The U.N. flag flies at half-mast in memory of staff killed during the most recent Israeli air strikes in Gaza. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Somar Wijayadasa
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 20 2014 (IPS)

The United Nations was founded “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.

To meet that objective, the Preamble of the U.N. Charter provides “to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained”.Since the Second World War, these good and evil countries have waged hundreds of wars in which nearly 50 million people have been killed, tens of millions made homeless, and countless millions injured and bereaved.

The United Nations has played a major role in defining, codifying, and expanding the realm of international law – which defines the legal responsibilities of states in their conduct with each other, and their treatment of individuals within state boundaries.

Historically, violators of international law are not only the countries branded as evil and belligerent but also countries that preach democracy and human rights. That undermines the efforts of the United Nations to maintain law and order.

Since the Second World War, these good and evil countries have waged hundreds of wars in which nearly 50 million people have been killed, tens of millions made homeless, and countless millions injured and bereaved. No part of the world has escaped the scourge of war. The countless mechanisms enshrined in the U.N. Charter to resolve conflicts by peaceful means have been rendered useless.

Let’s forget Hiroshima, Vietnam, Korea and a few other major disasters. Let’s look at what happened after the Cold War ended in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 – leaving the United States as the only superpower.

The mass murders in Rwanda and Sudan proved that neither the United Nations nor superpowers wished to intervene. Wars in the Balkans, and fragmentation of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are now forgotten history.

The U.S. and NATO authorised bombings in Kosovo and Serbia in the 1990s. The Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen is over. International law was violated in all these instances, and these countries now are in disarray.

The United States has been criticised for turning away from internationalism by abandoning the Kyoto Protocol, ignoring the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, repudiating the Biological Weapons Convention, repealing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, refusing to sign the Treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, and condoning the continued Israeli violence against Palestinians in occupied territories.

In 2011, following the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration embarked on a strategy of unilateralism, disregarding the U.N. and international law. Worst of all is its military strategy of “pre-emptive strikes” which defies the U.N. Charter by allowing the U.S. to use illegal force against other states.

Despite U.N. opposition, the Bush administration took a series of unilateral actions. The most damaging was the war in Iraq waged on bogus claims of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the war in Afghanistan.

After a decade of devastation, the expectations of democracy, freedom and human rights have vanished – and there are no winners in these wars despite continuing mayhem and casualties.

U.S. President Barack Obama revealed that the two wars have cost U.S. taxpayers over one trillion dollars. A study by American researchers (including Noble Laureate Joseph Stieglitz and experts from Harvard and Brown), estimate that the costs could be in the range of three to four trillion.

A major challenge to international law today is the U.S. policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) estimates that as many as 4,000 people have been killed in U.S. drone strikes since 2002 in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Of those, a significant proportion were civilians.

UCLA believes that “The U.S. policy instigated in 2006 is violating universally recognized customary international law on numerous counts: failure to discriminate between military and civilian objects, indiscriminate attacks, extrajudicial executions, attacks against places of worship.

“Ironically, the drone strikes could actually be classified as ‘international terrorism’, since they appear to have been often intended to coerce the civilian population and to influence the Pakistani government.”

Another major obstacle to peace in the Middle East and world security is the Israeli Occupation and expansion of settlements in occupied territories – acts that undermine International Law.

According to Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention — to which both Israel and the United States are signatories — prohibits any occupying power from transferring “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

Also, a landmark 2004 decision by the International Court of Justice confirmed the illegality of the Israeli settlements.

Since 1948, the U.N. has passed scores of resolutions declaring that all Israeli settlements outside of Israel’s internationally recognised borders are illegal but they have been blatantly ignored by Israel.

Condemning the recent Israeli attacks on homes, schools, hospitals, and U.N. shelters in Gaza that killed thousands of innocent civilians – a gross violation of the Geneva Conventions – U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said that “Israel was deliberately defying international law in its military offensive in Gaza and that world powers should hold it accountable for possible war crimes.”

Pillay said she was appalled at Washington consistently voting against resolutions on Israel in the Human Rights Council, General Assembly and Security Council.

Another inconspicuous violation is the application of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) approved by the U.N., in 2005, which is now subtly used for regime changes.

