Drones, spies, terrorists, and second-class citizenship in Pakistan

Abstract

This essay reviews seven recent books and reports that focus upon the use of US armed drones in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). This essay synthesizes a historical account of the program, critically interrogates key arguments and evidence advanced by the authors, and draws attention the particular problems that confront those who live in the FATA and the second-class citizenship that the Pakistani state has bestowed upon them for reasons of domestic and foreign policy concerns. This review essay does not intend to be the final word on any of the ongoing policy debates. But it does hope to enable a wider audience to take part in these important deliberations.

Keywords::

• CIA
• Datta Khel
• drones
• Haqqani Network
• Osama bin Laden
• Pakistan
• Salala
• Taliban

Notes

^1. See Frisbee, ‘Weaponizing the Predator UAV’.

^2. Quoted in John Sifton, ‘A Brief History of Drones: With the invention of drones, we crossed into a new frontier: killing that's risk-free, remote, and detached from human cues’, The Nation, 7 February 2012. http://www.thenation.com/article/166124/brief-history-drones#ixzz2V4xA1E9V.

^3.Wall, ‘Demystifying the Title-10 Title 50 Debate’.

^4. See e.g. Brent Sadler, ‘CNN gets rare up-close look at Predator drones’, CNN.com, 9 June 2006. http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/06/09/sadler.predator.btsc/; Nicola Abé, ‘Dreams in Infrared: The Woes of an American Drone Operator’, Spiegel Online, 14 December 2012. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pain-continues-after-war-for-american-drone-pilot-a-872726.html.

^5. Elizabeth Bumiller, ‘A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away’, The New York Times, 29 July 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/us/drone-pilots-waiting-for-a-kill-shot-7000-miles-away.html?pagewanted = all&_r = 0.

^6. See Winslow Wheeler, ‘The MQ-9′s Cost and Performance’, Time.com, 28 February 2012. http://nation.time.com/2012/02/28/2-the-mq-9s-cost-and-performance/#ixzz2V73HzPye. Winslow adopted these figures from ‘slide 4’ of ‘The Way Ahead: Remotely Piloted Aircraft in the United States Air Force’, briefing slides presented by Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, undated, at http://www.daytonregion.com/pdf/UAV_Rountable_5.pdf. The slide cites 168 people but the data on the slide indicate 171; 177 for surge purposes’ (f.n. 11, Winslow).

^7. Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman and Julian E. Barnes, ‘US Tightens Drone Rules’, Wall Street Journal, 4 November 2011, accessed at online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204621904577013982672973836.html?mod = WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories, 9 May 2013.

^8. Greg Miller, ‘CIA Seeks New Authority To Expand Yemen Drone Campaign’, The Washington Post, 18 April 2012, accessed at http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012–04–18/world/35453346_1_signature-strikes-drone-strike-drone-program, 9 May 2013.

^9.Columbia Law School, ‘The Civilian Impact of Drones’, 32–3.

^10. Micah Zenko, Reforming US Drone Strike Policies, January 2013, accessed at http://www.cfr.org/wars-and-warfare/reforming-us-drone-strike-policies/p29736?co = C009601, 9 May 2013; ‘The Civilian Impact of Drones’. Behaviors that the CIA may interpret as probative of involvement with hostile forces include traveling in convoys of vehicles that behave similarly to fleeing al Qaeda or Taliban; presence in areas that seem to be terrorist training camps; and participating in what the CIA adjudges to be militant gatherings, perhaps because they are armed and so forth. See Cora Currier, ‘How Does the US Mark Unidentified Men in Pakistan and Yemen as Drone Targets?’ ProPublica, 1 March 2013, accessed at http://www.propublica.org/article/how-does-the-u.s.-mark-unidentified-men-in-pakistan-and-yemen-as-drone-targ. On the CIA targeting Pakistani Taliban members as well as al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban, see Jonathan Landay, ‘Obama's drone war kills ‘others’, not just al Qaida leaders’, McClatchy.com, 9 April 2013, accessed at http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/04/09/188062/obamas-drone-war-kills-others.html#storylink = cpy.

^11. Entous, Gorman, and Barnes, ‘US Tightens Drone Rules;’ Cora Currier, ‘Everything We Know So Far About Drone Strikes’, Propublica.com, 5 February 2013, accessed at http://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-so-far-about-drone-strikes.

^12. See also Peter and Tiedemann, The Year of the Drone.

^13. New America Foundation, ‘The Drone War In Pakistan’, updated June 2013. http://natsec.newamerica.net/drones/pakistan/analysis.

