to the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and the head of CENTCOM, Gen. David Petraeus, during a 2008 visit. After a meeting with Petraeus, Pakistani president Zardari said, “Continuing drone attacks on our territory, which result in loss of precious lives and property, are counterproductive and difficult to explain by a democratically elected government. It is creating a credibility gap.”7 This statement is hard to contest. The drone strikes make the weak Pakistani president look bad before his people.

  The Pakistani defense minister claimed the strikes were generating “anti-American sentiments” and creating “outrage and uproar among the people.” Another military official said that the missile strikes were “counterproductive” and “driving a wedge between the government and the tribal people.”8 Certainly there have been mass protests against the drone strikes, especially following the Damadola strikes. These may have turned local tribesmen against the government and certainly caused an uproar throughout the country.

  Pakistani prime minister Yousuf Gilani described the strikes as “disastrous” and said, “Such actions are proving counter-productive to efforts to isolate the extremists and militants from the tribal population.”9 He also said, “We are trying to separate militants from tribesmen, but the drone attacks are doing exactly the opposite.”10 On another occasion he stressed, “The political and the military leadership have been very successful in isolating the militants from the local tribes. But once there is a drone attack in their home region, they get united again. This is a dangerous trend, and it is my concern and the concern of the army. It is also counterproductive in the sense that it is creating a lot of anti-American sentiment all over the country.”11

  In other words, this high-ranking Pakistani official felt the strikes might align aggrieved tribes that lost civilians as collateral damage in drone strikes with the Taliban, which would be catastrophic for the wars in both the FATA and Afghanistan. The Pakistani army’s Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas similarly claimed that the missile strikes “hurt the campaign rather than help.”12 And Abdul Basit, a Pakistan foreign
office spokesman, expressed his opposition to the strikes saying, “As we have been saying all along, we believe such attacks are counter-productive. They involve collateral damage and they are not helpful in our efforts to win hearts and minds.”13

  This statement is an understatement when it comes to the damage done to America’s image in Pakistan. One has only to extrapolate how Americans would feel about the CIA killing real or suspected American extremists without trials in the United States (much less a foreign Muslim intelligence agency such as the ISI doing the same thing) to see how most Pakistanis feel about America’s secretive drone assassination campaign in their country. On several occasions Pakistanis anecdotally told me they “liked to know what was going on in their own backyard,” and this phrase seemed to have begun to circulate in regard to the drones. The secretive nature of the drone strikes and the CIA’s lack of accountability to anyone in its own government (much less the Pakistani government) disturbed many Pakistanis I met.

  Thus, powerful figures in Pakistan see the strikes as undermining the country’s fragile civilian government and creating problems with the tribesmen who are caught between the drones and the Taliban. The undermining of the already unstable Pakistani government has grave strategic implications. For example, it is difficult for the Pakistani military to carry out its own anti-Taliban operations in places such as North Waziristan because the drone campaign makes it appear as if the army is doing so only in furtherance of U.S. goals. Pakistanis perceive their army as a “stooge” fighting fellow Muslims on behalf of the Americans.