The U.S. and NATO invoked R2P for military intervention in Libya on the pretext of a “no-fly zone” but ended in regime change. Today Libya is fragmented and is in the hands of rebels, forcing United States to evacuate its embassy staff and other foreign personnel in Libya.

The U.S. attempted to invoke the R2P mechanism in Syria even though there was no proof that the Assad regime killed its own people with chemical weapons.

President Obama was about to wage a war against Syria when a last-minute solution was found by the Russians to avert the war by removing Assad’s chemical weapons.

But the U.S. and its allies showed no interest in invoking R2P in the case of Darfur or in Israeli aggression against Palestinians in Gaza, where over 2,000 civilians were killed.

And no one is screaming to invoke R2P in East Ukraine despite the fact that already over 2,000 Ukrainians have been killed by Ukrainian military forces.

The United Nations has not played a fair role when invoking the Responsibility to Protect.

In 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) was established with a mandate to consider genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression. But it is unfortunate that ICC mainly focuses on criminal cases in Africa, without looking at so many breaches of the law elsewhere.

The United States is not a signatory to the ICC but it cannot escape from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) where cases can be initiated by one state against another.

Actions of many powerful countries prove that they are sticking to the Rule of Power instead of enhancing the Rule of Law.

For over 200 years, America has been a devout apostle of equality and freedom – defending peace, democracy, justice and human rights. It is in this sense that a few former U.S. presidents believed in peace and not war.

President Truman said, “The responsibility of the great states is to serve and not dominate the peoples of the world” and President Kennedy said, “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”

It is inconceivable that America, today, with its democratic history and unrivaled power, constantly violates international law instead of morally guiding the world towards peace, justice and prosperity.

Such actions not only erode the prestige of the United States and violate the U.N. Charter, but also undermine the effectiveness of the United Nations.

Somar Wijayadasa is a former Representative of UNAIDS at the United Nations.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

Posters and billboards have been posted by Pakistan Tehreek Insaf workers on University Road in Peshawar to urge people to attend their Nov. 23 anti-drone protest. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Nov 22 2013 (IPS)

Upping the ante against U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, celebrated cricketer-turned-political leader Imran Khan has threatened to block NATO supplies to Afghanistan through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where his party leads a coalition government.

“We are holding the biggest ever anti-drone protest in Peshawar, where we could decide to block NATO supplies permanently,” Khan, who leads the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI), told IPS ahead of massive protests planned by the party for Nov. 23.

“We don’t want to start a fight with the U.S. but we have every right to protest these illegal assaults which kill innocent people,” Khan said, calling the attacks a breach of international law and a violation of human rights.

His party is enraged over a U.S. drone strike at a madrassa or religious seminary that killed at least eight people in Hangu district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in northwestern Pakistan, on Nov. 20.

The PTI leads the coalition government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which is one of two key routes used by NATO to move supplies in and out of neighbouring Afghanistan and is strategically important as U.S.-led forces prepare to withdraw from the war-torn country in 2014.

“More than 200,000 political activists will gather here to send a very loud and clear message,” Khan said about the Nov. 23 demonstrations. “On the same day, a similar anti-drone protest will take place in the UK.”

When the party had organised a major two-day protest on Apr. 23-24, 2010, NATO supplies were suspended.

The PTI has staunchly opposed drone strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), adjacent to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The strikes target Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders who have taken refuge in FATA along a 2,400-km porous border with Afghanistan after being evicted from Kabul by U.S.-led forces towards the end of 2001.

FATA, which is directly ruled by the federal government, is teeming with militants, some of them with huge bounties on their heads as they are aggressively pursued by the U.S. for alleged involvement in the Sep. 11, 2001 terror attacks. Many high-profile Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders have been killed in the drone strikes.

Khan said his party wants to convey to the world that the U.S. government is killing innocent people in the garb of targeting militants.

“Even if those targeted in these strikes are supposed militants, the U.S. has no right to kill them without taking the Pakistan government into confidence,” Khan said.

Besides, while most drone attacks have taken place in FATA, the Nov. 20 strike was in the PTI’s stronghold of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

“We won’t allow drone strikes on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa soil,” Khan said.

