The fallibility of the CIA’s humint and techint and its potentially fatal results are best demonstrated by the case of two U.S. servicemen, Navy Corpsman Benjamin Rast and Marine Staff Sgt. Jeremy Smith, who were mistakenly killed by a drone in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan. Rast and Smith were misidentified as “Taliban” by a drone flown from Nevada and killed in a salvo of missiles.42 If the drone operators could not identify fellow Americans on a battlefield in Afghanistan, then there is a high probability they could similarly mistake other armed men in the remote FATA (a region where arms are prevalent) for Taliban.
A similar incident took place in Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan, when drone pilots noticed three trucks, which they mistook for a Taliban convoy, and attacked them with missiles. Unfortunately, the trucks were packed with civilians, and as many as twenty-three noncombatants were incinerated in an instant by drone Hellfires. A U.S. general who investigated the attack on the civilians found that “information that the convoy was anything other than an attacking force was ignored or downplayed” by the overly eager Predator crew whose reporting was “inaccurate and unprofessional.”43 In fact, the drone operators followed the civilian convoy of trucks for three and half hours analyzing its pattern-of-life movement before firing on it and massacring its members. It was only after the strike that drone pilots noticed terrified women survivors waving clothing to surrender to their airborne attackers as they carried babies from the convoy’s wreckage.44 It is likely that in both of these instances of misidentification trigger-happy drone operators gave into the urge to use their technology to mistakenly kill fellow Americans and unarmed Afghan civilians without full humint support. It can be theorized that the same thing has happened in Pakistan as well.
Several other drone errors have cost innocent people their lives. There is, for example, the case of Jabr al Shabwani, a deputy provincial governor in Yemen who met with a local al Qaeda leader to arrange a truce in October 2010. During the meeting a drone fired its missiles into the gathering, killing the popular Shabwani, five of his bodyguards, and the al Qaeda leader. According to Reuters, “The killing so angered Shabwani’s tribesmen that in the subsequent weeks they fought heavily with government security forces, twice attacking a major oil pipeline in Maarib.”45 Once again a drone strike proved to be a recruiter for anti-American militancy.
Another strike that demonstrates that the drones are only as good as their ground intelligence took place in Turkey. On November 22, 2011, the United States flew its last Predator and Reaper drones out of Iraq but transferred four of them to Turkey (smaller surveillance drones were, however, kept in Iraq to protect the massive U.S. embassy complex in Baghdad). At the time the Turkish government announced that it would be in charge of the four Predator drones’ operations in their country. It was assumed that the drones, which were based at Incirlik Air Base in southeastern Turkey, would be used to monitor the Iraqi-Turkish border. Specifically, they would monitor the infiltration of Kurdish guerrillas coming into Turkey from Iraq to fight for independence against Turkish troops.
On December 29, 2011, one of the drones spotted what appeared to be a group of Kurdish insurgents sneaking across the border from Iraq to Turkey.46 It then transmitted their location to Turkish F-16 fighter jets, which bombed the group approximately fifteen minutes later. At least thirty-five were killed in the strike. But it later became known that far from being Kurdish guerrillas, the men who were attacked were simply Kurdish smugglers sneaking into Turkey with cigarettes and fuel. Restless Kurds throughout Turkey staged mass protests over the killing of the smugglers, and the case once again proved that for all the technology at their fingertips, the drone pilots were not infallible. It was the largest Kurdish civilian death toll in a single strike in Turkey’s three-decade-long war with the Kurdish insurgents.
