By Fazal Mehmood
On 4 February 2012, an investigation in the Sunday Times reported that CIA operated drones frequently targeted and killed rescuers and funeral parties in Pakistan. In all, 18 cases were examined, of these, 12 were said to be verified by field researchers and eye witnesses in North and South Waziristan. The four-month investigation was led by Chris Woods, a journalist formerly with the BBC, and Rahimullah Yusufzai, the Peshawar-based executive editor of the Pakistani paper, News International.
From the outset, the report does little by way of introducing new knowledge to a much contested subject. After all, the 300-odd drone attacks on Pakistani soil, 260 of which were conducted following president Barack Obama’s electoral victory, have seemingly killed anything between 450 and 850 civilians, including children. Such attacks have been reported widely in the western press and much more so within Pakistan.
Yet, the investigation in question appears to have fluttered key actors within America’s intelligence community. One frustrated official told the New York Times that reports like this “help Al Qaeda succeed”. No doubt, the fact that this investigation was made public days after President Obama claimed that “drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties”, may explain bureaucratic nervousness. Apart from the soaring number of civilian causalities highlighted, what matters more is the allegation that the CIA-led operation has developed a pattern whereby civilians are purposefully targeted.
This goes against the very foundation of the President’s rationale for using what insiders often call “wonder weapons”. It challenges Obama’s conviction that drones are “very precise” and a “focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists”. Indeed, the metric of measuring “active terrorists” is in itself dubious. The difficulty of obtaining credible human intelligence or HUMINT in the badlands of Pakistan’s tribal agencies immediately compromises precision. No surprise then, commentators have called for a Congressional enquiry to bolster accountability.
Indeed, the use of these deathly weapons throws up all sorts of intellectual, legal, and most importantly, ethical questions. Certainly, these are not new areas of debate. Much of the Cold War was spent discussing the merit and folly of assassinations. Whether it is the CIA’s efforts to replace anti-US leaders in Latin America or Mossad’s highly sophisticated approach to “targeted killings” in the 1950s and 1960s, the grey area between legitimate targeting and extra judicial killing was intently debated in international customary law and at the Hague. The problem of course is that much of international law is based on consent rather than clearly identified legal process.
Ultimately, these vagaries led nations to introduce sovereign legal frameworks. Hence, in 1976, President Gerald Ford initiated what came to be called Executive Order 11905. Section 5(g) stated that no employee of the US government was permitted to “engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination”. This was overturned by President George W. Bush following the terrorist attacks in 2001. In October 2001, Bush permitted the CIA to engage in “lethal covert operations” to hunt Al Qaeda members and affiliates. According to some, the same executive order provides the required legal cover for conducting drone strikes. The precariously loose approach to covert operations is striking. Bush’s kill order, adopted wholesale by Obama, has trumped the very rationale underpinning legislative oversight. In part, the lack of attention on democratic controls is explained by the overwhelming (83 per cent) public support for the drone campaign.
This is not to argue that drones are used casually, or that there are no in-house mechanisms in place for assessment. As officials make clear, identifying and attacking a target not only requires substantial intelligence but a whole range of internal legal permits. To be sure, the Rules of Engagement in the current conflict in Afghanistan are far more restrictive than commentators wish to recognise or accept. Yet, whilst the actions of a western soldier in Helmand or Kandahar are strictly regulated by specific military codes, hence instituting a norm of accountability, those operating drones work outside these socio-legal liabilities. Doing so appears to have removed the politics associated with the conduct of war. To quantify this, one might turn to the rage on the streets of Pakistan, where clinical assessments on a cost-benefit basis matters little to the ever mounting hatred for the United States. INAV