Brian Williams - Predators

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

One local described the aftermath of the strike: “There were pieces—body pieces—lying around. There was lots of flesh and blood.” The mourning people of the village were forced to “collect pieces of flesh and blood and put them in a coffin.” 27Unsurprisingly, the reaction among villagers who had lost their respected elders in the notorious strike ranged from sorrow to vows of badal -style revenge. One surviving tribesman said, “Our whole village was orphaned because all the elders were killed.” A second villager warned, “It has been a big mistake to target the jirga as it will have severe consequences.” 28Another similarly stated, “It will create resentment among the locals and everyone might turn into suicide bombers.” 29Finally, a surviving elder said, “Americans don’t spare us—not our children, nor our elders, nor our younger. That is why we have decided we will take blood revenge however we can.” The remaining elders wrote a statement titled “Announcement of Jihad against America”: “We have given permission to our loved ones to do suicide attacks against Americans. And we will take revenge so that Americans will remember it for centuries.” 30

Similar anecdotal evidence suggests errant strikes that kill civilians, at the worst, drive surviving tribesmen into the arms of the militants or, at best, undermine progovernment tribal leaders. Aamir Latif writes,

Until last month, Habibullah was one of many Pakistani tribesmen who considered the Taliban and their foreign operatives as the prime reason for their woes.

But three days after President Barack Obama took the oath of office, everything changed for the 26-year-old. A missile that Habibullah believes was fired by a U.S. drone hit his house, killing his two brothers and a mentally retarded relative…

Now, Habibullah has become a Taliban militant himself, swearing to avenge the deaths of his brothers in line with a centuries-old Pashtun custom of badal , or revenge.

Many Pakistani tribesmen resent the Taliban for the self-declared Islamic rules it has imposed on the local population, as well as its backing for foreign operatives living in the tribal regions. But the increasing number of U.S. drone attacks, coupled with bombing raids by Pakistani forces, have made it harder for many to oppose the Taliban’s presence…. According to Hazar, whenever the tribal elders, and local religious leaders, who have been sidelined by the Taliban, manage to create an anti-Taliban environment, a U.S. drone attack or bombing by Pakistani jets often ruins their efforts. 31

Striking a similar note, one Pashtun tribesman said, “Many people who did not support the Taliban previously support them now because the Americans are killing innocent people.” 32

Just as several Pakistani government officials suspected, drone strike mistakes had the ability to drive tribesmen to anti-American militancy. In a earlier statement that could have been scripted to fit the scenarios previously described Prime Minister Gilani warned,

The political and the military leadership have been very successful in isolating the militants from the local tribes. But once there is a drone attack in their home region, they get united again. This is a dangerous trend and it is my concern and the concern of the army. It is also counterproductive in the sense that it is creating a lot of anti-American sentiment all over the country. But in order to fight the militants in Waziristan we have to carry the public with us. One cannot go into any war without the support of the masses. We need huge public support to combat terrorism. But we do not get that if there is American interference which we do not ask for. 33