Sky News reported the aftermath of the errant strike as follows: “Television images showed a line of corpses covered by blankets on a barren hillside, with a crowd of people gathered around—some with their heads in their hands and crying. People loaded the bodies onto donkeys which were led down the hill to be loaded into vehicles and taken to hospital in the mainly Kurdish southeast of the country. Security sources said the people killed had been carrying canisters of diesel on mules and that their bodies were found on the Iraqi side of the border.” A local mayor said, “We have 30 corpses, all of them are burned. The state knew that these people were smuggling in the region. This kind of incident is unacceptable. They were hit from the air.”47 To compound matters, most of those who were killed in the strike were Kurdish teenagers whose fathers belonged to a clan that actually fought for the Turkish government against the Kurdish insurgents.48 This fact suggests that the decision to carry out the deadly strike on the Kurdish smugglers was made without the benefit of any supporting ground humint whatsoever.
A similar errant strike took place in Radaa, Yemen, in September 2012 and led to the death of thirteen civilians. In this case, the drones hit a civilian vehicle traveling near a targeted terrorist vehicle. At the time the Yemeni government apologized for the mistake and said, “This was one of the very few times when our target was completely missed. It was a mistake, but we hope it will not hurt our anti-terror efforts in the region.” Grieving family members tried unsuccessfully to carry the bodies of the slain victims to the capital. When the government blocked their passage, a Yemeni who was near the strike angrily said, “You want us to stay quiet while our wives and brothers are being killed for no reason. This attack is the real terrorism.”49
In her groundbreaking 2009 article on the cost of the drone war for the New Yorker, Jane Mayer wrote, “Cut off from the realities of the bombings in Pakistan, Americans have been insulated from the human toll, as well as from the political and the moral consequences. Nearly all the victims have remained faceless, and the damage caused by the bombings has remained unseen.”50 Several well-known civilian victims, however, have provided us faces and names to represent all the innocents who have died in the drone attacks. Chief among them was a young antidrone activist named Tariq Khan. Following is a BBC account of his death:
When tribal elders from the remote Pakistani region of North Waziristan travelled to Islamabad last week to protest against CIA drone strikes, a teenager called Tariq Khan was among them. A BBC team caught him on camera, sitting near the front of a tribal assembly, or jirga, listening carefully.
Four days later the 16-year-old was dead—killed by one of the drones he was protesting against. In his final days, Tariq was living in fear, according to Neil Williams from the British legal charity, Reprieve, who met him at the Jirga. “He was really petrified,” said Mr Williams, “and so were his friends. He didn’t want to go home because of the drones. They were all scared.”
Tariq carried with him the identity card of his teenage cousin, Asmar Ullah, who was killed by a drone. On Monday he shared his fate. Tariq’s family says he was hit by two missiles as he was driving near Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan. The shy teenager, who was good with computers, was decapitated in the strike. His 12-year-old cousin Wahid was killed alongside him.
The boys were on their way to see a relative, according to Tariq’s uncle, Noor Kalam, who we reached by phone. He denied that Tariq had any link to militant groups. “We condemn this very strongly,” he said. “He was just a normal boy who loved football.”51
In the aftermath of the deaths of Tariq Khan and his twelve-year-old cousin, an unnamed U.S. official said of the strike that killed him, “On that day no child was killed; in fact, the adult males were supporting al-Qaeda’s facilitation network and their vehicle was following a pattern of activity used by al-Qaeda facilitators.”52
Another civilian casualty of the drone campaign was Saadullah, whose death was reported as follows:
Many senior commanders from the Taliban and al-Qaeda are among the dead. But campaigners claim there have been hundreds of civilian victims, whose stories are seldom told. A shy teenage boy called Saadullah
is one of them. He survived a drone strike that killed three of his relatives, but he lost both legs, one eye and his hope for the future. “I wanted to be a doctor,” he told me, “but I can’t walk to school anymore. When I see others going, I wish I could join them.”
