Meanwhile, the media reported that the strike had been a success, killing a group of militants, including Ilyas Kashmiri. It was not until two years later that Kashmiri was actually killed.
The hubbub surrounding the drone killings of Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders like Baitullah Mehsud and Ilyas Kashmiri is notable because it illustrates the strategy and rhetoric that has gone into the elevation of drone warfare as the best possible solution to the strategic challenges posed by non-state actors hiding in remote outposts of the world. The intense focus on men like Mehsud and Kashmiri, who by any measure had a damnable lack of respect for human life, prevents any questioning of the tactics and their impact on less dastardly people—like innocent men, women, and children. “Don’t you want the bad guys to die?” is the question used to suppress those inconvenient, nagging doubts about drones and their hidden victims.
Unsurprisingly, there are many others dead than just these bad guys—the evil poster boys of Al Qaeda and the Taliban whose deaths made everything else seem justified and unworthy of debate. Slowly, despite the muzzled silence imposed on them by local security forces and the indifference of the media, the victims of drone attacks whose houses were felled, loved ones killed and solitude destroyed by the constant buzzing of invasive aircraft, began to speak.
One of them was Karim Khan, a resident of the tiny village of Machikhel, near Mir Ali in North Waziristan. On December 31, 2009, as most Americans were putting together their lists of New Year resolutions and gearing up for an evening of festivities to bid adieu to the first decade of the millennium, a drone strike leveled the hujra, or community space, located within the four walls of Karim Khan’s compound.202 Karim Khan’s family had used the space for years to organize the community for jirgas, or gatherings in which community members made decisions regarding issues that affected their tiny village, from pooling money for the medical care of an elderly relative to mediating a property dispute between brothers.
But there was not a jirga in process that evening. Indeed, Khan was not even in the village that night—he was hundreds of miles away in Islamabad. His brother Asif Iqbal and his eighteen-year-old son Zaeenullah Khan were home, though. They were chatting in the courtyard when a drone flew overhead, casting its dark, buzzing shadow over the hearths of the village of Machikhel.
But that night it didn’t just hover above, watching the movements of the villagers below, as it had done on other occasions. No, this time it let loose a missile into the very heart of the village. When the chaos of the explosion dissipated, and the ever-encroaching darkness settled back over the rubble and the blood, Khan’s brother and son had been blown to bits.
Khan did not know of their deaths until it was almost morning, when a ringing cell phone at his bedside delivered the news. He rushed home to lift the biers of his beloved brother and son, burying their bodies—on New Years Day, 2010—in the dry cold soil of the village they had loved. News reports alleged that the target of the drone had been Haji Omar, a Taliban commander. But the villagers insisted that Haji Omar had been nowhere near the village that night. The tragedy that forever scarred the lives of Karim Khan’s family was the product of a mistake.
While the American public hears stories about evil militants like Ilyas Kashmiri and Baitullah Mehsud, it doesn’t hear the stories about victims like Asif Iqbal and Zaeenullah Khan.
Indeed, Asif Iqbal was not a militant or even a militant sympathizer, but a schoolteacher. After receiving his masters in English literature from the National University of Modern Languages, he had returned to work as a schoolteacher in the adjoining village of Dattakhel. It was a post he had held for eight years, teaching children with whatever meager resources he could muster. For nearly a decade he had weathered threats and school closures enforced by the Taliban, and smiled through the restrictions placed by Pakistani security forces. Iqbal bravely confronted the myriad challenges of educating a population riven by war, arguing for the distant benefits of education against the instant power of firearms.
This educated man who had put his faith in the promise of the future was now dead, the target of a faraway aggressor he would never know, an aggressor who would face no punishment for pressing the “fire” button without looking long enough, without checking and double checking the target. Iqbal left behind a young family. His bride of three years was now a widow so distraught that she could not speak for weeks after the attack. In her lap was Mohammad Kafeel, a two-year-old boy who would never remember his father, save for the worn, fingered photographs shown to him by his mother, a single newspaper clipping describing the attack, and the memories told to him by old uncles and cousins.
