Daily Times

President Obama feels contrite and apologises for drone strikes: “I profoundly regret what happened,” he said. “On behalf of the US government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families.” Obama’s aides described this as one of the most painful moments of his presidency. This most painful moment was due to the fact that one US citizen, Warren Weinstein, and the Italian Giovanni Lo Porto were killed by a drone strike intended to gun down terrorists. This is the value each US life holds for its president and also, consequently, it signifies how thousands of innocent lives lost in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen due to these drone strikes, are all worth zilch to the biggest preacher of human values in the world. The subject of drone strikes and their callous collateral damage has been around for some time and the consensus drawn is that no matter how numerically precise they are, they are still blind, deaf and inhuman.
Drone strikes, as a means of the US counterterrorism strategy, have always invited debate and controversy, which, over a period of time, have raised the issue to the level where the UN has made a law to discourage these strikes. Drone strikes became popular as a strategy to prevent public outcry in the US and NATO war on Iraq and Afghanistan resulting in US soldiers’ casualties. There was huge public pressure on the US government to get out of this war as the number of killed US soldiers increased. Drones seemed to satisfy multiple purposes. They were more secretive, more accurate and, most of all, only killing people in other countries. In Pakistan, they started their operations in 2004 and Musharraf has reluctantly admitted that he allowed them but that in his reign they were very infrequent. Successive governments thereafter have completely denied that drone attacks were with their consent and have been raising voice against them but to little effect, till very recently. The subject of innocent people dying in these strikes has been shrouded in secret as FATA is an area where the media cannot go and research, and statistics are highly manipulated by governments to suit their purposes.
In the beginning, drone strikes were infrequent and were always hailed as a wonder weapon that could pin down terrorists and kill them with deadly accuracy. However, as the strikes became frequent, with 2010 recording almost 90 drone attacks, unrest in Pakistan against these strikes and the media stories about how these strikes were indiscriminate began to surface more and more. Some landmark studies revealed horrific facts. The UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism published a chilling picture of the truth: “Only 704 of the 2,379 dead have been identified, and only 295 of these were reported to be members of some kind of armed group.” As part of its Naming the Dead project, the Bureau collected the names and, where it was possible, the details of people killed by the CIA, using a multitude of sources. Amnesty International’s report called indiscriminate droning equivalent to war crimes. The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling on states using drone strikes as a counterterrorism measure to comply with international law as the 193-member body acted on a range of issues related mainly to human rights. The unanimous call for regulating the use of remotely piloted aircraft against suspected terrorists was contained in a comprehensive 28-paragraph resolution, titled ‘Protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism’. The portion about drone strikes was included as a result of intensive efforts made by the Pakistan delegation.
Reprieve, the UK NGO working on drone impacts, managed to present an affected family in front of the US Congress and the harrowing story of the victim’s family had a very touching and disturbing impact on the international media. Rafiq ur Rehman, a Pakistani primary school teacher, who appeared on Capitol Hill with his children Zubair 13, and Nabila nine, described his mother, Momina Bibi, as the “string that held our family together”. His two children, who were gathering okra in the field with their grandmother the day she was killed, on October 24, 2012, were injured in the drone attack. Zubair, his son, who was injured, said: “When the drone fired the first time, the whole ground shook and black smoke rose up. The air smelled poisonous. We ran but several minutes later the drone fired again. People from the village came to our aid and took us to hospital. We spent the night in great agony in the hospital and the next morning I was operated on. That is how we spent Eid.”
This pressure made President Obama make laws stricter in 2013 to ensure no damage to civilians is inflicted due to drone attacks. However, Obama’s hypocrisy and double standards were at work again. The Wall Street Journal quotes current and former US officials as saying President Obama made rules for the US drone programme stricter in 2013 but secretly approved a waiver allowing the CIA more flexibility when it comes to conducting drone strikes against suspected militants in Pakistan. The deaths of two hostages, Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, who were killed in a drone strike targeting al Qaeda militants, could have been avoided had the exemption not been in place for Pakistan. The CIA would have been required, by the rules, to gather more intelligence before conducting a drone strike. But what goes around comes around. When you bend a rule, the rule sooner or later bends you. Today, if Obama is facing the hardest moment of his presidency, it is because for years he has completely ignored the cries of the victims of this unmanned and inhumane weapon of innocents’ destruction.
Being black himself, today Obama is seeing blacks crying against discrimination, against the death of a black protestor due to police brutality. Principles of equality regardless of race, class and gender are still more rhetoric than practice. That is why despite so much modernisation there is so much brutalization, that is why despite such advancement in the comforts of life, quality of life has become so elusive, that is why despite the best research and training available in leadership, it has produced such few real leaders in the world. Perhaps if Obama and leaders around the world had paid heed to the final words of Rehman to Congressmen about the drone killing his mother, many more inhumanities would have been prevented. Rehman said: “In the end, I would just like to ask the US public to treat us as equals. Make sure that your government gives us the same status of a human with basic rights as they do to their own citizens. We do not kill our cattle the way the US is killing humans in Waziristan with drones. This indiscriminate killing has to end and justice must be delivered to those who have suffered at the hands of the unjust.”

The writer is secretary information PTI Punjab, an analyst, a columnist and can be reached at andleeb.abbas1@gmail.com