From Waziristan to NYC: Drones Are No Joking Matter

I've never been a fan of the contrived one-liners that routinely characterize the annual gathering of the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, but one of President Obama's jokes at this year's event held on May 1 was particularly upsetting. In the presence of close to 3,000 guests, President Obama quipped, "Jonas Brothers are here, they're out there somewhere." Pretending to send a stern, fatherly message to the pop stars, Obama then added, "Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don't get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You'll never see it coming."

I'm not usually one for strict politically correctness, and I can certainly appreciate good political satire. But, in treating the hundreds of civilian deaths directly resulting from U.S. predator drone strikes in the AfPak region as a laughing matter, Obama's crude joke struck me as deeply troubling. I'd imagine the comment probably lost something in translation for the people of Pakistan and the families of the civilian victims of U.S. drone strikes in the Pakistani tribal regions. For a president who spent last week assuring Afghan President Hamid Karzai of his commitment to minimizing civilian casualties in the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban, firing off a joke about utilizing predator drones to prevent his daughters from teenage dating does not exactly highlight the seriousness of America's effort to protect civilians in the region.

As the number of troops have grown in Afghanistan, so too have the use of drone strikes against targets in the tribal regions of Pakistan under the Obama administration. The strikes are seen by military officials as key to protecting the growing number of troops in Afghanistan from insurgent attacks originating from Pakistan's border region. Once confined to high-level al Qaeda operatives, the list of targets approved for drone attacks has broadened exponentially under President Obama to include lower-level al Qaeda personnel, the Taliban, Waziristan militants, as well as camps, training areas, bomb makers, and other targets in the remote region.

Most insiders in Washington — and people across the country — have raised little objection to the new strategy, and newspaper reports on drone attacks often amount to a paragraph or less, naming the place and estimated number of "militants" killed. U.S. officials normally do not comment on suspected drone strikes, and the White House has yet to publicly acknowledge that the U.S. military is even utilizing predators in Pakistan.

But, for journalists like Safdar Dawar, General Secretary of the Tribal Union of Journalists, who witnessed a drone strike that killed 24 people in North Waziristan, the drone strikes are no secret. The eye-witness testimony provided by Dawar and his colleague who works with the locally-based Waziristan Relief Agency, a group committed to helping the victims of drone attacks, is truly disturbing. Last year, Dawar and his colleague arrived at a home in North Waziristan that was hit by a drone strike in the late evening on May 12, only to find three people killed, two men and a seven year-old boy. Their bodies were carbonized and fully burned. As local villagers helped to haul their charred and mutilated corpses away to the morgue, they were struck by yet another drone attack, just 15 minutes after the initial hit. Six more people died, including the volunteers and the brother of the man killed in the initial strike.

This harrowing scene is a powerful example of the crux of the problem with predator attacks: while the strikes might target militants or terrorists, they are often imprecise and take many innocent civilians along with them. Pressure from the high-impact explosions can send bystanders flying through the air, often leading to deaths or causing bone fractures and brain injuries. Survivors of drone attacks have no legal recourse and receive no compensation — the U.S. doesn't even acknowledge that it carries out the attacks and neither the Pakistani military nor the government investigate the consequences of the strikes.

Given that Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American Times Square car bomber, cited U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan — especially one that occurred while he was in the country — as one of his chief motivations for carrying out his failed attack in New York City, it seems clear that drone strikes are not only questionable on a moral and legal level, but also might be harming — more than helping — the effort to defeat terrorism and win the hearts and minds of the Afghan and Pakistani people. The strikes are extremely unpopular in Pakistan, and serve as one of the primary recruiting tactics for al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban in the fight against the United States and its NATO allies.

Maybe President Obama got the joke wrong at the White House Correspondents Dinner. It's not the drones that we won't see coming, but the consequences of these attacks — from Waziristan to New York City — that we are failing to understand and take seriously. As hatred for America continues to grow amongst the people in the tribal regions of Pakistan, it is inexplicable that we are not asking questions and demanding answers from Washington about the legal, moral, and strategic dimensions of these attacks. As the Shahzad affair indicates, this failure to challenge the Washington drone consensus may have serious consequences for our national security.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons