Three independent studies discussed in chapter 7 have demonstrated that approximately 95 percent of those who are targeted in drone strikes are militants. Thus it follows that the vast majority of those who are being removed or rescued from the rubble of a drone strike are Taliban militants or al Qaeda terrorists, not civilians. In fact, in many, if not most, cases those who are removing the victims from the rubble are themselves Taliban militants; there are very few if any emergency medical technicians, paramedics, or first responders in this undeveloped area. The Taliban militants are the de facto authorities in these regions, so their presence at the scenes of attacks is not surprising.
There are scores of media reports of the Taliban “cordoning off” drone strike zones and “conducting recovery operations.”173 A typical account reads, “A local resident said he was woken by two loud explosions around 4 a.m. on Thursday. Militants rushed to the site immediately after the attack to clear the rubble and retrieve the bodies, he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.”174 A second report states, “First a volley of four missiles hit a compound in the village of Mizar Madakhel. After Taliban fighters cordoned the area and began to recover bodies, a second volley was fired. Initial reports indicated that 12 Taliban fighters were killed.”175 A third source reads, “Eight militants were killed and two wounded. Militants have surrounded the [targeted] compound and are removing the dead bodies.”176 Another local Pashtun source claims, “The reason why these estimates about civilian ‘casualties’ in the US and Pakistani media are wrong is that after every attack the terrorists cordon off the area and no one, including the local villagers, is allowed to come even near the targeted place. The militants themselves collect the bodies, bury the dead and then issue the statement that all of them were innocent civilians.”177 A BBC story similarly reported, “Officials say that local Taliban militants immediately cordoned off the [strike] area and closed the road in the aftermath of the attack.”178 The Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, a think tank of researchers and political activists from the North-West Frontier Province and FATA, similarly reported, “People told me that typically what happens after every drone attack is that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda terrorists cordon off the area. No one from the local population is allowed to access the site, even if there are local people killed or injured.”179 Civilians are rarely able to rush to the scene of a drone strike on Taliban terrorists and insurgents in order to help wounded militants or retrieve their bodies.
So well-known is the Taliban’s propensity to cordon off areas where their comrades have been killed or wounded in a drone strike that a FATA-based Pakistani official even offered the Americans some advice on how to kill more Taliban using drones. According to Al Jazeera, “He explained that after a strike, the terrorists seal off the area to collect the bodies; in the first 10–24 hours after an attack, the only people in the area are terrorists. You should hit them again—there are no innocents there at that time.”180 FATA-based scholar Farhat Taj similarly wrote, “Your new drone attack strategy is brilliant, i.e., one attack closely followed by another. After the first attack the terrorists cordon off the area and none but the terrorists are allowed on the spot. Another attack at that point kills so many of them. Excellent! Keep it up!”181
Clearly the CIA has taken this advice and, on the basis of many reports of Taliban militants rushing to the scenes of drone attacks to save their buried or wounded comrades, begun targeting those who arrive at drone strike locations to rescue wounded militants. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism surely realized that in the vast majority of cases those who are killed or wounded in the drone strikes are themselves Taliban militants and that those who are killed in follow-up strikes are more than likely also Taliban militants. Yet they chose to completely omit this important detail in their scathing report.
As for the claim that the drones target funerals, we have already seen in chapter 1 that the CIA fired on a funeral for slain Taliban commander Sangeen Khan in 2009 in an effort to kill Pakistan’s most-wanted man, Baitullah Mehsud, who was in attendance. A local source claimed that of the sixty-seven people killed in that drone explosion eighteen were villagers.182 Clearly the CIA felt that on this occasion the risk of killing civilian bystanders at a Taliban-organized funeral for a militant was outweighed by the opportunity to kill the terrorist mastermind who had sent scores of suicide bombers into Pakistani towns killing and maiming hundreds if not thousands. Ironically, among the Taliban suicide bombers most-favored targets have been funerals of tribal chieftains who have resisted them.183
There has been one other famous drone strike on a Taliban funeral. Taj describes it as follows:
On the other hand, drone attacks have never targeted the civilian population except, they informed, in one case when the funeral procession of Khwazh Wali, a TTP commander, was hit. In that attack too, many TTP militants were killed including Bilal (the TTP commander of Zangara area) and two Arab members of al Qaeda. But some civilians were also killed. After the attack people got the excuse of not attending the funeral of slain TTP militants or offering them food, which they used to do out of compulsion in order to put themselves in the TTP’s good books. “It [this drone attack] was a blessing in disguise,” several people commented.184
Even though the majority of rescuers at drone strikes on Taliban militants are themselves Taliban militants and the rare strikes on funerals have been aimed at notorious terrorists, the bureau’s skewed reporting created a popular image of drones pouncing on concerned “first responders” and innocent civilians mourning their dead at funerals. This public relations fiasco certainly helped paint a distorted image of the drones as operating beyond the pale of humanity.
9
The Argument for Drones
We’ve seen violent extremists pushed out of their sanctuaries. We’ve struck major blows against al Qaeda leadership as well as the Taliban’s. They are hunkered down. They’re worried about their own safety. It’s harder for them to move, it’s harder for them to train and to plot and to attack … and all of that makes America safer.
