Even though the majority of rescuers at drone strikes on Taliban militants are themselves Taliban militants and the rare strikes on funerals have been aimed at notorious terrorists, the bureau’s skewed reporting created a popular image of drones pouncing on concerned “first responders” and innocent civilians mourning their dead at funerals. This public relations fiasco certainly helped paint a distorted image of the drones as operating beyond the pale of humanity.
9
The Argument for Drones
We’ve seen violent extremists pushed out of their sanctuaries. We’ve struck major blows against al Qaeda leadership as well as the Taliban’s. They are hunkered down. They’re worried about their own safety. It’s harder for them to move, it’s harder for them to train and to plot and to attack… and all of that makes America safer.
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.
In a rare commentary on the CIA’s Predator/Reaper drone campaign in Pakistan, in May 2009 former CIA director Leon Panetta said, “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership.”1 Those who advocate for the aerial assassination campaign agree with Panetta and offer a simple, unassailable argument recognizing its benefits: it is killing large numbers of Taliban and al Qaeda leaders and foot soldiers, disrupting their military and terrorist operations, and sowing fear and dissension among the enemy. This saves civilian lives because it is hard for the terrorists to plan mass-casualty attacks when they themselves are being terrorized. The strikes are the ultimate form of deterrence and are saving countless civilians from future terrorist attacks against the West, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. One U.S. official called the drone strikes “the purest form of self-defense.”2 An example of this is the drone strike on June 3, 2011, that preemptively killed Ilyas Kashmiri, a Pakistani terrorist mastermind who had been assigned the task of carrying out an assassination attempt on President Obama.3 In conventional military terms, the attack on Kashmiri could be described as “suppression fire,” which is meant to kill the enemy or keep him pinned down and thus unable to fight.
The drone campaign advocates argue that those in the West who are against the drones are naive and have selective memories. They have forgotten, or deliberately overlooked, the hundreds upon hundreds of suicide bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan that have slain or maimed scores and the horrors of 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings in London, which were carried out by al Qaeda–linked militants trained in the FATA or Afghanistan’s tribal lands. Antidrone activists also seem to live in an alternative universe where talk of bona fide terrorists who have been targeted and killed by drones simply does not exist. Instead there is a total focus on unintentional civilian casualties that result from strikes on these unmentioned terrorists. Had the FATA-trained Faisal Shahzad successfully set off his bomb in Times Square or had the FATA-based Rashid Rauf blown up numerous passenger jets with liquid bombs, many of the antidrone voices in the West would be muted, if not silent, it can be argued.
Those in Pakistan who are against the drones forget that the Taliban have deliberately killed thousands of their compatriots on a yearly basis. The drones are the front line in the defense of Pakistani civilians, who are threatened by terrorists living in a de facto Taliban terrorist state in the FATA.
Perhaps the best example of the way the drones have saved civilian lives is the case of the previously mentioned Mumbai-style terrorism plot in Europe that was disrupted by drones. As the FATA-based terrorists plotted to use bombs and automatic weapons to slaughter civilians in France, Germany, and Britain, they themselves were hunted down and killed by drones, and thus countless civilian lives were spared. Grateful British security officials subsequently downgraded their terrorism threat level and said, “Strikes have decimated the Al Qaeda senior leadership, and we didn’t have to get directly involved.”4
Similarly, in my own work in Afghanistan in 2009 with the Afghan National Directorate of Security, I discovered that most suicide bombers in Afghanistan (the world’s second largest recipient of suicide bombings at the time) were trained in madrassas and terrorist camps in the FATA.5 Having been trained to be “Mullah Omar’s missiles,” the suicide bombers were sent into Afghanistan to detonate their explosives and slaughter Afghan civilians. The Afghan police and intelligence officers I worked with all applauded the drones for disrupting potential Taliban terrorist plots and killing future suicide bombers and terrorists before they could make their way to Afghanistan to wreak havoc on civilians.
Another example of the deterrent effect of drones is the case of the Taliban leader Qari Hussain. Qari Hussain was known as the Ustad e Fedayeen (Teacher of Suicide Bombers). He ran a camp in South Waziristan that trained suicide bombers who then went into Pakistan and slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians. Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad wrote of Hussain,
He moved back to South Waziristan and soon won notoriety for brutally killing anti-Taliban figures and for introducing the practice of slitting the throats of Pakistani soldiers….
He established a reign of terror across the [Swat] valley that had once been known for its tranquility, beauty and peace-loving residents. One of his more gruesome habits was to teach valley militants how to slit a throat with a rusty knife, film the incident and then distribute it on a video recording. By now the small-fry sectarian agitator had evolved into a national terror ringmaster.6
One of Hussain’s typical suicide bombing attacks targeted a group of Pashtun elders who were meeting in the FATA to muster a lashkar (militia) to fight the Taliban in Orakzai Agency. A Taliban suicide bomber broke into the meeting and set off a bomb that slaughtered approximately a hundred. In one of his more horrific acts, Qari Hussain kidnapped children and brainwashed them so that they would blow themselves up as suicide bombers. On more than one occasion the Pakistani security forces discovered and closed down his “suicide nurseries.” After raiding one of his child indoctrination schools, a Pakistani officer said,
It was like a factory that had been recruiting nine- to 12-year-old boys, and turning them into suicide bombers. The computers, other equipment and literature seized from the place give graphic details of the training process in this so-called “nursery.” There are videos of young boys carrying out executions, a classroom where 10- to 12-year olds are sitting in formations, with white band of Quranic verses wrapped around their forehead, and there are training videos to show how improvised explosive devices are made and detonated.7
Qari Hussain also trained Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani American who tried to set off a car bomb in a civilian-packed Times Square.