^14. Acting US Ambassador to Pakistan met with anti-drone Code Pink activists in November 2011. Even discussing the existence of the program and the possible outcomes of the strikes cause Hoagland to remark that ‘I probably just, you know, got into big trouble with what I just said.’ ‘Acting US ambassador to Pakistan met with Code Pink, discussed “classified” drone casualty counts’, The Daily Caller, 5 November 2011, accessed at http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/05/acting-us-ambassador-to-pakistan-met-with-code-pink-discussed-classified-drone-casualty-counts/#ixzz2EJ4GxBjr. However, in April 2013 the Obama Administration offered its first detailed justification of a program it had previously refused to discuss. See Charlie Savage, ‘Top US Security Official Says ‘Rigorous Standards’ Are Used for Drone Strikes’, The New York Times, 30 April 2013, accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/world/obamas-counterterrorism-aide-defends-drone-strikes.html?_r = 0.

^15.Masters, ‘Backgrounder: Targeted Killing’.

^16. Daniel Markey comments transcribed in Ritika Singh, ‘Lawfare Podcast Episode #20: Daniel Markey on US-Pakistan Terrorism Cooperation and Pakistan's Extremist Groups’, 27 September 2012, accessed at http://www.lawfareblog.com/2012/09/daniel-markey-on-u-s-pakistan-terrorism-cooperation-and-pakistans-extremist-groups.

^17. Singh, ‘Lawfare Podcast Episode #20’.

^18. Inter alia, John Reed, ‘Pakistan Boots US From Drone Base’, Defensetech.com, 30 June 2011, accessed at http://defensetech.org/2011/06/30/pakistan-boots-u-s-from-drone-base/; ‘US-Pak intelligence cooperation continues’, The Dawn, 23 January 2012, accessed at http://dawn.com/2012/01/23/us-pak-intelligence-cooperation-continues/; Chris Woods, ‘CIA drones quit one Pakistan site – but US keeps access to other airbases’, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 15 December 2011, accessed at http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/12/15/cia-drones-quit-pakistan-site-but-us-keeps-access-to-other-airbases/; ‘Pakistan Helps US Drones Campaign: Reuters’, HuffingtonPost.com, 22 January 2012, accessed at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/22/pakistan-us-drones-campaign_n_1221774.html; ‘US embassy cables: Pakistan backs US drone attacks on tribal areas’, The Guardian, 30 November 2010.

^19. ‘Nawaz Deeply Disappointed by Drone Strike’, The Dawn, 31 May 2013. http://beta.dawn.com/news/1015193/nawaz-deeply-disappointed-by-drone-attack-pml-n-wants-us-to-give-peace-a-chance.

^20. Murtaza Ali Shah, ‘US Drone attacks not war crimes; to end soon: Nawaz’, The News, 25 October 2012. http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-13–26261-US-drone-attacks-not-war-crimes;-to-end-soon-Nawaz.

^21. Husain Haqqani quoted in Michael Hirsh, ‘Pakistan Signed Secret ‘Protocol’ Allowing Drones’, National Journal, 23 October 2013. http://www.nationaljournal.com/white-house/pakistan-signed-secret-protocol-allowing-drones-20131023.

^22.Khan, Eating Grass, 227–8.

^23.Abbottabad Commission, Report, 159.

^24. Jonathan Landay, ‘Obama's drone war kills ‘others,’ not just al Qaida leaders’, McClatchy.com, 9 April 2013. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/04/09/188062/obamas-drone-war-kills-others.html#storylink = cpy.

^25.Fair, ‘The Militant Challenge in Pakistan’.

^26.Kronstadt, ‘Direct Overt US Aid’.

^27. Michael Hirsh and Kristin Roberts, ‘What's in the Secret Drone Memos: Sources say Obama won't release them because of classified agreements with foreign governments’, National Journal, 22 February 2013. http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/what-s-in-the-secret-drone-memos-20130222.

^28. C. Christine Fair, ‘The Problems with Studying Civilian Casualties from Drone Usage in Pakistan: What We Can't Know’, The Monkey Cage, 17 August 2011. http://themonkeycage.org/2011/08/17/the-problems-with-studying-civilian-casualties-from-drone-usage-in-pakistan-what-we-can%E2%80%99t-know/.

^29. Sebastian Abbot, ‘AP Impact: New Light on Drone War's Death Toll’, Associated Press, 26 February 2012. http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-light-drone-wars-death-toll-150321926.html.

^30. See Fair, Kaltenthaler, Miller, ‘The Drone War’.

