Imran Khan has been the strongest critic of US drone operations in our tribal areas, telling the people if elected prime minister he would order shooting down of any drone invading our territory. The issue figured prominently in Nawaz Sharif's campaign promises as well. PML-N Senator Pervez Rashid though tried to downplay its importance in a post-election discussion programme. Hurling a taunt at the PTI Chairman the Senator from Lahore said he who had claimed to shoot down drones has received a drubbing at the hands of voters in Karachi and Lahore.
The fact of the matter is that drones have been playing havoc with ordinary lives neither in Karachi nor Lahore but in Fata while the adjoining KP is affected indirectly. That is where the PTI has won sizeable number of votes. It, of course, is a foreign policy/security issue which is the preserve of the federal government. Nawaz Sharif who says drone attacks are against national sovereignty and a challenge to the country's independence now has to tackle the problem in an effective manner. These attacks have had covert backing of both the Musharraf and Zardari governments, which rendered the national sovereignty argument rather untenable. Drone strikes, we learnt a while ago, had gone on with a nod and a wink from Islamabad. In a recent public statement General Musharraf acknowledged that he had allowed "a few" drone strikes. We know that he not only allowed such strikes, but also provided a base from which Predator drones operated to kill Pakistanis on their own land. Several other reports emanating from American sources have revealed that the Zardari government condoned the attacks in private and condemned them in public.
There has been a shocking lack of respect for Pakistani lives. In his book "Obama's Wars" well-known American investigative journalists Bob Woodward quoted President Asif Ali Zardari as telling an American official "you Americans worry about collateral damage, I don't." No wonder the Americans have not worried about resorting to indiscriminate killing of Pakistanis.
His government, apparently, was too afraid to take the right stand in the face of an arrogant superpower. Yet there was considerable unease in Islamabad over the issue; and some feeble attempts were made, too, to stop the attacks. Some recent reports point out that for a time the government had wanted to bring an end to drone operations. The UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson QC, who came for a three-day visit to Islamabad in March seemed to be convinced that drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas are carried out without the consent of the government, and declared that these operations violate the country's sovereignty. Furthermore, he said, Pakistan's foreign ministry had confirmed that since 2010 it had been regularly sending notes to the US Embassy protesting the use of drones on the country's territory and "requiring the US to cease these strikes immediately." A Wall Street Journal report went so far as to claim that "Pakistan has considered shooting down a drone to reassert control over the country's airspace but shelved the idea as needlessly provocative."
Yet a section of our 'liberal' intelligentsia has been justifying the attacks arguing that drones use precision technology against carefully selected targets, and that those killed are almost always militants challenging the writ of the state or are al Qaeda associates. Various reports emanating from Western sources give a lie to such claims. According to American think-tank Brookings Institution, ten civilians die for every militant killed. A research study carried out by Bureau of Investigative Journalism in Britain revealed that out of an estimated 1,658 and 2,597 casualties investigated between 391 and 780 were civilians, 160 of them children. Note the wide gap between estimated casualties, which shows no one really knows the exact number of those killed and hence the real identity of the dead.
An idea of who those dead people might be can be had from an arbitrary and random - rather than precision - target selection system that includes what is known as "signature strikes/crowd killings" in American military parlance. Here is how such target selection was explained - as reported by Newsweek magazine shortly before it went out of publication - for a scheduled strike in our tribal areas to President Obama at a briefing session:" We can see that there are a lot of military-age males down there, men associated with terrorist activity, but we don't always know who they are." Just in case Obama did not get the point, the then CIA chief Michael Hayden offered further elucidation. Said he, a lot more bad guys can be taken out when groups rather than individuals are targeted. The more afraid militants are to congregate, he continued, the harder it would be for them to plot, plan, or train for attacks against America and its interests. In short, all it takes for anyone living in the tribal areas to get killed is to be young and male. So much for the much touted precision targeting. Shame on all those self-styled civilised people in this country who defend such wanton criminality on one pretext or another. There can be no justification whatsoever for indiscriminate killing of our people. This drone war's supporters are no different from the ruthless militants murdering innocent people for the furtherance of their ends.
There is still talk of patience in the name of pragmatism. Such advice where lives are involved, to say the least, is deplorable. Passive acceptance of the unacceptable encourages only reckless behaviour. The legality of drone operations is being challenged both inside the US and outside at international forums. No matter what his associates like Senator Pervez Rashid say, there is reason to believe that Nawaz Sharif has a strong resolve to act in our own interest and stop US' illegal and immoral drone war on our land. Hopefully, he will take courage in both his hands and have a serious conversation with Washington. Once the Americans know he is serious, they will pay attention.
saida_fazal@yahoo.com