Death by drone
The world has witnessed an aggressive increment in the military use of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), over the past ten years. Originally intended for surveillance and intelligence purposes, armed drones have recently been used to launch missiles and bombs at 'suspected' targets in 'volatile' regions located in West Asia and Southasia. The US military has used drones in Afghanistan since 2001, in Iraq since 2002, in Yemen since 2002, and in Pakistan since 2004. Nor is the US the only country to use drones for offensive military purposes: the UK initiated drone strikes in Afghanistan in 2007, and Israel has used them in Gaza since 2008.
There is no doubt that drone strikes have caused civilian casualties, but calculating the number of casualties has been very difficult both because drones are often used in remote areas, and also due to the strict secrecy surrounding these strikes. The New American Foundation, a US think tank, estimates between 1870 and 2873 total deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, of which an estimated third were civilians. The website Pakistan Body Count suggests a far higher proportion: 50 civilian casualties for every militant killed. Independent investigations by Al-Jazeera show between 391 and 780 civilians killed since 2004.
When considering these figures, the controversy surrounding the label 'Militant' is also rightly an extremely important issue. There is currently no agreement on how precisely to distinguish an innocent individual from a militant or insurgent. Is any young male in a tribal agency in Pakistan truly a 'terrorist', as the governments using drone strikes would have us believe? And even so, does that justify the extrajudicial killings of these human beings via drone strikes?16-year-old Tariq Aziz, killed alongside his 12-year-old cousin in a drone strike in Waziristan last year, is just one example of the many innocent civilians indiscriminately killed in these attacks.
To understand the objection to drone strikes, it is important to understand the nature of this particular method of executing civilians overseas. Correctly dubbed the 'Playstation Mentality' by many human rights activists, the core concern over drone strikes is how the geographical and psychological distance between the drone operator and the target is very much like that between a gamer and an opponent in a video game. This delusional distance between imagination and reality dangerously lowers the threshold for launching an attack, and subsequently makes it more likely that weapons will be used against the 'enemy'. Being a gamer myself, I am naturally unsettled by the mindset of young military personnel using joysticks some 12,000 km away in the Nevada desert to determine whether Target A in Waziristan is worthy of a drone attack.
Even more disturbingly, instead of seeing actual human beings, these US military personnel now only see simple blips on their screens. In one report, a member of the US Army explained how in military slang, as soon as the drone strike is carried out, the dead body is humorously called a 'bugsplat'. This is precisely how a culture of convenient killing grows stronger and more indiscriminate in its barbaric execution of unknown human beings. Modern technology has made the act of killing incredibly easy by lowering both the costs and the risks for the executioner.
There is currently also intense criticism against the notion of 'Targeted Killings' – the term currently preferred by those carrying out the strikes – which is essentially just a euphemism for extrajudicial execution. Philip Alston, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur, has challenged the US and the UK to provide a legal basis and explanation for the arbitrary killings resulting from their drone strikes. Human rights activists from Reprieve and other organisations have also demanded an explanation of the reasoning behind the now common practice of 'posthumously' proving a civilian innocent. The accountability-vacuum in this case is astoundingly massive and blind, which is one reason fuelling anti-US (in specific) and anti-Western (in general) sentiment in places where the drone strikes are occurring. Far from resolving conflict or even addressing legitimate security issues, drone strikes have only catalysed livid anger, mistrust, and an ever-growing chasm between human communities.
That truth is evident even outside the targeted regions. David Kilcullen, a former Pentagon adviser to General David Petraeus, called on the US House of Representatives' Armed Services Committee to stop drone attacks over Pakistan. In Kilcullen's words:
The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they've given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists … If we want to strengthen our friends and weaken our enemies in Pakistan, bombing Pakistani villages with unmanned drones is totally counterproductive.
Some within the US military have also expressed concern. US Army chaplain and ethics instructor Keith Shurtleff has said:
As war becomes safer and easier, as soldiers are removed from the horrors of war and see the enemy not as humans but as blips on a screen, there is a very real danger of losing the deterrent that such horrors provide.