There are also cases of people who allowed armed Taliban, often uninvited, into their houses and then paid the price for the visit with a drone strike. For example, the Pakistani paper the News reported,
The Taliban and Al Qaeda have unleashed a reign of terror on the people of FATA. People are afraid that the Taliban will suspect their loyalty and behead them. Thus, in order to prove their loyalty to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, they offer them to rent their houses and hujras for residential purposes.
There are people who are linked with the Taliban. Terrorists visit their houses as guests and live in the houses and hujras. The drone attacks kill women and small children of the hosts. These are innocent deaths because the women and children have no role in the men’s links with terrorists.
Other innocent victims are local people who just happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.60
A similar case was reported in the Asia Times: “In an interview with a researcher for CIVIC, a civilian victim of a drone strike in North Waziristan carried out during the Obama administration recounted how his home had been visited by Taliban fighters asking for lunch. He said he had agreed out of fear of refusing them. The very next day, he recalled, the house was destroyed by a missile from a drone, killing his only son.”61
Although it is common knowledge in the FATA that the drones are hunting militants, not civilians, many Pashtuns fear that they will be killed by accident, and so they live in a state of fear. A Pakistani journalist interviewed one tribesman named Khaista Khan: “The people in North Waziristan, currently the main target of the drone strikes, are developing psychological disorders because of the constant fear and anxiety caused by the drones regularly flying over the area. ‘Everyone is scared here,’ Khan said. ‘It is like someone is pointing a loaded gun at you when you are working, eating your meal, sitting with the children or sleeping. It is becoming very difficult to live this way.’”62
A journalist for the Miami Herald painted a similar picture of the tribesmen’s fear of drones:
They described a terrifying existence under the drones in North Waziristan, the focus of the strikes. A 13-year-old boy, Saddam Hussain, said that he lost his 10-month-old niece and sister-in-law in a strike on their house on the night of Oct. 9, in the Datta Khel area of North Waziristan. Saddam carried a large picture of the baby girl with him at the protest. “The drones patrol day and night. The sound comes when they fly lower down. Sometimes we see six in the air all at once,” Saddam said. “When they come down, people run out of their houses, even at night.”63
A Globe and Mail reporter in the FATA reported,
People who sleep under the buzzing of the drones say it’s hard to settle down for the night, listening to the sound of armed machines nearby. Muhammad Amad, executive director of Idea, an aid group that works in the tribal areas, was telling a visitor that the drones are counterproductive because they stir up local anger, when he was interrupted by one of his local staffers from Waziristan, interjecting in broken English: “Mental torture,” said the bearded man, with sun-weathered skin. He repeated himself, struggling to enunciate: “Mental torture.” “Yes, it’s mental torture,” Mr. Amad said. “When we lie down under the noise of the drones, nobody sleeps.”
Several people from the tribal areas said the same thing. Sleeping pills and anti-depressants have become a regular part of the diet, they said, even in poor villages where few people can afford meat.64
The Xinhua news agency similarly reported, “Dr. Faizur Rehman Burki, a local physician, said that the drone strikes have not only panicked people, but also catalyzed uncertainty because of which people were now using sedatives. ‘Usage of tranquilizers has been increased,’ Xinhua news agency quoted Dr. Burki, as saying. ‘I am not scared, but haunted by the uncertainty that anything can happen anytime to my home and the loved ones,’ said Naseemullah, a native of Wana.”65
A local source told the Los Angeles Times, “These drones fly day and night, and we don’t know where to hide because we don’t know who they will target. If I could, I would take revenge on America.”66 Another Pakistani said, “People are very worried, very tense all the time. When the missile is fired from the plane, there is a loud explosion. When it hits the ground, it makes a terrifying noise. The people below, they just start running. Pieces of missile, they fly everywhere, very far, into other people’s houses.”67
Similar sentiments have been expressed in Yemen, where CIA drones have made several strikes on al Qaeda operatives, including the previously mentioned attack that accidentally killed a popular Yemeni governor. According to one Yemeni source, “The drones fly over Marib every 24 hours and there is not a day that passes that we don’t see them. The atmosphere has become weary because of the presence of U.S. drones and the fear that they could strike at any time.”68
Thus it would seem that for every voice in favor of the drones found in the previous chapter, there is a voice against them. Some supporters in the targeted regions support the drone campaign whereas others live in fear of the unseen killers in the sky. Some root for the drones to kill the militants who terrorize them whereas others point out that the drones are self-defeating in that they act as accidental recruiters for these very same terrorists when they kill civilian bystanders. That this is the case should not be surprising considering the controversial nature of any assassination campaign carried out during a time of war—especially one being run by a distrusted foreign government’s covert intelligence agencies.
11
The Future of Killer Drones
The development of a new generation of military robots, including armed drones, may eventually mark one of the biggest revolutions in warfare in generations.
It’s a good time to be a flying robot.
There can be no doubt that drones represent the future of counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency in remote, unpoliced lands, such as Pakistan’s FATA region, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. Where U.S. troops cannot be placed on the ground, drones will increasingly fly to strike at those whom America deems to be its enemies. In 2011, during a speech given at Harvard University, John Brennan, the president’s top counterterrorism adviser, announced, “The United States does not view our authority to use military force against al-Qaeda as being restricted solely to ‘hot’ battlefields like Afghanistan.”1 This means that the U.S. government believes it can use drones wherever al Qaeda may be, from the Maghreb in North Africa (where al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb operates) to Mindanao in the southern Philippines (home to several pro–al Qaeda Islamic groups, such as Abu Sayyaf). All signs are that the U.S. military and the CIA are planning a future in which drones play an increasingly important role in warfare and antiterrorist operations.
This of course means more strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the primary focus of current drone operations. As the United States draws down its troops in Afghanistan in 2014 and prepares to hand the fight against the Taliban over to allied Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police troops, its ground presence in this strategic country will be much diminished, and the Pentagon will turn over much of the reduced American combat against the Taliban insurgents to small, elite groups of rapid-reaction special operations troops, manned support aircraft, and of course, drones. These troops and drones, which will most likely be based in residual bases, or so-called Joint Facilities, in Jalalabad (eastern Afghanistan), Kandahar (southern Afghanistan), and Bagram (north of Kabul), will be used to assist the Afghan army in repelling Taliban swarm assaults on town centers and will bolster the Afghan army’s efforts to carry out offensives against Taliban-held sanctuaries. They will also engage in “hunt and kill” missions designed to take out local Taliban commanders and disrupt their networks.