Predators

by Williams, Brian Glyn

  The drone strikes also provide the Taliban with more reason to hate the Pakistani military and the United States. According to one Pakistani army officer quoted in the London Times, the drone strikes have provided the Taliban with a “huge motivation to fight against the Government and the army.” Another Pakistani general said, “We complained about it [the strike]. It was detrimental to our operations. I was about to mount an operation and the moment the drone did its attack I had to change dates. Our success lies with the writ of the Government and our popularity with the people. We have to take into account the influences and perceptions these people have.”14 Major General Abbas complained, “The US might have achieved tactical gains through the drone strikes, but they too had caused enormous damage to Pakistan’s efforts towards fighting the terrorism.”15 Similarly, progovernment tribal elders have pleaded for an end to the strikes because they “made them look like puppets” and “gave lie to the argument that we’ve made for a long time, this fight is theirs too.”16 Michael J. Boyle, an assistant professor of political science at La Salle University, summed up the previous Pakistani positions aptly: “Despite the fact that drone strikes are often employed against local enemies of the governments in Pakistan and Yemen, they serve as powerful signals of these governments’ helplessness and subservience to the United States and undermine the claim that these governments can be credible competitors for the loyalties of the population.”17

  Criticism of the drone strikes is not limited to the Pakistani government. There has been no person more critical of the strategic setbacks caused by the drone campaign than retired admiral Dennis C. Blair, a former director of national intelligence. Since being forced out of his post in 2010 for voicing his criticism of the strikes, Blair has called for the CIA to hand over the drone campaign to the military. He went so far as to suggest that the United States “pull back on unilateral actions … , except in extraordinary circumstances.” He further said, “We’re alienating the countries concerned, because we’re treating countries just as places where we go [to] attack groups that threaten us. We are threatening the prospects for long-term reform raised by the Arab Spring … which would make these countries capable and willing allies who could in fact knock that threat down to a nuisance level.”18 Speaking specifically about the drones, Blair said,

  As the drone campaign wears on, hatred of America is increasing in Pakistan. American officials may praise the precision of the drone attacks. But in Pakistan, news media accounts of heavy civilian casualties are widely believed. Our reliance on high-tech strikes that pose no risk to our soldiers is bitterly resented in a country that cannot duplicate such feats of warfare without cost to its own troops.

  Our dogged persistence with the drone campaign is eroding our influence and damaging our ability to work with Pakistan to achieve other important security objectives like eliminating Taliban sanctuaries, encouraging Indian-Pakistani dialogue, and making Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal more secure.19

  Blair has also said that there is “little point in killing easily replaceable foot soldiers if the cost is public outrage in Pakistan.” He believes that the reliance on unpopular drone strikes undermines America’s credibility in Pakistan and hurts the Pakistani army’s ability to gain support to fight the war to seize territory from the Taliban. The only way to keep from further alienating the Pakistanis, in Blair’s opinion, is to “put two hands on the trigger,” that is, allow the Pakistanis veto rights and a voice in choosing drone targets. The war against the Taliban, Blair thinks, cannot be won from the air; it can best be won with aid and assistance to impoverished villages in the FATA. This would help improve the U.S. and Pakistani government’s images and win over tribesmen who might be on the fence by offering positive instead of negative incentive. Blair also complained, “The steady refrain in the White House that ‘This is the only game in town’—reminded me of body counts in Vietnam.”20

  Blair was not alone in his views. One critic of the drone campaign, Nathaniel Fick of the Center for a New American Security, wrote, “Drone strikes excite visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion. The persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government, and contributes to Pakistan’s instability.”21 Writing for the Daily Times, former Pakistani general Talat Masood similarly argued,

  For Pakistan, these strikes are a huge embarrassment. An ally is challenging its sovereignty and independence repeatedly and humiliatingly. …

  A government that is already under criticism and has credibility issues is being made to look helpless in the face of US attacks. The leadership, especially President Asif Zardari, is losing popularity and no one is prepared to take seriously the official condemnations that follow every incident. …

  This war has to be won through the people’s support, and the advantage that a democratically elected government has over a dictatorship is obliterated if the former is seen as helpless against US strikes. In fact, drone strikes are diverting attention from combating insurgency, and anti-Americanism is on the rise. And even if the militants seem to be losing tactically in the short-term, there will be a long-term rise in the number of militants as well as the number of alienated people. There is further negative blowback as the militants hold the government complicit in these attacks.22

  The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and other members of the State Department who are tasked with cleaning up the public relations mess after strikes like the Datta Khel attack, which killed scores of villagers, would most likely agree with Mr. Masood. They think that the CIA ignores the huge diplomatic cost that comes from strikes that now increasingly kill mere Taliban foot soldiers.23 Opinion in Pakistan, a country of 190 million people, is being turned against the United States all for the sake of killing hundreds of low-level Taliban fighters. The public opinion fallout has given anti-American politicians from the various Islamic political parties a platform to mobilize people against the pro-American Zardari government. Whereas Imran Khan was unable to gather large numbers to his antidrone rallies, Pakistan’s main Islamist party, the Jamiat e Ulema, was able to bring together 100,000 people for an antidrone rally in Karachi in January 2012.24 This sort of mass protest seriously undermines the Zardari government, which is already struggling with the military, the judiciary, other less pro-American political parties, and of course the Taliban and other extremists. Should the weak Zardari government be removed from power by one of these many antidrone groups, the U.S.-Pakistani alliance in the war on terrorism could end.