Like Tariq, Saadullah travelled to Islamabad for last week’s jirga. Seated alongside him was Haji Zardullah, a white-bearded man who said he lost four nephews in a separate attack. “None of these were harmful people,” he said. “Two were still in school and one was in college.” Asghar Khan, a tribal elder in a cream turban, said three of his relatives paid with their lives for visiting a sick neighbor. “My brother, my nephew and another relative were killed by a drone in 2008,” he said. “They were sitting with this sick man when the attack took place. There were no Taliban.”53
Another similar civilian death was featured in Salon.com in 2010:
Gul Nawaz, from North Waziristan, was watering his fields when he heard the explosion of drone missiles: “I rushed to my house when I heard the blast. When I arrived I saw my house and my brother’s house completely destroyed and all at home were dead.” Eleven members of Gul Nawaz’s family were killed, including his wife, two sons and two daughters as well as his elder brother, his wife, and his four children. “Yes, the drone strikes hurt the Taliban. Most of the strikes are effective against the Taliban but sometimes innocent people also become the victim of such attacks. Take my case,” said Gul Nawaz.
“I blame the government of Pakistan and the USA, they are responsible for destroying my family. We were living a happy life and I didn’t have any links with the Taliban. My family members were innocent. … I wonder, why was I victimized.54
Other civilian victims of drone strikes have been covered in the media. For example, Noor Behram, a resident of North Waziristan, has spent years photographing the civilian aftermath of drone strikes in his native region. He has organized an exhibit of his photographs in London and a similar one, titled “Bugsplat,” was held in Lahore. Following are some of the captions that accompanied photographs Behram published:
Dande Darpa Khel (North Waziristan), Aug. 21, 2009
The stench that Behram smelled when he arrived at Dande Darpa Khel came from the charred bodies of Bismullah Khan and his wife. Near the bombed-out remains of their house, Behram found the Khans’ three living children. The children—the younger two girls on the left, their older brother on the right—were in shock, and clutched the ruins of their neighbor’s house as if the rubble could comfort them. “These kids had no idea where their parents were. They didn’t know their parents were killed,” Behram says. Also killed in the blast: their brother, Syed Wali Shah, age 7. Behram later heard that the children were taken in by their uncle. “There’s no government here, no social network or security,” he explains. “People have to look after each other.”
Dande Darpa Khel, Aug. 21, 2009
By the time Behram reached Bismullah Khan’s mud house, partially destroyed in the strike, Khan’s youngest son, Syed Wali Shah, had already died. Behram watched as the boy’s body was laid out on a prayer rug, a “very small” one, in preparation for his funeral. “The body was whole,” Behram recalls. “He was found dead.” The villagers wrapped a bandage around the boy’s head, even though they had no chance to save his life. Behram doesn’t know who the target of the Dande Darpa Khel attack was. (“You’d have to ask the CIA that,” he says.) But he observed people’s anger as they prepared bodies for burial and cleared the wreckage. “The people were extremely angry. They were talking and shouting against the U.S. for the attack,” Behram says.
Datta Khel, Oct. 18, 2010
Pakistan’s Express Tribune reported a drone attacked “two suspected militant hideouts” in Datta Khel near Mirin Shah. Behram never saw the scene. He headed instead to a Mirin Shah hospital, where he heard residents had frantically driven one of the strike’s victims: Naeemullah, a boy of about 10 or 11. Naeemullah was said to be injured in the strike after a missile struck the house next door. Shrapnel and debris travelled into Naeemullah’s house, wounding him in his “various parts of his body,” Behram says. “You can’t see his back, but his back was wounded by missile pieces and burns.” An hour after Behram took this picture, Naeemullah died of his injuries.55
While Behram admits that he did not take pictures of dead Taliban victims (who were likely removed from the scenes by fellow militants), he does not necessarily have to present the whole picture. The pictures and stories of dead Pakistani civilians are enough to confirm to Pakistanis that the U.S. drones do in fact kill civilians. As for the locals’ responses to the drone attacks, the Guardian writes,
According to Noor Behram, the strikes not only kill the innocent but injure untold numbers and radicalize the population. “There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can’t find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.
