Daily Times

Two reports appearing in the United States last month castigated the US for its drone attacks on terrorists in FATA. Their timing, just before the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf’s (PTI’s) now-fizzled-out march against the drones, might be coincidental but the similarities in the agenda are not.

The United Kingdom-based group Reprieve had commissioned the New York University (NYU) and Stanford to produce the study, Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan. In October 2011, the Reprieve director Clive Stafford Smith and the PTI chairperson Imran Khan’s former wife Jemima Khan were making rounds in Pakistan and the trio held press conferences and television talk shows against the drone attacks. After one such press conference by Imran Khan and Clive Smith, The Daily Mail had claimed: “Khan’s speech was watched by his ex-wife Jemima, who it was revealed this morning had helped pay for digital cameras to be given to tribal leaders to photograph drone attacks.”

A year on, Clive Smith is the go-between for the ‘anti-drone’ Pakistani lobby and US academia. It is not clear though if the NYU/Stanford study made any use of the data from the cameras purportedly distributed for documentation as it relies almost exclusively on third party polls and archives. Surprisingly, the study does not call upon the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to verify independently the civilian toll from the drone attacks in FATA. It does not ask Pakistan, the Taliban, the Haqqani network or the US to facilitate such a probe by the ICRC. The fundamental problem with the secondhand data harvested from media is that the Pakistani establishment, which is known to ratchet up a media outcry when its ‘favourite’ ‘good Taliban’ are killed, tightly controls information coming out of FATA. Interestingly, there is no hullaballoo when the ‘bad’ Taliban like Baitullah Mehsud are killed, suggesting that the narrative is manipulated to suit Pakistan’s line.

The NYU and Stanford could have taken precautions to avoid their perceived use as the agents of someone’s political agenda or pursuing one on their own. They should have asked for and included a list of Reprieve’s financiers, as ‘non-profit’ does not necessarily mean non-political. But avoiding conflict of interest and producing an independent report was clearly not a priority for the NYU/Stanford academics. The authors have unquestioningly adopted the Reprieve/PTI narrative and made no effort to understand and present the other side of the story. For example, the study fusses over the local nomenclature for drones, and how the buzzing sound it makes has earned it the Pashto title ‘bangana’ (a buzzing, pestering hornet), implying negative connotations. Interestingly, many FATA residents also call the drones ‘spinay farishtay’ (white angels) and more importantly, ‘Ababeel’. As the Quranic tradition goes, the Ababeel were the God-sent swallows that destroyed the Yemeni invaders and their elephants by bombarding them with small pebbles when they tried to ransack the Holy Ka’ba. It is disingenuous of a study that opens with declaring the US stance on drones as a ‘false narrative’ to so black out blatantly any alternative local narrative. But such are the pitfalls of research in which parties with a clear political agenda handpick the study subjects and the researchers choose to exercise little or no control over the screening process.

The NYU/Stanford study, like its UK and Pakistani patrons, obfuscates the origins and context of the conflict in FATA by making it sound like a chicken-and-egg situation. The fact is that there simply were no drone attacks until Pakistan allowed the Taliban, the Haqqani network and indeed the Uzbek, Chechen and Arab militants allied with al Qaeda to operate from the tribal areas against Afghanistan, the US, and indeed the world at large. Pakistan has ceded both its territory and sovereignty to the militants, or at the very least, shares it with them. A modern nation state allowing a perfidious enemy to hide in the midst of its civilian population poses a serious legal question. Unfortunately, neither the NYU/Stanford study nor another report by the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia University titled The civilian impact of drones: Unexamined costs, unanswered questions, while claiming to probe the legality of the drone attacks, raise this question. The perfidy of the terrorists and their using the Pashtun population of FATA as human shields does not feature in either report. A treacherous enemy that does not wear uniforms or abide by the laws of war or even the ‘conventions’ of guerilla warfare poses a legal dilemma that these studies took a detour around.

On a practical side, these reports seem to make light of the scores of terrorist bigwigs taken out by the drones by presenting it as a mere two percent of the total casualties. Trivialising the impact of decapitating the terror outfits, as well as disrupting the rank and file networking fits nicely with the overall anti-US bias of both studies. The reports virtually absolve Pakistan of any responsibility in an exercise that does nothing but apportion blame by boatloads. The simple fact is that the US — no matter what its involvement in the anti-Soviet campaign had been — did not create the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies. We got here not because of what the US did or is doing in the region but because of the Pakistani security establishment’s attempts to treat Afghanistan as its backyard. Not surprisingly then, the two studies do not call upon Pakistan, in any way whatsoever, to rein in the transnational terrorists it harbours. Indeed, the Pakistani government and military do not feature at all in the list of the principals the two studies make their recommendations to.

These studies seem to ignore that no American president is going to take any chances with another 9/11. The mandate to pursue al Qaeda emanates from the joint resolution of the US Congress after September 11, 2001, authorising the US president to use force against not just the planners of the attacks but also those who harbour them. The ‘stated’ US position on drones might become untenable under international law if Pakistan were to rescind its implied consent. But then the US may have to take a clear position that a sovereign state is harbouring terrorists and sanctioning it for being a sponsor of terror. Taking the drones out of the legal black hole is the way forward because it is the right thing to do, not because of any cherry-picking expedition.

(Concluded)

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/mazdaki