The Rise of Drone Warfare

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In an article published last July in the Los Angeles Times, veteran journalist Doyle McManus noted that, “The drone has become America’s counter-terrorism weapon of choice.”

Unmanned aerial vehicles, they are aircraft controlled by operators from the ground, thousands of miles away, at American bases in places like Djibouti or in the United States itself.

Carrying lethal missiles, they can hover for hours over potential targets, and kill suspected terrorists with relative precision. And of course they don’t endanger American lives.

First utilized in the 1990s in the Balkan wars, since 2001 their use has dramatically escalated in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is an independent not-for-profit organization, established in April 2010 in Britain. Its team of researchers has calculated that under President Barack Obama over 3,000 people, including nearly 500 civilians, have been killed by drones.

Since 2004, drones controlled by the CIA’s Special Activities Division have attacked 401 targets in northwest Pakistan, especially in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where the Pakistani Taliban operates. Total deaths as of October 2014 number between 2,383 and 3,858, of which 416 to 951were civilians.

From 2007 to the end of October, Somalia’s al-Shabab has been targeted by nine drone strikes, resulting in upwards of 30 reported deaths, virtually all of them militants. An attack in September killed Ahmed Abdi Godane (also known as Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr), the alleged mastermind of al-Shabab’s attack on an upscale shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, in September 2013.

Ansar al-Shari’a (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), formed in January 2009 from a merger of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni and Saudi branches, has helped destabilize Yemen, with suicide bombings and armed attacks.

Confirmed U.S. drone strikes in that country since 2002 number between 67 to 79, but the figure may be as high as 100. The total number of people reported killed range between 347 and 503, among them 26 to 68 civilians – but again, these numbers may prove to be much higher.

The greatest number of drone strikes has taken place in Afghanistan, as part of the 13-year war against the Taliban – more than 1,000 since 2008 alone. Dozens of armed drones fly over Afghanistan every day.

A report released this past February by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), found that drone strikes accounted for at least a third of all civilian deaths in air strikes last year. UNAMA notes that it is sometimes difficult to establish which type of aircraft carried out a strike, so the true total could be higher.

While the House and Senate intelligence committees of the U.S. Congress are responsible for scrutinizing the highly classified CIA drone program, some have complained about being denied information. In any case, according to one source, “It’s a serious question as to how much any elected official could possibly understand about what’s going on inside” the intelligence agencies.

For example, Abu Yahya al-Libi, a high-ranking al-Qaeda official, was killed by a drone in June of 2012 in Mir Ali, in the Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan. But the missile that killed him was part of a sequence of attacks that killed between 14 and 18 people.

A story in the Washington Post reported that after an initial strike, drones returned to attack those carrying out rescue work. But apparently committee members were only shown video covering the final part of the incident, giving a misleading impression that concealed over a dozen deaths.

In October 2009 the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, called on the U.S. to demonstrate that it was not randomly killing people in violation of international law through its use of drones on the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Alston, a professor of international law at New York University, contended that “Intelligence agencies, which by definition are determined to remain unaccountable except to their own paymasters, have no place in running programs that kill people in other countries.”

A further question is the extent to which operators become trigger happy with remote controlled armaments, situated as they are in complete safety, distant from the conflict zone.

The morality of drone warfare is bound to remain a contentious issue for the foreseeable future.