^31. See ‘Right-Wing Bigots Circulating Fake Pictures of Drone Victims to Deflect Attention from Taliban's Attack on Malala’, Defense.pk.org, 12 October 2012. http://www.defence.pk/forums/national-political-issues/212780-right-wing-bigots-circulating-fake-pictures-drone-victims-deflect-att.html#ixzz2VHNrcdis; Sarah Khan, ‘Islamist Bigots Circulating Fake Pictures of Drone Victims to Deflect Attention from Taliban's Attack on Malala’, Let Us Build Pakistan, 12 October 2012. http://criticalppp.com/archives/229851.

^32. ‘Conwoman Faked Own Death from Dehydration in Remote Pakistan Hospital to Claim £2m Life Insurance’, Mail Online, 20 January 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1348882/Rozeena-Butt-faked-death-Pakistan-claim-2m-life-insurance.html#ixzz2VHQ3WilR. Pakistanis routinely face corruption in securing birth and death certificates among other public services. For a general overview of corruption in Pakistan, see Transparency International-Pakistan, ‘National Corruption Perception Survey 2011’, 28 December 2011. http://www.transparency.org.pk/report/ncps2011/ncps2011.pdf.

^33. See Pakistan Commission for Human Rights, State of Human Rights in 2012.

^34.Haqqani, Pakistan; Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan; Hussain, Pakistan and the Emergence of Islamic Militancy; Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad.

^35. Osama Siddique, ‘The Other Pakistan: Special Laws, Diminished Citizenship and the Gathering Storm’, 5 December 2012, accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2185535.

^36. Gulman S. Afridi, ‘FCR's Collective Responsibility’, The Dawn, 2 January 2012, accessed at http://dawn.com/2012/01/02/fcrs-collective-responsibility.

^37. Siddique, ‘The Other Pakistan’, 11.

^38. Afridi, ‘FCR's Collective Responsibility’.

^39. Aamenah Yusafzai, ‘Bringing Justice to FATA’, Dawn.com, 23 November 2010, accessed at http://blog.dawn.com/2010/11/23/bringing-justice-to-fata. Technically aspects of the FCR have been amended via a presidential order in August 2011. However, none of these have been implemented. Chaudhry, The Frontier Crimes Regulation.

^40. Yusafzai, ‘Bringing Justice to FATA;’ Khan, ‘FATA’. Surprisingly the FCR was critically discussed in US Department of State, ‘2004 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices – Pakistan’.

^41.UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, ‘Humanitarian Dashboard – Pakistan’.

^42.White, ‘The Shape of Frontier Rule’.

^43. Like many databases, the Pak Institute for Peace Studies is not always clear about what sorts of attacks it tallies and what criteria it uses to code different kinds of violence. These numbers are taken from their annual reports from 2008 and 2011. They reported that 7107 Pakistanis had been killed in 2011; 10,003 in 2010; 12,632 in 2009; 7997 in 2008; 3448 in 2007; 907 in 2006; and 216 in 2005, for a total of 42,310. Pak Institute for Peace Studies, Pakistan Security Report 2008, PIPS Security Report2009, Pakistan Security Report2011, Pak Institute for Peace Studies, ‘Civilian Casualties’.

^44. Interview with Akbar Ahmed by Steve Inskeep, ‘How The ‘War On Terror’ Became A War On “Tribal Islam,”’ NPR Morning Edition, 12 March 2013. http://www.npr.org/2013/03/12/174080047/how-the-war-on-terror-became-a-war-on-tribal-islam.

^45. See e.g. Nichols, History of Pashtun Migration.

^46. His volume includes a picture of tribal children with the additional explanatory note ‘some without shoes’ (Ahmed, p. 13) and an archaic images that compare a photo depiction of ‘Pashtun tribesmen’ (circa nineteenth century) to that of a stone relief of Alexander the Great (Ahmed, p. 16). The images conjure a sense of timelessness in FATA, where people live as they have lived since before the arrival of Alexander the Great. Such ahistoric understanding is nonsensical to a modern scholar of the region.

^47.Human Rights Commission of Pakistan – Peshawar Chapter, FCR.

^48.Ahmed, Resistance and Control in Pakistan.

^49. See American Anthropological Association, ‘Executive Board Statement’.

^50. Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung, ‘Administration Debates Stretching 9/11 Law to Go After New Al-Qaeda Offshoots’, The Washington Post, 6 March 2013. http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013–03–06/world/37500569_1_qaeda-drone-strikes-obama-administration.

^51.Wall, ‘Demystifying the Title 10–Title 50 Debate.

^52. Spencer Ackerman, ‘Little Will Change If the Military Takes Over CIA's Drone Strikes’, Wired.com, 20 March 2013, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/03/military-drones.