“The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed. Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack. The Americans think it is working, but the damage they’re doing is far greater.”56
Another account of a drone strike reads, “Their bodies, carbonized, were fully burned. They could only be identified by their legs and hands. One body was still on fire when he reached there. Then he learned that the charred and mutilated corpses were relatives of his who lived in his village, two men and a boy aged seven or eight. They couldn’t pick up the charred parts in one piece.”57 Regarding the acceptability of civilian casualties, another Pakistani angrily said, “I think, even if they said, ‘we’ve killed 100 terrorists,’ and just one child was also killed. … If you, at that time, you see that child’s body, you talk to his mother and father—I think, for me, this is a very serious thing. That one child, sitting in his house, could be killed like this.”58
Researchers at Stanford University and New York University have compiled a report of stories from drone victims that brings to life those whose lives have been shattered by drone strikes. One account reads,
“Before the drone strikes started, my life was very good. I used to go to school and I used to be quite busy with that, but after the drone strikes, I stopped going to school now. I was happy because I thought I would become a doctor.” Sadaullah recalled, “Two missiles [were] fired at our hujra and three people died. My cousin and I were injured. We didn’t hear the missile at all and then it was there.”
He further explained, “[The last thing I remembered was that] we had just broken our fast where we had eaten and just prayed. … We were having tea and just eating a bit and then there were missiles. … When I gained consciousness, there was a bandage on my eye. I didn’t know what had happened to my eye and I could only see from one.”
Sadaullah lost both of his legs and one of his eyes in the attack. He informed us, “Before [the strike], my life was normal and very good because I could go anywhere and do anything. But now I am not able to do that because I have to stay inside. … Sometimes I have really bad headaches … [and] if I walk too much [on my prosthetic legs], my legs hurt a lot. [Drones have] drastically affected life [in our area].59
There are also cases of people who allowed armed Taliban, often uninvited, into their houses and then paid the price for the visit with a drone strike. For example, the Pakistani paper the News reported,
The Taliban and Al Qaeda have unleashed a reign of terror on the people of FATA. People are afraid that the Taliban will suspect their loyalty and behead them. Thus, in order to prove their loyalty to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, they offer them to rent their houses and hujras for residential purposes.
There are people who are linked with the Taliban. Terrorists visit their houses as guests and live in the houses and hujras. The drone attacks kill women and small children of the hosts. These are innocent deaths because the women and children have no role in the men’s links with terrorists.
Othe
r innocent victims are local people who just happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.60
A similar case was reported in the Asia Times: “In an interview with a researcher for CIVIC, a civilian victim of a drone strike in North Waziristan carried out during the Obama administration recounted how his home had been visited by Taliban fighters asking for lunch. He said he had agreed out of fear of refusing them. The very next day, he recalled, the house was destroyed by a missile from a drone, killing his only son.”61
Although it is common knowledge in the FATA that the drones are hunting militants, not civilians, many Pashtuns fear that they will be killed by accident, and so they live in a state of fear. A Pakistani journalist interviewed one tribesman named Khaista Khan: “The people in North Waziristan, currently the main target of the drone strikes, are developing psychological disorders because of the constant fear and anxiety caused by the drones regularly flying over the area. ‘Everyone is scared here,’ Khan said. ‘It is like someone is pointing a loaded gun at you when you are working, eating your meal, sitting with the children or sleeping. It is becoming very difficult to live this way.’”62
A journalist for the Miami Herald painted a similar picture of the tribesmen’s fear of drones:
They described a terrifying existence under the drones in North Waziristan, the focus of the strikes. A 13-year-old boy, Saddam Hussain, said that he lost his 10-month-old niece and sister-in-law in a strike on their house on the night of Oct. 9, in the Datta Khel area of North Waziristan. Saddam carried a large picture of the baby girl with him at the protest. “The drones patrol day and night. The sound comes when they fly lower down. Sometimes we see six in the air all at once,” Saddam said. “When they come down, people run out of their houses, even at night.”63
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