Blair was not alone in his views. One critic of the drone campaign, Nathaniel Fick of the Center for a New American Security, wrote, “Drone strikes excite visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion. The persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government, and contributes to Pakistan’s instability.”21 Writing for the Daily Times, former Pakistani general Talat Masood similarly argued,
For Pakistan, these strikes are a huge embarrassment. An ally is challenging its sovereignty and independence repeatedly and humiliatingly….
A government that is already under criticism and has credibility issues is being made to look helpless in the face of US attacks. The leadership, especially President Asif Zardari, is losing popularity and no one is prepared to take seriously the official condemnations that follow every incident….
This war has to be won through the people’s support, and the advantage that a democratically elected government has over a dictatorship is obliterated if the former is seen as helpless against US strikes. In fact, drone strikes are diverting attention from combating insurgency, and anti-Americanism is on the rise. And even if the militants seem to be losing tactically in the short-term, there will be a long-term rise in the number of militants as well as the number of alienated people. There is further negative blowback as the militants hold the government complicit in these attacks.22
The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and other members of the State Department who are tasked with cleaning up the public relations mess after strikes like the Datta Khel attack, which killed scores of villagers, would most likely agree with Mr. Masood. They think that the CIA ignores the huge diplomatic cost that comes from strikes that now increasingly kill mere Taliban foot soldiers.23 Opinion in Pakistan, a country of 190 million people, is being turned against the United States all for the sake of killing hundreds of low-level Taliban fighters. The public opinion fallout has given anti-American politicians from the various Islamic political parties a platform to mobilize people against the pro-American Zardari government. Whereas Imran Khan was unable to gather large numbers to his antidrone rallies, Pakistan’s main Islamist party, the Jamiat e Ulema, was able to bring together 100,000 people for an antidrone rally in Karachi in January 2012.24 This sort of mass protest seriously undermines the Zardari government, which is already struggling with the military, the judiciary, other less pro-American political parties, and of course the Taliban and other extremists. Should the weak Zardari government be removed from power by one of these many antidrone groups, the U.S.-Pakistani alliance in the war on terrorism could end.
Many people who oppose the drone strikes also consider them a Whac-a-Mole-type short-term solution that cannot solve the problem of Taliban control in North Waziristan and elsewhere. Wars cannot be won from the air; they have to be fought on the ground. This means that sooner or later the United States will have to rely on Pakistan to ultimately solve the problem of the terrorist sanctuary in the FATA. One Pakistani has warned, “Drone attacks are ‘not an effective long-term strategy.’ This is an ideological and political war that cannot be won through the use of drones. Each time it is proclaimed that a top militant has been killed, another militant comes up to take up the leadership. Look how after Baituallah’s death, Hakimullah took over the reins of the Pakistani Taliban and the militants are as deadly as ever.”25
DRONES ARE NOT PERFECT; THEY CAN (AND DO) MAKE MISTAKES THAT LEAD TO CIVILIAN DEATHS
Although, as demonstrated in chapter 8, drones are incredibly precise, they are far from perfect killing machines. Drones have killed the wrong people. Examples of such mistakes that can be proven provide ammunition for those who claim that the United States is reliant on techint and humint that is all too fallible.
The first example of a drone operator killing an innocent civilian was in the attack against Mir Ahmad, discussed in chapter 4. Ahmad was a tall Afghan who collected scrap metal in the hills of Zawhar Kili, Afghanistan, during the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom. He was spotted by a drone operator who assumed that anyone that tall in Afghanistan had to be bin Laden. Thus, Ahmad and his friends were blown to bits in an instant with a Hellfire missile. The drone pilots essentially arrogated for themselves the right to be judge, jury, and executioner, and in the process they killed several innocent villagers, entirely as the result of their supreme reliance on technology. No local sources on the ground verified that the target the drone operators had randomly stumbled across on a typical hill in the Texas-sized country of Afghanistan was bin Laden.
Similarly misguided attacks, in which drone pilots have spotted and killed someone whose pattern-of-life movements mistakenly gave him the signature of a Taliban militant, have likely occurred in the FATA. Although the majority of drone kills are supported by both solid, on-the-ground humint and technical intelligence, mix-ups are bound to happen owing to the distances involved and inevitable communication problems. In these cases, innocent people die.
This point was vividly demonstrated with the infamous spring 2011 Datta Khel strike, which, as discussed in chapter 8, took place the day after CIA contractor Raymond Davis was released from a Pakistani jail where he had been detained after he killed two Pakistanis. In this strike as many as fifteen respected tribal elders were killed in a single attack against a local Taliban commander. Although the commander and several of his guards were also killed, the collateral damage among civilians was larger and had far greater ramifications than the killing of the few Taliban militants. An eyewitness account of the strike provides harrowing insight into what it is like for civilians to be attacked by drones:
The assembly, a traditional Pathan jirga [tribal council], was being held in the open, on flat ground close to the Tochi river, on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border in tribal North Waziristan. There were more than 150 present, gathered to resolve a dispute over how much revenue each of several neighboring clans was due from a chromite mine on the slopes of a nearby mountain.
Sharbat Khan, the contractor who had leased the mining rights, had just begun to speak when four or five Predators—American pilotless “drone” aircraft—flew over the line of brown, craggy hills at the valley’s rim and seemingly filled the sky.
Their first target was a car, which was heading away from the Afghan border, being driven along the rough mountain road at high speed in an effort to outrun the drones and their deadly payload. According to witnesses, the aircraft fired four missiles at the car, but it was going so fast that they missed. Then, as the vehicle passed the village of Datta Khel, where the jirga had assembled, the drones fired two more missiles. This time, the car turned into a fireball, and all five men inside were killed.
It may well be that whoever was piloting the drones thousands of miles away, sitting at a computer screen somewhere in America, did have reliable intelligence that the men in the car were terrorists. It is probable, say Pakistani security sources, that a GPS chip had been secreted inside the vehicle by an agent working for the Americans in order to track it more accurately.
But after the car’s destruction, and before the tribesmen could take cover, the drones came back and started firing indiscriminately at them. “Four missiles were fired on the jirga members, who included people from all ages,” a tribesman, Samiullah Khan, told a local Pathan journalist. “The next moment there was nothing except the bodies of the slain and injured all around.” According to Samiullah Khan, the victims’ families had to be satisfied with burying disconnected “pieces of flesh.” In all, 41 died immediately, and a further seven over the following week.26