Drone attacks: challenging some fabrications
analysis: Drone attacks: challenging some fabrications —Farhat Taj
Courtesy to "Daily Times"
The people of Waziristan are suffering a brutal kind of occupation
under the Taliban and al Qaeda. Therefore, they welcome the drone
attacks
There is a deep abyss between the perceptions of the
people of Waziristan, the most drone-hit area and the wider Pakistani
society on the other side of the River Indus. For the latter, the US
drone attacks on Waziristan are a violation of Pakistani’s sovereignty.
Politicians, religious leaders, media analysts and anchorpersons express
sensational clamour over the supposed ‘civilian casualties’ in the
drone attacks. I have been discussing the issue of drone attacks with
hundreds of people of Waziristan. They see the US drone attacks as their
liberators from the clutches of the terrorists into which, they say,
their state has wilfully thrown them. The purpose of today’s column is,
one, to challenge the Pakistani and US media reports about the civilian
casualties in the drone attacks and, two, to express the view of the
people of Waziristan, who are equally terrified by the Taliban and the
intelligence agencies of Pakistan. I personally met these people in the
Pakhtunkhwa province, where they live as internally displaced persons
(IDPs), and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
I
would challenge both the US and Pakistani media to provide verifiable
evidence of civilian ‘casualties’ because of drone attacks on
Waziristan, i.e. names of the people killed, names of their villages,
dates and locations of the strikes and, above all, the methodology of
the information that they collected. If they can’t meet the challenge, I
would request them to stop throwing around fabricated figures of
‘civilian casualties’ that confuse people around the world and provide
propaganda material to the pro-Taliban and al Qaeda forces in the
politics and media of Pakistan.
I pose that challenge because no
one is in a position to give a correct estimate of how many individuals
have been killed so far in drone attacks. On the basis of American media
estimates, 600 to 700 ‘civilian population’ have been killed. The
Pakistani government, pro-Taliban political parties like
Jamaat-e-Islami, Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam, Tehrik-e-Insaf, and the media
are quoting the same figure. Neither the government of Pakistan nor the
media have any access to the area and no system is in place to arrive at
precise estimates. The Pakistani government and media take the figure
appearing in the American media as an admission by the American
government. The US media too do not have access to the area. Moreover,
the area is simply not accessible for any kind of independent
journalistic or scholarly work on drone attacks. The Taliban simply kill
anyone doing so.
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, burry the dead and then issue
the statement that all of them were innocent civilians. This has been
part of their propaganda to provide excuses to the pro-Taliban and al
Qaeda media persons and political forces in Pakistan to generate public
sympathies for the terrorists. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) or
other militants have never admitted to the killing of any important
figure of al Qaeda or the TTP. One exception is the killing of Baitullah
Mehsud that the TTP reluctantly admitted several days after his death.
According to the people of Waziristan, the only civilians who have been
killed so far in the drone attacks are women or children of the
militants in whose houses/compounds they hold meetings. But that, too,
used to happen in the past. Now they don’t hold meetings at places where
women and children of the al Qaeda and TTP militants reside. Moreover,
in this case too no one is in a position to give even an approximate
number of the women and children of the terrorists killed in drone
attacks.
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. Secondly, the people feel comfortable with the drones
because of their precision and targeted strikes. People usually
appreciate drone attacks when they compare it with the Pakistan Army’s
attacks, which always result in collateral damage. Especially the people
of Waziristan have been terrified by the use of long-range artillery
and air strikes of the Pakistan Army and Air Force. People complain that
not a single TTP or al Qaeda member has been killed so far by the
Pakistan Army, whereas a lot of collateral damage has taken place.
Thousands of houses have been destroyed and hundreds of innocent
civilians have been killed by the Pakistan Army. 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.
I
have heard people particularly appreciating the precision of drone
strikes. People say that when a drone would hover over the skies, they
wouldn’t be disturbed and would carry on their usual business because
they would be sure that it does not target the civilians, but the same
people would run for shelter when a Pakistani jet would appear in the
skies because of its indiscriminate firing. They say that even in the
same compound only the exact room — where a high value target (HVT) is
present — is targeted. Thus others in the same compound are spared. The
people of Waziristan have been complaining why the drones are only
restricted to targeting the Arabs. They want the drones to attack the
TTP leadership, the Uzbek/Tajik/Turkmen, Punjabi and Pakhtun Taliban. I
have heard even religious people of Waziristan cursing the jihad and
welcoming even Indian or Israeli support to help them get rid of the TTP
and foreign militants. The TTP and foreign militants had made them
hostages and occupied their houses by force. The Taliban have publicly
killed even the religious scholars in Waziristan.
I have yet to
come across a non-TTP resident of Waziristan who supports the Taliban or
al Qaeda. Till recently they were terrified by the TTP to the extent
that they would not open their mouth to oppose them. But now, having
been displaced and out of their reach, some of them speak against them
openly and many more than before in private conversations. They express
their fear of the intelligence agencies of Pakistan whenever speaking
against the Taliban. They see the two as two sides of the same coin.
What
we read and hear in the print and electronic media of Pakistan about
drone attacks as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty or resulting in
killing innocent civilians is not true so far as the people of
Waziristan are concerned. According to them, al Qaeda and the TTP are
dead scared of drone attacks and their leadership spends sleepless
nights. This is a cause of pleasure for the tormented people of
Waziristan.
Moreover, al Qaeda and the Taliban have done
everything to stop the drone attacks by killing hundreds of innocent
civilians on the pretext of their being American spies. They thought
that by overwhelming the innocent people of Waziristan with terror
tactics they would deter any potential informer, but they have failed.
On many occasions the Taliban and al Qaeda have killed the alleged US
spies in front of crowds of hundreds, even thousands of tribesmen.
Interestingly, no one in Pakistan has raised objection to killings of
the people of Waziristan on charges of spying for the US. This, the
people of Waziristan informed, is a source of torture for them that
their fellow Pakistanis condemn the killing of the terrorists but fall
into deadly silence over the routine murders of tribesmen accused of
spying for the US by the terrorists occupying their land.
The
writer is a research fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender
Research, University of Oslo and a member of Aryana Institute for
Regional Research and Advocacy. She can be reached at bergen34@yahoo.com
In : Farhat Taj
Notes