Also murdered that night was Karim Khan’s son, Zaeenullah Khan, a recent graduate from high school. The boy had returned to the village inspired by his young uncle and got a job as a guard in the same modest school. Like his uncle, he was determined to convince the community of the value of education. He died close to his mentor that night, leaving behind hundreds of students with scant chance of resuming their education—young people now mired in hatred for the drone that had killed their teacher, aching for revenge.
A third man died that night, too, a chance visitor to the hujra in Karim Khan’s compound. He was a stonemason who had traveled to the little town to work on the village mosque. Too tired after the day’s labor to return to his own home miles away, he had been welcomed—with the traditional hospitality—as a guest in Khan’s home.
The casualties from the attack on Machikhel village that night would have slipped into the same murky abyss as hundreds of nameless, faceless casualties of drone attacks, labeled with the sterile inhumanity of “collateral damage,” but for the fact that Karim Khan was a journalist.
After burying the bodies of his son and brother that grim, gray January, he vowed that they would never be forgotten. Over the next year, he gathered victims’ families from all over North and South Waziristan, the detritus of drones pushed out of the world’s moral narrative, their suffering unseen, and their plight invisible before the gigantic imperative of killing terrorists.
In November 2010, Khan won his first small victory. With the help of an Islamabad-based human rights lawyer named Shahzad Akbar, he sent a legal notice to the American embassy in Islamabad, detailing the wrongful deaths of his brother and son, and accusing the CIA of grossly violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its targeting and killing of innocent civilians through drone attacks.203
A few weeks later, close to the first anniversary of the attack, Karim Khan spoke outside a police station where he had just lodged a complaint, asking that the CIA Station Chief in Islamabad be forbidden from leaving Pakistan until he answered to the charges against him. “We appeal to the authorities to not let Jonathan Banks escape from Pakistan,” Khan implored, standing on the station steps.204 His lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, said that his client had learned of Mr. Banks’s identity, normally kept secret, through local press reports. A local Pakistani newspaper had also reported that the Station Chief’s name was not on the roster of diplomats slated to receive diplomatic immunity, and claimed that he should be made to answer for the atrocities inflicted by the CIA drone program on innocent Pakistani civilians.205
While the accusation by the family of drone victims against a CIA agent made headlines in Pakistan, Karim Khan did not win that round. Jonathan Banks, if that was even his real name, was allowed to leave the country. But in the ensuing days and months, Khan’s work organizing the families of victims slowly began to bear fruit as local politicians in Pakistan and international human rights organizations like the UK-based legal services group Reprieve and the international rights organization CIVIC began to look more deeply into the issue.
In October 2011, the Pakistan-based Foundation for Fundamental Rights, with the help of the British legal group Reprieve, brought a group of elders and drone victim families from North and South Waziristan to Islamabad. Called the “Grand Waziristan Jirga,” it gathered over 350 villagers, including ove
r sixty drone victim families who lived on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier to meet with Westerners. For the first time, the villagers got a chance to offer their perspectives on the shadowy drone war being waged in their region. The jirga ended with a call from the Pakistanis condemning all forms of terrorism, including the CIA-operated drone strikes.
In the group was a shy sixteen-year-old boy named Tariq Aziz. Tariq had been trained by human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar in basic photography so that he could document the devastation caused by the strikes in his own and adjoining villages.206 Tariq had a personal motivation: eighteen months earlier, his cousin Anwar Ullah had been killed by an unmanned drone as he drove his motorcycle through the village of Norak.
Tariq also had plenty of firsthand experience with drones. Neil Williams, a British investigator with Reprieve who was at the tribal meeting, recalled having asked Tariq if he had ever seen a drone. “I expected him to say, ‘Yes, I see one a week.’ But he said they saw ten or fifteen every day,” said Williams. “And he was saying at nighttime, it was making him crazy, because he couldn’t sleep.”
