My own relatives, close family relatives, have been killed. Elders of the villages, the maliks, the children of the schools, other children, all have been victims of strikes,” said Najeeb Saaqib a community leader in Pakistan’s tribal region of Waziristan. Saaqib’s testimony and the testimonies of 130 other Pakistani citizens form the backbone of, “Living Under Drones,” a 9-month research project released earlier this week by law professors at Stanford and New York University.
The exhaustive project concludes that drone strikes targeting enemy combatants is “counterproductive” because of the large number of civilian casualties. While the attacks have eliminated many high level al-Qaida targets, the resulting damage to schools, homes and infrastructure has been devastating for already impoverished villages.
The authors contend that indiscriminate strikes unnecessarily destroy Pakistani villages while radicalizing otherwise peaceful populations incensed by the aerial attacks.
The report
Professor Sarah Knuckey of New York University (NYU) explains in an online video that the research for the project was conducted over the course of two separate trips to Pakistan in which she and her colleague Professor James Cavallaro were given special permission to travel to Waziristan in Pakistan’s self-governing tribal region.
Professor Knuckey sought to discover whether popular support for the drone programs was justified, saying, “Most of the media coverage and the U.S. government line in the U.S. is that drone strikes are very precise and they target with surgical precision particularly militants and terrorists.”
Since 2004, the U.S. has carried out more than 340 drone strikes in Pakistan. However, civilian casualties have been downplayed.
“What we have documented is that drones kill not only terrorists, they kill many others, they kill civilians, they have killed women and children,” said Cavallaro, director of Stanford University International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that since 2004, up to 884 civilians have been killed as a result of drone strikes. Of this number, at least 176 are reported to be children. The “Living Under Drones” report posits that these numbers might be lower than actual totals because the Obama administration counts any military aged males killed as “combatants.”
Researchers also believe that the strikes have fundamentally altered the way of life for average Pakistanis, many of whom suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after attacks kill family and friends.
Clive Stafford Smith, director of the U.K.-based human rights group Reprieve, a sponsor of the report’s research, commented, saying, “An entire region is being terrorized by the constant threat of death from the skies. Their way of life is collapsing: kids are too terrified to go to school, adults are afraid to attend weddings, funerals, business meetings, or anything that involves gathering in groups.”
“They don’t know who they will strike. The result is symptoms of psychological disorder, of trauma, of severe anxiety, and of dysfunctionality. We heard stories of people who won’t leave their houses,” added Cavallaro.
The traumatizing attacks have turned whole villages once neutral, or perhaps sympathetic to the American mission to route terrorism, into firm opponents of any U.S. presence in their country.
Alienating allies
“We did not know that America existed. We did not know what its geographical location was, how its government operated, what its government was like, until America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. We do know that Americans supported the Taliban in our area, North Waziristan, to fight off the Soviets. But now with the Soviets divided and broken … we have become victims of Americans,” said Khalid Raheem a community elder.
Raheem continues, saying, “We don’t know how they treat their citizens or anything about them. All we know is that they used to support us, and now they don’t. … [W]e didn’t know how they treated a common man. Now we know how they treat a common man, what they’re doing to us.”
The researchers contend that many Pakistanis living in rural tribal areas bore no ill will of the U.S., as many did not have negative experiences before drone incursions.
America’s poor standing in the region continues to deteriorate with increases in civilian casualties, a troubling trend for defense experts concerned about the possibility of growing radicalism.
“Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge and more recruits for a militant movement,” said David Kilcullen, former adviser to Gen. David Petraeus.
This is also reflected in recent opinion polling conducted by the Pew Research Center. The 2012 poll finds 74 percent of Pakistanis consider America to be the enemy. In other parts of the world, where anti-American sentiment was far lower, the expansion of drone use has led to increased local opposition and the radicalization of populations, particularly in Yemen.
Ibrahim Mothana, a Yemeni lawyer and activist, wrote in a June New York Times Op-Ed titled, “How Drones Help Al-Qaeda”:
“Anti-Americanism is far less prevalent in Yemen than in Pakistan. But rather than winning the hearts and minds of Yemeni civilians, America is alienating them by killing their relatives and friends. Indeed, the drone program is leading to the Talibanization of vast tribal areas and the radicalization of people who could otherwise be America’s allies in the fight against terrorism in Yemen.”
Selling the idea of drones to Americans
The Obama administration has quietly expanded the use of drones, promoting the use of unmanned vehicles as a precise way to target enemy combatants. The attacks have taken out high level al-Qaida targets, including Abu Yaha al-Libi in 2012 and Anwar Aulaqi in 2011.
However, the authors estimate that the number of high level targets like al-Libi and Aulaqi are exceedingly rare, saying, “The number of ‘high-level’ targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low- estimated at just 2 percent.”
Knuchey and Cavallaro continue, saying, “Furthermore, evidence suggests that U.S. strikes have facilitated recruitment to violent non-state armed groups, and motivated further violent attacks. As the New York Times has reported, ‘drones have replaced Guantanamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants.”
This contradicts previous support from prominent academics believing that drone use is justified because it is an accurate way to strike enemy targets without risking American pilots in bombing operations. Bradley Strawser, a professor at the Defense Analysis Department at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. published a widely read paper in support of drones earlier this year, saying,
“It’s all upside. There’s no downside. Both ethically and normatively, there’s a tremendous value,” he said. “You’re not risking the pilot. The pilot is safe. And all the empirical evidence shows that drones tend to be more accurate. We need to shift the burden of the argument to the other side. Why not do this? The positive reasons are overwhelming at this point. This is the future of all air warfare. At least for the U.S.”