—President Barack Obama
The people of Waziristan are suffering a brutal kind of occupation under the Taliban and al Qaeda. It is in this context that they would welcome anyone, Americans, Israelis, Indians or even the devil, to rid them of the Taliban and al Qaeda. Therefore, they welcome the drone attacks.
—Farhat Taj, Pashtun scholar from the FATA
In a rare commentary on the CIA’s Predator/Reaper drone campaign in Pakistan, in May 2009 former CIA director Leon Panetta said, “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership.”1 Those who advocate for the aerial assassination campaign agree with Panetta and offer a simple, unassailable argument recognizing its benefits: it is killing large numbers of Taliban and al Qaeda leaders and foot soldiers, disrupting their military and terrorist operations, and sowing fear and dissension among the enemy. This saves civilian lives because it is hard for the terrorists to plan mass-casualty attacks when they themselves are being terrorized. The strikes are the ultimate form of deterrence and are saving countless civilians from future terrorist attacks against the West, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. One U.S. official called the drone strikes “the purest form of self-defense.”2 An example of this is the drone strike on June 3, 2011, that preemptively killed Ilyas Kashmiri, a Pakistani terrorist mastermind who had been assigned the task of carrying out an assassination attempt on President Obama.3 In conventional military terms, the attack on Kashmiri could be described as “suppression fire,” which is meant to kill the enemy or keep him pinned down and thus unable to fight.
The drone campaign advocates argue that those in the West who are against the drones are naive and have selective memories. They have forgotten, or deliberately overlooked, the hundreds upon hundreds of suicide bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan that have slain or maimed scores and the horrors of 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings in London, which were carrie
d out by al Qaeda–linked militants trained in the FATA or Afghanistan’s tribal lands. Antidrone activists also seem to live in an alternative universe where talk of bona fide terrorists who have been targeted and killed by drones simply does not exist. Instead there is a total focus on unintentional civilian casualties that result from strikes on these unmentioned terrorists. Had the FATA-trained Faisal Shahzad successfully set off his bomb in Times Square or had the FATA-based Rashid Rauf blown up numerous passenger jets with liquid bombs, many of the antidrone voices in the West would be muted, if not silent, it can be argued.
Those in Pakistan who are against the drones forget that the Taliban have deliberately killed thousands of their compatriots on a yearly basis. The drones are the front line in the defense of Pakistani civilians, who are threatened by terrorists living in a de facto Taliban terrorist state in the FATA.
Perhaps the best example of the way the drones have saved civilian lives is the case of the previously mentioned Mumbai-style terrorism plot in Europe that was disrupted by drones. As the FATA-based terrorists plotted to use bombs and automatic weapons to slaughter civilians in France, Germany, and Britain, they themselves were hunted down and killed by drones, and thus countless civilian lives were spared. Grateful British security officials subsequently downgraded their terrorism threat level and said, “Strikes have decimated the Al Qaeda senior leadership, and we didn’t have to get directly involved.”4
Similarly, in my own work in Afghanistan in 2009 with the Afghan National Directorate of Security, I discovered that most suicide bombers in Afghanistan (the world’s second largest recipient of suicide bombings at the time) were trained in madrassas and terrorist camps in the FATA.5 Having been trained to be “Mullah Omar’s missiles,” the suicide bombers were sent into Afghanistan to detonate their explosives and slaughter Afghan civilians. The Afghan police and intelligence officers I worked with all applauded the drones for disrupting potential Taliban terrorist plots and killing future suicide bombers and terrorists before they could make their way to Afghanistan to wreak havoc on civilians.
Another example of the deterrent effect of drones is the case of the Taliban leader Qari Hussain. Qari Hussain was known as the Ustad e Fedayeen (Teacher of Suicide Bombers). He ran a camp in South Waziristan that trained suicide bombers who then went into Pakistan and slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians. Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad wrote of Hussain,
He moved back to South Waziristan and soon won notoriety for brutally killing anti-Taliban figures and for introducing the practice of slitting the throats of Pakistani soldiers. …
He established a reign of terror across the [Swat] valley that had once been known for its tranquility, beauty and peace-loving residents. One of his more gruesome habits was to teach valley militants how to slit a throat with a rusty knife, film the incident and then distribute it on a video recording. By now the small-fry sectarian agitator had evolved into a national terror ringmaster.6
One of Hussain’s typical suicide bombing attacks targeted a group of Pashtun elders who were meeting in the FATA to muster a lashkar (militia) to fight the Taliban in Orakzai Agency. A Taliban suicide bomber broke into the meeting and set off a bomb that slaughtered approximately a hundred. In one of his more horrific acts, Qari Hussain kidnapped children and brainwashed them so that they would blow themselves up as suicide bombers. On more than one occasion the Pakistani security forces discovered and closed down his “suicide nurseries.” After raiding one of his child indoctrination schools, a Pakistani officer said,
It was like a factory that had been recruiting nine- to 12-year-old boys, and turning them into suicide bombers. The computers, other equipment and literature seized from the place give graphic details of the training process in this so-called “nursery.” There are videos of young boys carrying out executions, a classroom where 10- to 12-year olds are sitting in formations, with white band of Quranic verses wrapped around their forehead, and there are training videos to show how improvised explosive devices are made and detonated.7
Qari Hussain also trained Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani American who tried to set off a car bomb in a civilian-packed Times Square.