  Many people who oppose the drone strikes also consider them a Whac-a-Mole-type short-term solution that cannot solve the problem of Taliban control in North Waziristan and elsewhere. Wars cannot be won from the air; they have to be fought on the ground. This means that sooner or later the United States will have to rely on Pakistan to ultimately solve the problem of the terrorist sanctuary in the FATA. One Pakistani has warned, “Drone attacks are ‘not an effective long-term strategy.’ This is an ideological and political war that cannot be won through the use of drones. Each time it is proclaimed that a top militant has been killed, another militant comes up to take up the leadership. Look how after Baituallah’s death, Hakimullah took over the reins of the Pakistani Taliban and the militants are as deadly as ever.”25

  DRONES ARE NOT PERFECT; THEY CAN (AND DO) MAKE MISTAKES THAT LEAD TO CIVILIAN DEATHS

  Although, as demonstrated in chapter 8, drones are incredibly precise, they are far from perfect killing machines. Drones have killed the wrong people. Examples of such mistakes that can be proven provide ammunition for those who claim that the United States is reliant on techint and humint that is all too fallible.

  The first example of a drone operator killing an innocent civilian was in the attack against Mir Ahmad, discussed in chapter 4. Ahmad was a tall Afghan who collected scrap metal in the hills of Zawhar Kili, Afghanistan, during the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom. He was spotted by a drone operator who
assumed that anyone that tall in Afghanistan had to be bin Laden. Thus, Ahmad and his friends were blown to bits in an instant with a Hellfire missile. The drone pilots essentially arrogated for themselves the right to be judge, jury, and executioner, and in the process they killed several innocent villagers, entirely as the result of their supreme reliance on technology. No local sources on the ground verified that the target the drone operators had randomly stumbled across on a typical hill in the Texas-sized country of Afghanistan was bin Laden.

  Similarly misguided attacks, in which drone pilots have spotted and killed someone whose pattern-of-life movements mistakenly gave him the signature of a Taliban militant, have likely occurred in the FATA. Although the majority of drone kills are supported by both solid, on-the-ground humint and technical intelligence, mix-ups are bound to happen owing to the distances involved and inevitable communication problems. In these cases, innocent people die.

  This point was vividly demonstrated with the infamous spring 2011 Datta Khel strike, which, as discussed in chapter 8, took place the day after CIA contractor Raymond Davis was released from a Pakistani jail where he had been detained after he killed two Pakistanis. In this strike as many as fifteen respected tribal elders were killed in a single attack against a local Taliban commander. Although the commander and several of his guards were also killed, the collateral damage among civilians was larger and had far greater ramifications than the killing of the few Taliban militants. An eyewitness account of the strike provides harrowing insight into what it is like for civilians to be attacked by drones:

  The assembly, a traditional Pathan jirga [tribal council], was being held in the open, on flat ground close to the Tochi river, on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border in tribal North Waziristan. There were more than 150 present, gathered to resolve a dispute over how much revenue each of several neighboring clans was due from a chromite mine on the slopes of a nearby mountain.

  Sharbat Khan, the contractor who had leased the mining rights, had just begun to speak when four or five Predators—American pilotless “drone” aircraft—flew over the line of brown, craggy hills at the valley’s rim and seemingly filled the sky.

  Their first target was a car, which was heading away from the Afghan border, being driven along the rough mountain road at high speed in an effort to outrun the drones and their deadly payload. According to witnesses, the aircraft fired four missiles at the car, but it was going so fast that they missed. Then, as the vehicle passed the village of Datta Khel, where the jirga had assembled, the drones fired two more missiles. This time, the car turned into a fireball, and all five men inside were killed.

  It may well be that whoever was piloting the drones thousands of miles away, sitting at a computer screen somewhere in America, did have reliable intelligence that the men in the car were terrorists. It is probable, say Pakistani security sources, that a GPS chip had been secreted inside the vehicle by an agent working for the Americans in order to track it more accurately.

  But after the car’s destruction, and before the tribesmen could take cover, the drones came back and started firing indiscriminately at them. “Four missiles were fired on the jirga members, who included people from all ages,” a tribesman, Samiullah Khan, told a local Pathan journalist. “The next moment there was nothing except the bodies of the slain and injured all around.” According to Samiullah Khan, the victims’ families had to be satisfied with burying disconnected “pieces of flesh.” In all, 41 died immediately, and a further seven over the following week.26