When the meeting ended, Tariq returned to his village in Waziristan, encouraged in his documenting efforts by the activists and journalists who vowed to publicize the plight of Waziris. But neither he nor the foreigners he met with could have imagined that the first documentation of drone deaths after their gathering in Islamabad would be that of Tariq himself.
Three days after the meeting, Tariq, together with his twelve-year-old cousin Waheed Rehman, went to pick up his newlywed aunt. When the two boys were just two hundred yards from her house, two missiles slammed into their car, killing them both instantly.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, their deaths marked the 174th and 175th child casualties of CIA drones.207
Tariq Aziz was the youngest of seven children, growing up dirt poor along the hardscrabble border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. His father had left years ago, working as a driver for a sheikh in the United Arab Emirates and sending money home to his family whenever he could. His cousin Waheed was equally poor, his family relying on the boy’s monthly salary of $23 as a shop assistant to make stretched ends meet.
Thanks to the fateful meeting in Islamabad days before, the death of these boys—unlike other drone victims never mentioned or mourned beyond the village—was reported in newspapers around the world. American lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who had just met the boy in Islamabad, wrote a compelling New York Times Op-Ed.208 “My mistake had been to see the drone war in Waziristan in terms of abstract legal theory—as a blatantly illegal invasion of Pakistan’s sovereignty, akin to President Richard M. Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia in 1970,” Stafford wrote. “But now, the issue has suddenly become very real and personal. Tariq was a good kid, and courageous. My warm hand recently touched his in friendship; yet, within three days, his would be cold in death, the rigor mortis inflicted by my government. And Tariq’s extended family, so recently hoping to be our allies for peace, has now been ripped apart by an American missile—most likely making any effort we make at reconciliation futile.”
A US official acknowledged to ABC News that the attack was not a mistake—the CIA had chosen this target because the two people in the car were supposedly militants.209 Pratap Chatterje, a journalist at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism who met Tariq at the Islamabad meeting, was dumbfounded. “If this sixteen-year-old was indeed a suspected terrorist, then why wasn’t he arrested in Islamabad?” Chatterje asked. “It would have been very easy to find him at the hotel and arrest him.”210
On November 4, 2011, two days after the attack that killed the boys, the Wall Street Journal reported on a dispute within the Obama Administration regarding drone attacks, saying that many key US military and State Department officials were demanding that the strikes be more selective while CIA brass wanted a free hand to pursue suspected militants. The dispute led to an independent review of the program during the summer of 2011—a review in which President Obama himself was involved. According to the Journal, the CIA agreed to make a series of “secret concessions,” including giving the State Department greater say in strike decisions; informing Pakistani leaders in advance about more operations; and suspending operations when Pakistani officials visited the US.211
Too bad there were no Pakistani officials visiting the US when Tariq Aziz and Waheed Khan were driving to their aunt’s house.
While the number of those killed and their grieving families is in the thousands, the ripple effects of drone warfare have affected millions.
First there are the immediate consequences: death squads associated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban—called Khorasan Mujahedin—that show up after drone attacks to hunt down informants they suspect of helping the Americans identify targets.212 Informants, often poor villagers, are paid about $100 for information about militants and their safe houses.
Seeking revenge, forty to sixty heavily armed and hooded men descend on a village, kidnapping their victims. Most of those kidnapped are beaten, tortured and killed, with videotapes of their executions passed around as a warning to others. “Interestingly, there is a parallel between the Khorasan and Americans,” said Shahzad Akbar. “Both use torture to extract information from their detainees, who say anything to be spared from the torture. And in the end, both get their bad guys.”
“In the sky there are drones, and on the ground there’s Khorasan Mujahedin,” one of the villagers told the Los Angeles Times.213 “Villagers are extremely terrorized. Whenever there’s a drone strike, within 24 hours Khorasan Mujahedin comes in and takes people away.” The drone attacks stoke an endless fire of violence and revenge.