In response to such outrages the Pakistani government put an approximately $600,000 bounty on Hussain’s head and began a hunt for him in South Waziristan. In desperation the Pakistanis asked the Americans for help, and the CIA made several attempts to kill Hussain with a drone. As the U.S. drones hunted Qari Hussain and his fellow suicide-bombing trainers, a Pakistani wrote a letter to his country’s primary English-language newspaper, Dawn, in support of the drone strikes. He also pointed out the hypocrisy of Pakistanis who reflexively protested the U.S. drone strikes for accidentally causing collateral damage deaths in their hunt for terrorists but who did not protest against suicide bombers for purposefully killing civilians. This author wrote,
When American pilotless aircraft, the drones, zero in on and attack the masterminds of these suicide attacks, in the tribal area, the religio-political parties raise a storm of protest on the grounds that the sovereignty of Pakistan has been threatened. The media too, inadvertently, follows the line of the religio-political parties and creates a hype and makes it look as if the Americans have done great harm to Pakistan while the other set of foreigners, i.e. Arab, Chechen, Uzbek militants, have played no role in a persistent effort to destabilize Pakistan.
Probably, the media and, in turn, the general public forget that the vast majority of the militant leaders that plan suicide attacks inside Pakistan are the former students of the seminaries controlled by the very leaders who are in the forefront to raise a storm of protests when an isolated drone attack takes place by the Americans. But these leaders observe absolute silence when the militants carry out suicide attacks that inflict devastating damage on Pakistan’s human and material assets.
Seen neutrally, it will dawn on critics of the drone attacks that the Americans are assisting Pakistan by annihilating the masterminds that sit in the tribal areas, plan, prepare and dispatch suicide attackers who play havoc with life and property in the urban Pakistan.8
Another person, who supported the drone strikes for the same reason, posted a comment on Dawn’s website: “Innocent women and children are also dying in our neighborhoods, kindergarten schools and in our shopping malls in suicide attacks. I don’t think they deserve to die either. I guess drone attacks are good as long as they [are] killing those terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. Maybe you will understand this when somebody from your neighborhood dies in a suicide attack.”9
A third Pakistani wrote in Dawn similarly condemning the suicide bombers while condoning the drones:
Why would the people under Taliban and Al Qaeda occupation and oppression not cheer when these murderers are killed? What does not make sense is the chorus of protests over these drone attacks emanating from people like Imran Khan and Hamid Gul—to name only two—who claim to speak for the people of the tribal areas. What exactly is their agenda, and why are they acting as cheerleaders for these terrorists?
I have often wondered about this callous hypocrisy too. If we condemn the Americans so vociferously over the drone campaign, should we not be more critical of the thugs who are killing far more Pakistani civilians? And yet, it seems that our more popular Urdu anchorpersons and TV chat show guests reserve their outrage for Washington, while giving the Taliban and Al Qaeda a free pass over their vicious suicide bombings that have taken hundreds of innocent lives in recent weeks.
Why then are we silent over the daily killings of fellow Pakistanis by the TTP and other terror groups, while frothing at the mouth over the drone attacks? Clearly, this irrational and double-faced reaction is based in the anti-American sentiment that has taken root in Pakistan.10
As the drones hunted Qari Hussain, some in Pakistan saw the CIA’s remote-control killers as an ally in the struggle against the scourge of suicide-bombing terrorism. After the 2009 killing of Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistani president Ali Zardari de
clared, “Due to his death the Taliban leadership is in disarray, the major suicide bombing network and Taliban patronage has been disrupted. Acts of terror have considerably decreased in the border area.”11 This sort of acknowledgment of the drones’ usefulness may have increased when it was reported that a CIA drone tracked and blew up a Taliban suicide-bombing truck packed with explosives before it could reach its intended target.12
As the debate continued, on October 4, 2010, the drones finally found Qari Hussain and fired on his vehicle. Hussain was injured in the strike, and three of his guards were killed. Three days later the Teacher of Suicide Bombers himself was finally killed in a second drone strike. As they had after Baitullah Mehsud was killed, many Pakistanis quietly celebrated the death of the man who had killed so many of their people with his suicide bombers. The Pakistani Express Tribune published the comments of readers who wrote in to celebrate the CIA drone assassination of Hussain. Their commentary demonstrates that not everyone in Pakistan was loudly opposed to the drone strikes on the Taliban; some clearly supported them. Some of the readers’ comments follow:
If this news is true then God Bless America and God Bless the drones. He blew people into pieces and he got blown into bits and pieces. Good riddance!
—A Suhail
Wonderful news, if confirmed. This guy had the blood of thousands of innocent Muslims and Pakistanis on his hand. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Drone attacks may be wrong but they are effective and precise compared to full-fledged army onslaught which normally has more collateral damage.
Predators Page 21