He had earlier stated that they would stop NATO supplies even if it meant his party losing its place in the provincial government. But he later stressed that only his party workers would take part in the protest.

“The PTI government in the province will stay away from the protest because we don’t want to take any illegal steps,” Khan said.

The PTI has been accusing Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of failing to raise the concerns of Pakistani citizens about drone strikes with President Barack Obama.

“We were the first to point out that these strikes were in total contravention of U.N. and other international law that guarantees the sovereignty of any country,” he said.

He said the U.S. had sabotaged the government’s proposed peace talks with the Tehreek Taliban Pakistan by killing its leader Hakimullah Mehsud in a Nov. 1 drone attack.

“Targeting a madrassa with missiles from a drone, killing our citizens, is a clear violation of the province’s territorial rights,” Muhammad Junaid, a PTI worker, told IPS. The shopkeeper from the militancy-hit Swabi district said drone strikes kill innocent people, including women and children, and should not be permitted by any country.

“We have the right to protest,” said Junaid. “We are ready to join Imran Khan, our leader, in stopping supplies to NATO forces in Afghanistan.”

The Jamaat Islami Party and Awami Jamhoori Ittehad, the PTI’s allies in the provincial government, are on the same page.

“Upwards of 150,000 protestors will take part in the protest against drone strikes and over the continuation of NATO supplies,” Jamaat Islami chief Syed Munnawar Hassan said.

“We can stop them [NATO supplies] permanently,” he said.

After a drone strike had reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud Nov. 1, the spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council declared that, if true, it would be “a serious loss” for the terrorist organisation.

Hakimullah Mehsud. Credit: public domain

That reaction accurately reflected the Central Intelligence Agency’s argument for the strike. But the back story of the episode is how President Barack Obama supported the parochial interests of the CIA in the drone war over the Pakistani government’s effort to try a new political approach to that country’s terrorism crisis.

The failure of both drone strikes and Pakistani military operations in the FATA tribal areas to stem the tide of terrorism had led to a decision by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to try a political dialogue with the Taliban.

But the drone strike that killed Mehsud stopped the peace talks before they could begin.

Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan immediately denounced the drone strike that killed Mehsud as “a conspiracy to sabotage the peace talks.” He charged that the United States had “scuttled” the initiative “on the eve, 18 hours before a formal delegation of respected ulema [Islamic clerics] was to fly to Miranshah and hand over this formal invitation.”

An unidentified State Department official refused to address the Pakistani minister’s criticism, declaring coolly that the issue was “an internal matter for Pakistan”.

Three different Taliban commanders told Reuters Nov. 3 they had been preparing for the talks but after the killing of Mehsud, they now felt betrayed and vowed a wave of revenge attacks.

The strategy of engaging the Taliban in peace talks, which was supported by the unanimous agreement of an “All Parties Conference” on Sept. 9, was not simply an expression of naïvete about the Taliban as was suggested by a Nov. 3 New York Times article on the Pakistani reaction to the drone strike.

A major weakness of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) lies in the fact that it is a coalition of as many as 50 groups, some of whose commanders are less committed to the terrorist campaign against the Pakistani government than others. In the aftermath of the Mehsud killing, several Taliban militants told Reuters that some Taliban commanders were still in favour of talks with the government.

The most important success achieved by Pakistan in countering Taliban violence in the past several years has been to reach accommodations with several militant leaders who had been allied with the Taliban but agreed to oppose Taliban attacks on government officials and security forces.

Sharif and other Pakistani officials were well aware that the United States could unilaterally prevent such talks from taking place by killing Mehsud or other Taliban leaders with a drone strike.

The government lobbied the United States in September and October to end its drone war in Pakistan – or at least to give the government a period of time to try its political strategy.

Obama had already suggested in a May 23 speech at National Defence University that the need for the strikes was fast diminishing and would soon end, because there were very few high value targets left to hit, and because the U.S. would be withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. In August, Secretary of State John Kerry had said the end might come “very, very soon.”

After the meeting with Sharif on Oct. 23, Obama said they had agreed to cooperate in “ways that respect Pakistan’s sovereignty, that respect the concerns of both countries” and referred favourably to Sharif’s efforts to “reduce these incidents of terrorism.”

Shortly after the meeting, Sharif’s adviser on national security and foreign affairs, Sartaj Aziz, said in an interview with Al Jazeera that the Obama administration had promised to “consider” the prime minister’s request to restrain drone attacks while the government carried out a political dialogue.

A “senior Pakistani official” told the Express Tribune that Obama had “assured Premier Nawaz that drone strikes would only be used as a last option” and that he was planning to end the drone war once “a few remaining targets” had been eliminated.

The official said the Pakistani government now believed the unilateral strikes would end in “a matter of months.”

But Obama’s meeting with Sharif evidently occurred before the CIA went to Obama with specific intelligence about Mehsud, and proposed to carry out a strike to kill him.

The CIA had an institutional grudge to settle with Mehsud after he had circulated a video with Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian suicide bomber who had talked the CIA into inviting him to its compound at Camp Chapman in Khost province, where he killed seven CIA officials and contractors on Dec. 30, 2009.

The CIA had already carried out at least two drone strikes aimed at killing Mehsud in January 2010 and January 2012.

Killing Mehsud would not reduce the larger threat of terrorism and would certainly trigger another round of TTP suicide bombings in Pakistan’s largest cities in retaliation.

Although it would satisfy the CIA’s thirst for revenge and make the CIA and his administration look good on terrorism to the U.S. public, it would also make it impossible for the elected Pakistani government to try a political approach to TTP terrorism.

Obama appears to have been sympathetic to Sharif’s argument on terrorism and had no illusions that one or a few more drone strikes against leading Taliban officials would prevent the organisation from continuing to mobilise its followers to carry out terror attacks, including suicide bombers.

But the history of the drone war in Pakistan shows that the CIA has prevailed even when its proposed targets were highly questionable. In March 2011, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter had opposed a CIA proposal for a drone strike just as CIA contractor Raymond Davis was about to be released from a jail in Lahore.

Munter had learned that the CIA wanted the strike because it was angry at Pakistan’s ISI, which regarded the Haqqani group as an ally, over Davis’s incarceration, according to an AP story on Aug. 2, 2011. The Haqqani group was heavily involved in fighting U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan but was opposed to the TTP’s terror attacks in Pakistan.

CIA Director Leon Panetta rejected Munter’s objection to the strike, however, and Obama had supported Panetta. It was later revealed that the strike had been based on faulty intelligence. It was not a meeting of Haqqani network that was hit but a conference of tribal leaders from all over the province on an economic issue.

But the CIA simply refused to acknowledge its mistake and continued to claim to journalists that only terrorists had attended the meeting.

After the strike, Obama had formalised the ambassador’s authority to oppose a proposed drone strike, giving Munter what he called a “yellow card.” But despite the evidence that the CIA had carried out a drone strike for parochial reasons rather then an objective assessment of evidence, Obama gave the CIA director the power to override an ambassadorial dissent, even if the secretary of state supported the ambassador.

The extraordinary power of the CIA director over the drone strike policy, which was formalised by Obama after that strike, was evident in Obama’s decision to approve the CIA’s proposal for the Mehsud strike. The director was now John Brennan, who had shaped public opinion in favour of drone strikes through a series of statements, interviews and leaks as Obama’s deputy national security adviser from 2009 to 2013.

Even though Obama was determined to phase the out drone war in Pakistan and apparently sympathised with the need for the Pakistani government to end it within a matter of months, he was unwilling to reject the CIA’s demand for a strike that once again involved the agency’s parochial interests.

A late July 2013 survey had shown that 61 percent of U.S. citizens still supported the use of drones. Having already shaped public perceptions on the issue of terrorism, Obama allowed the interests of the CIA to trump the interests of Pakistan and the United States in trying a different approach to Pakistan’s otherwise intractable terrorism problem.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Members of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party burn replica of Drone aircraft near Peshawar Press Club on May 14, 2011. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Oct 25 2013 (IPS)

The Washington Post on Thursday reported what it presented as new evidence of a secret agreement under which Pakistani officials have long been privately supporting the U.S. drone war in the country even as they publicly criticised it.

Most news outlets picked up the Post story, and the theme of public Pakistani opposition and private complicity on the drone issue framed media coverage of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s declaration that he had called on President Barak Obama to end the drone war.The CIA’s drone war was no longer concentrated from mid-2008 onward on foreign terrorists...Instead the CIA was targeting Islamists who had made peace with the Pakistani government.

But the Post story ignored a central fact that contradicts that theme: the Pakistani military leadership had turned decisively against the drone war for years and has been strongly pressing in meetings with U.S. officials that Pakistan be given a veto over targeting.

In fact, the leak of classified CIA documents to the Post appears to represent an effort by CIA officials to head off a decision by the Obama administration to reduce the drone war in Pakistan to a minimum, if not phase it out completely.

The Post article, co-authored by Bob Woodward, said, “Despite repeated denunciation of the CIA’s drone campaign, top officials in Pakistan’s government have for years secretly endorsed the program and routinely received classified briefings on strikes and casualty counts….”

The Post cited top secret CIA documents that it said “expose the explicit nature of a secret arrangement struck between the two countries at a time when neither was willing to publicly acknowledge the existence of the drone program.” The documents, described as “talking points” for CIA briefings, provided details on drone strikes in Pakistan from late 2007 to late 2011, presenting them as an overwhelming success and invariably claiming no civilian casualties.

It has long been known that an understanding was reached between the George W. Bush administration and the regime of President Pervez Musharraf under which the CIA was allowed to carry out drone strikes in Pakistan.

A WikiLeaks cable had quoted Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani as saying in August 2008, “I don’t care if they do it as long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.”

That statement was made, however, at a time when CIA strikes were still few and focused only on Al-Qaeda leadership cadres. That changed dramatically beginning in 2008.

The Post articles failed to point out that that Pakistan’s military leadership shifted from approval of the U.S. drone campaign to strong opposition after 2008. The reason for the shift was that the CIA dramatically expanded the target list in 2008 from high value Al-Qaeda officials to “signature strikes” that would hit even suspected rank and file associated with supporters of the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban.

The Post referred to the expansion of the drone strike target list, but instead of noting the impact on the Pakistani military’s attitude, the article brought in another popular news media theme – the unhappiness of Obama administration officials with the support of the Pakistan’s intelligence agency for the Afghan Taliban based in Pakistan.

The Obama administration was well aware of the Pakistani military’s support for the Afghan Taliban movement, however, before it decided to escalate the war in Afghanistan – a fact omitted from the Post story.

The vast expansion of drone strikes in Pakistan engineered by then CIA Director Michael Hayden in 2008 and continued by his successor, Leon Panetta, was justified by targeting anyone in Pakistan believed to be involved in support for the rapidly growing Pashtun resistance to the U.S.-NATO military presence in Afghanistan.

That shift in targeting meant that the CIA’s drone war was no longer concentrated from mid-2008 onward on foreign terrorists and their Pakistani allies who had been waging an insurgency against the Pakistani government. Instead the CIA was targeting Islamists who had made peace with the Pakistani government and were opposing the Pakistani Taliban war against the government.

Two-thirds of the drone strikes in 2008 targeted leaders and even rank and file followers associated with Jalaluddin Haqqani and Mullah Nazeer, both of whom were involved in supporting Taliban forces in Afghanistan, but who opposed attacks on the Pakistani government.

At least initially, the CIA was not interested in targeting the Pakistani Taliban leaders associated with Baitullah Mehsud, who was leading the violent war against the Pakistani military. It was only under pressure from the new head of the Pakistani Army, Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, that the CIA began targeting Mehsud and his organisation in 2009, when Mehsud was killed in a drone strike.

That temporarily mollified the Pakistani military. But in 2010, more than half the strikes in Pakistan were against Hafiz Gul Bahadur, an ally of the Haqqani forces who had reached agreement with the Pakistan government that he would not shelter or support any Taliban militants fighting against the government.

Nearly all the rest of the strikes were against Afghan Taliban targets.

The original agreement reached under Musharraf was clearly no longer applicable. Kayani had clearly expressed his unhappiness with the drone war to the CIA leadership in 2008-09 and again in 2010, but only privately.

Then the January 2011 Raymond Davis incident, in which a contract CIA employee shot and killed two Pakistanis who he believed had been following him on motorcycles, triggered a more serious conflict between the CIA and ISI.

The CIA put intense pressure on ISI to release Davis from jail rather than allowing him to be tried by a Pakistani court, and ISI Chief Shuja Pasha personally intervened in the case to arrange for Davis to be freed on Mar. 16, 2011, despite the popular fury against Davis and the United States.

But the CIA response was to carry out a drone attack the day after his release on what it thought was a gathering of Haqqani network officials but was actually a meeting of dozens of tribal and sub-tribal elders from all over North Waziristan.

An angry Kayani then issued the first ever denunciation of the U.S. drone campaign by a Pakistan military leader. And when Pasha met with CIA Director Leon Panetta and Deputy Director Michael Morell in mid-April 2011, he demanded that Pakistan be given veto power over the strikes, according to two active-duty Pakistani generals interviewed in Islamabad in August 2011.

Reuters reported Apr. 16, 2011 that U.S. officials had said the CIA was willing to consult with Pakistan over the strikes, but that suggestions from the Pakistani military that the drone campaign should return to the original list of high value Al-Qaeda targets was “unacceptable”.

But the Pakistani military’s insistence on cutting down on strikes apparently had an impact on the Obama administration, which was already debating whether the drone war in Pakistan had become counterproductive. The State Department was arguing that it was generating such anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan that it should be curbed sharply or stopped.

Obama himself indicated in his May 23, 2013 speech at the National Defence University that he was thinking about at least reducing the drone war dramatically. Obama said the coming end of U.S. combat in Afghanistan and the elimination of “core Al-Qaeda militants” in Pakistan “will reduce the need for unmanned strikes.”

And in an Aug. 1 interview with a Pakistani television interviewer, Secretary of State John Kerry said, “I think the [drone] programme will end…. I think the president has a very real timeline, and we hope it’s going to be very, very soon.”

CIA concern that Obama was seriously considering ending the drone war in Pakistan was certainly the motive behind a clever move by CIA officials to create a story denigrating Pakistani official opposition to the drone war and presenting it in the best possible light.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama greets Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan in the Oval Office prior to their bilateral meeting, Oct. 23, 2013. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 24 2013 (IPS)

Even as Pakistan’s prime minister again publicly demanded an end to controversial U.S. drone strikes in his country before a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama Wednesday, secret documents reveal long-time collusion with the CIA-led targeted assassination programme.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s visit coincided with fresh allegations this week by human rights groups that U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions may amount to war crimes.

On Thursday, the Washington Post said it had obtained top-secret CIA documents and Pakistani diplomatic memos explicitly confirming what was already apparent to many – that “top officials in Pakistan’s government have for years secretly endorsed the programme and routinely received classified briefings on strikes and casualty counts.”

“This whole business of ‘they [Islamabad] secretly or tacitly agreed to the strikes’ is very, very dangerous,” Jeremy Rabkin, a member of the board of directors at the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent national security institution here, and a professor of law at the George Mason University School of Law, told IPS.

“It doesn’t mean very much to us if the Pakistani government can’t even endorse the drone programme in front of their own people,” he said.

According to Professor Rabkin, the secret deal between the U.S. and Pakistani governments could pose a serious threat to U.S. interests in the long run. “If you look at the anger of the Pakistani people, it is clear that we’ve acted against their consent, and that doesn’t do us any good. I think we’re on very thin ice,” he said.

Two days before the Post’s revelations were published, Sharif continued to to press Obama to put a definitive end to drone strikes at an appearance at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

“The issue has become a major irritant in our bilateral relations,” Sharif said Tuesday. “I would therefore stress the need for an end to drone strikes.”

However, the evidence suggests that this stance is merely a political maneuver aimed at appeasing Sharif’s audience back home.

“What we do know from sources such as Wikileaks is that in the last government at least the prime minister and the president knew about the strikes and supported them,” Christine Fair, an assistant professor at Georgetown University here and a fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, said Wednesday.

Fair cited a statement by a high-ranking U.S. military official saying that “the U.S.-Pakistan relation is improving because they are letting us kill their terrorists.”

While the Washington Post documents cover the period from 2007 to late 2011, some say that the two countries have shared a covert deal on drone operations ever since the first strike in 2004, which presumably targeted Nek Muhammad Wazir, a greater enemy to Pakistan than he was to the United States as he had twice attempted to assassinate then-President Pervez Musharraf.

“The first drone strike in June 2004 was basically the first time the CIA was allowed to use drones. Musharraf had allowed the CIA to carry out these operations. That was the deal from the beginning,” Mark Mazzetti, the national security correspondent for the New York Times said Wednesday.

Afghanistan

Despite the public outrage over the U.S. drone programme, Afghanistan has been and still is the primary source of tension in U.S.-Pakistan relations, with a looming U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan set for 2014.

In a statement delivered on Tuesday at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Sharif said he believes that “a peaceful, stable and united Afghanistan is in Pakistan’s vital interest.”

However, the relationship between the two countries plunged into crisis in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. raid that captured and killed Osama Bin Laden in northeastern Pakistan in May 2011, which was allegedly conducted without the prior consent of the Pakistani government.

The government in Islamabad soon responded by blocking U.S. and NATO access points in and out of Afghanistan, creating a substantial logistical obstacle to U.S. military movements there. The supply routes opened again in July of 2012.

The Obama administration has also faced critiques over a U.S. airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers near the country’s border with Afghanistan.

Pakistan has allegedly taken steps of its own aimed at achieving a peaceful solution to the 12-year old conflict in neighboring Afghanistan.

Last month, the government in Islamabad agreed to Afghan requests to release long-time leader and founding member of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Pakistani authorities hoped to finally get the peace process started by having the Taliban negotiate with the Afghan government.

According to recent reports, however, Baradar may not be free at all. No negotiations have been set so far, and there have been no talks of setting up a location either. Some suggest that he is still being held captive by Pakistani authorities.

A protest in Peshawar against drone strikes. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 22 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. government has been engaged in unlawful drone strikes in Pakistan that are in violation of international law, and may amount to war crimes, according to a new report released here by Amnesty International on Tuesday.

The report’s release comes at a critical time, as newly-elect Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif returns to Washington for his first official visit as the country’s leader since 1999."The narrative of precision and of no civilian casualties is a false one." -- Naureen Shah of Amnesty International

In the report, “Will I Be Next? U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan,” the human rights organisation provides evidence that U.S. drones have killed innocent civilians that posed no apparent threat to the United States.

Amnesty’s report notes that in nine strikes carried out between May 2012 and July 2013, at least 29 unarmed civilians lost their lives, including a 68-year-old woman who was killed instantly by two U.S. Hellfire missiles as she was picking vegetables.

The study was released jointly with a report by Human Rights Watch, another human rights organisation, highlighting the illegality of U.S. drone strikes in Yemen. The report “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda,” estimates that in Yemen, where the U.S. is currently engaged fighting Yemen’s Al-Qaeda wing (AQAP), dozens of civilians have been killed between 2009 and 2013 by U.S. drone strikes.

“President [Barack] Obama needs to come clean about these killings,” Naureen Shah, an advocacy advisor at Amnesty International USA, told IPS. “What really matters is that the U.S. government and Congress recognise that these killings are occurring, that civilians have been killed and that the narrative of precision and of no civilian casualties is a false one.”

Indeed, while the two human rights groups call for greater transparency by the U.S. government and for accountable investigations of unlawful killings, they are not advocating for an end of the practice itself.

“Drone technology is not illegal per se, it’s just a weapon or a weapons platform. What really matters is that the U.S. government conducts any drone strike in compliance with the rules of international law,” Amnesty International’s Shah told IPS.

According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S. conducted as many as six drone strikes in Yemen, five between 2012 and 2013. Two of the attacks killed civilians indiscriminately “in clear violation of the laws of war,” and the other four strikes targeted individuals who were not legitimate military objectives.

False promises

In a speech delivered last May, Obama vowed to increase his administration’s transparency on the issue of drone strikes, shortly after three U.S. citizens were reportedly killed during a drone operation.

However, critics and human rights activists claim that President Obama has fallen far short of this pledge.

“The U.S. government continues to operate in complete and utter secrecy over its drone policy, so we still don’t know whether the government’s actions amount to war crimes,” Mustafa Qadri, Amnesty International’s Pakistan researcher, said at the report’s launch here on Tuesday.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had no comment when contacted by IPS, referring press inquiries on the matter to the White House.