  One local described the aftermath of the strike: “There were pieces—body pieces—lying around. There was lots of flesh and blood.” The mourning people of the village were forced to “collect pieces of flesh and blood and put them in a coffin.”27 Unsurprisingly, the reaction among villagers who had lost their respected elders in the notorious strike ranged from sorrow to vows of badal-style revenge. One surviving tribesman said, “Our whole village was orphaned because all the elders were killed.” A second villager warned, “It has been a big mistake to target the jirga as it will have severe consequences.”28 Another similarly stated, “It will create resentment among the locals and everyone might turn into suicide bombers.”29 Finally, a surviving elder said, “Americans don’t spare us—not our children, nor our elders, nor our younger. That is why we have decided we will take blood revenge however we can.” The remaining elders wrote a statement titled “Announcement of Jihad against America”: “We have given permission to our loved ones to do suicide attacks against Americans. And we will take revenge so that Americans will remember it for centuries.”30

  Similar anecdotal evidence suggests errant strikes that kill civilians, at the worst, drive surviving tribesmen into the arms of the militants or, at best, undermine progovernment tribal leaders. Aamir Latif writes,

  Until last month, Habibullah was one of many Pakistani tribesmen who considered the Taliban and their foreign operatives as the prime reason for their woes.

  But three days after President Barack Obama took the oath of office, everything changed for the 26-year-old. A missile that Habibullah believes was fired by a U.S. drone hit his house, killing his two brothers and a mentally retarded relative…

  Now, Habibullah has become a Taliban militant himself, swearing to avenge the deaths of his brothers in line with a centuries-old Pashtun custom of badal, or revenge.

  Many Pakistani tribesmen resent the Taliban for the self-declared Islamic rules it has imposed on the local population, as well as its backing for foreign operatives living in the tribal regions. But the increasing number of U.S. drone attacks, coupled with bombing raids by Pakistani forces, have made it harder for many to oppose the Taliban’s presence. … According to Hazar, whenever the tribal elders, and local religious leaders, who have been sidelined by the Taliban, manage to create an anti-Taliban environment, a U.S. drone attack or bombing by Pakistani jets often ruins their efforts.31

  Striking a similar note, one Pashtun tribesman said, “Many people who did not support the Taliban previously support them now because the Americans are killing innocent people.”32

  Just as several Pakistani government officials suspected, drone strike mistakes had the ability to drive tribesmen to anti-American militancy. In a earlier statement that could have been scripted to fit the scenarios previously described Prime Minister Gilani warned,

  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. But in order to fight the militants in Waziristan we have to carry the public with us. One cannot go into any war without the support of the masses. We need huge public support to combat terrorism. But we do not get that if there is American interference which we do not ask for.33

  Gilani’s fears that the drone strikes might drive the tribes into the arms of the terrorists were not overblown. On several occasions the Taliban or enraged Pasthun tribesmen have retaliated for air strikes, most notably the Chenagai strike, with suicide bombings. One account of this sort of trend reads, “My neighbor was so furious when a drone killed his mother, two sisters and his 7-year-old brother last September that he filled his car with explosives and rammed it into a Pakistani army convoy. He had to avenge the death of his loved ones.”34 A Pashtun from the region similarly argued that the killing of innocent people was driving anti-Americanism to new highs. According to Mohammad Kamran Khan, “I recently visited North Waziristan during Eid. People were angry with me for the large number of civilians killed in these attacks. They were angry with the Pakistan government and our armed forces for not doing anything to put a halt to these attacks. Also, their hatred towards America was at an all-time high.”35

  A member of the Pakistani parliament said, “The lava of anger and hatre
d is flowing in the tribal areas. Clearly, the drone attack strategy is not winning people over. It is only increasing hatred against the US and now more people are taking up arms.”36

  The same trend of increased support for terrorists following collateral damage death from drone attacks has been observed in Yemen. One Yemeni businessman said, “The attacks are making people say ‘we believe Al Qaeda is on the right side.’” Another Yemeni whose nephew was killed as a bystander in a drone strike stated, “The Americans are targeting the sons of the Awlak. I would fight even the devil to exact revenge for my nephew.”37 A third Yemeni said, “Dear Obama, when a US drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda.”38 After a drone strike in Yemen wounded seven civilians, an outraged Yemeni said, “Our lives are valueless in the eyes of our government, and that is why civilians are being killed without a crime.”39

  An anguished survivor of another drone strike, which killed a group of Yemeni civilians, including a mother, her seven-year-old daughter, and a twelve-year-old boy, stated, “Their bodies were burning. How could this happen? None of us were Al Qaeda.”40 Another survivor of the strike said, “I would try to take my revenge. I would even hijack an army pickup, drive it back to my village and hold the soldiers in it hostages. I would fight along al-Qaeda’s side against whoever was behind this attack.” Yet another said, “Our entire village is angry at the government and the Americans. … If the Americans are responsible, I would have no choice but to sympathize with al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda is fighting America.” And finally, a Yemeni who lost a family member in the strike added, “If there’s no compensation from the government, we will accept the compensation from al-Qaeda. If I am sure the Americans are the ones who killed my brother, I will join al-Qaeda and fight against America.” Summing up such emotions, a Yemeni source said, “Every time the American attacks increase, they increase the rage of the Yemeni people, especially in al-Qaeda-controlled areas. The drones are killing al-Qaeda leaders, but they are also turning them into heroes.”41