Then there are the hundreds of thousands of indirect victims—villagers caught between CIA operated drones, the pernicious politics of the Pakistani Taliban and operations by the Pakistani military to “cleanse” the area of alleged militants. This volatile mix has led to the destruction of village after village, and the plight of local villagers seems to be of little concern to any of the parties involved.
Even when the Pakistani military declared many areas safe for families to return, the absence of reconstruction assistance and the persistence of drone attacks in the region have kept many from doing so.
The flight of so many refugees has affected an even greater population—the people of the southern port city of Karachi. There are no visible drones flying over this mega-city of nearly 18 million people, but its squalid bursting streets have had to absorb massive numbers of families fleeing the conflict in the Northwest.214 A report produced by Amnesty International estimated the number of displaced at over one million.
The influx sparked an outbreak of ethnic violence in Karachi between the city’s Muhajir, who are the descendants of original refugees from India, and the Pashtun, who include the recent immigrants from the Northwest provinces. In 2011, over 1,000 people were killed during intermittent clashes between political parties representing the city’s Pashtun population and those representing the Muhajirs or Urdu-speaking population.
Karachi had another mark against it: it was the initiation point for NATO supplies being shipped to US troops in Afghanistan. That meant the city also experienced serious political unrest as protesters of drone attacks and the US occupation of Afghanistan tried to block the NATO shipment routes from the city’s port.
So we can see in the case of Pakistan the ripple effects of drone warfare. The direct casualties caused by the attacks feed into the political unrest and bloody ethnic warfare in Karachi that is exacerbated by the hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into the city. The large-scale structural problems caused by drone warfare will likely persist for years, even after the United States and NATO forces have pulled out of the region. At its heart, the plight of refugees in the already poor, under-resourced and conflict-ridden city of Karachi represents the second tier of catastrophe caused by a form of warfare repeatedly and consistently presented as the cost-free magic wand that can eliminate terror.
Meanwhile, as the drone attacks in Pakistan continued to wreak havoc, US officials announced near the end of 2011 that the number of “high-value” Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan had dwindled to two.215
US drone attacks have also claimed innocent victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. Like in Pakistan, their stories are usually buried along with their bodies. Even the drone killing of an American teenager elicited little discussion.
Sixteen-year-old Abdurahman Anwar al-Awlaki was born in Denver, but left for Yemen with his family in 2002. The teenager’s Facebook page showed him as a typical, smiling teenager with glasses who liked rap, hip-hop, and swimming.216 Not so typical, however, was his father, Anwar al-Awlaki, one of Al Qaeda’s prominent propagandists.
The Awlaki family moved from the United States to Yemen in 2002. Abdurahman lived with his mother in the capital Sanaa. According to his mother, the teenager ran away from home in October 2011 to try to find his father. A week later, he was killed in a drone attack.
If the killing of a sixteen-year-old American fails to spark any substantial debate in the American media regarding the blatantly extra-judicial nature of drone attacks, then certainly the killing of poor Yemenis or Somalis is not going to cause a stir.
The United States is not the only country killing by remote control. A report published in the Washington Post in December 2011 detailed the Israeli military’s use of drone aircraft over the Gaza strip, where millions of Palestinians live in crowded quarters. The misery of their existence is exacerbated by the fear—and buzzing—of being constantly watched and suddenly targeted by unmanned aircraft.217
In 2009, Human Rights Watch relayed numerous reports of drones hitting civilians during the 2009 Israeli invasion of Gaza. In one case, a mother was sitting on the roof while her small son Mu’mim rode a bicycle. Suddenly there was a powerful explosion. When Nahla Allaw managed to see through the dust and smoke, she looked at her son in horror. “His legs were crushed, his chest had tiny holes in it, and blood poured from them. I carried him, crying. He was breathing his last breath. I talked to him, saying, ‘It’s alright my dear.’”218
Drone Warfare Page 9