At a briefing Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney defended the U.S. government’s drone policy.

“We take the matter of civilian casualties enormously seriously and the actions we take are mindful of the absolute need to limit civilian casualties,” Carney said.

So far, the two human rights organisations have been cautious and have not labeled U.S. practice a war crime. Part of the reason is the lack of detailed information.

“We’re still not 100 percent sure that the strikes amount to war crimes. So what we’re doing is we’re calling on the Obama administration to come forward and demonstrate that we’re wrong,” Human Rights Watch’s Letta Tayler said on Tuesday. A more transparent approach, she said, would be a first step.

Both groups urged the U.S. government to at least offer compensation to the relatives of the victims. But the problem, they say, is that the U.S. refuses to acknowledge the strikes. So far, the U.S. government has only acknowledged two attacks in Yemen, which involved the death of U.S. citizens.

Mending relations

U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have long been a contentious issue between Washington and Islamabad, and the public backlash over civilian victims may hinder U.S. efforts against Al-Qaeda insurgents in the country. Prime Minister Sharif’s visit could not have been more timely.

“The drone issue is definitely going to come up during Sharif’s visit with President Obama, but it probably won’t be a major point of contention, since the two countries are trying to rebuild their ties,” Shuja Nawaz, the director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, a think tank here, told IPS.

According to Nawaz, Pakistan’s prime minister is going to raise protests against U.S. drone policy, but mainly to appease his audience back home.

The two governments are attempting to mend their relations after reaching an historic low-point in 2011, following the capture of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers by a U.S. air strike near the country’s border with Afghanistan.

The White House has also recently confirmed that that it will release a 1.6-billion-dollar aid package to Pakistan, beginning in 2014. It is estimated that most of the aid will be allocated to assisting the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“In some ways, it is unfortunate that the White House announced its aid release before the Prime Minister’s visit,” the Atlantic Council’s Nawaz told IPS. “It reduces the partnership to a simple transactional relationship, while the two governments should be working more closely together on other important issues, such as better trade relations.”

Sharif is scheduled to meet with President Obama on Wednesday.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, on an official trip to Pakistan, announced Thursday that high-level policy discussions will begin anew between Washington and Islamabad.

“Today, very quickly, we were able to agree to a resumption of the strategic dialogue to foster a deeper, broader and more comprehensive partnership between our countries,” Kerry said, speaking to the press in Islamabad.“The continuation of drone operations, now that the Pakistani government has made it clear in every possible way that it wants them to stop, is a very serious irritant to U.S.-Pakistani relations.” -- South Asia expert Bruce Riedel

Such dialogue between Washington and Islamabad had been suspended for almost two years following a series of U.S. actions in 2011 which killed people inside Pakistan and infuriated the public there.

“This is a modest but important step in taking this important relationship to a healthier place than where it has been in the last several years,” Bruce Riedel, who has worked as a senior advisor on South Asia and the Middle East for the last four U.S. presidents, told IPS.

October 2011 was the last time a visit was made by a U.S. secretary of state to the strategically important nation, which is possessed of a growing stockpile of nuclear weaponry and which neighbours a land where the U.S. is still leading a war.

The major actions which irked Islamabad in 2011 included the killing of two Pakistani men by CIA asset Raymond Davis in Lahore, the assassination of Osama Bin Laden by U.S. soldiers in Abbottabad, and the strafing to death of 24 Pakistani soldiers by U.S. planes along the country’s border with Afghanistan.

Two years later, however, the situation has evolved, Touqir Hussain, a member of the South Asian Studies faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told IPS.

“Something like this had to happen,” says Hussain. “The relationship had been going too far into negative territory.”

Husssain, who calls the resumption of U.S.-Pakistani discussions a “reset” in the relationship between the two countries, stresses the importance of the U.S. war for the sudden resumption of dialogue. He says that the U.S. recognises the importance of a successful withdrawal from Afghanistan, and that it will be better off in that task if working with a cooperative Islamabad.

“The U.S. realises the important role that a stable Pakistan can play for them, especially in Afghanistan,” he told IPS.

The drone issue

The biggest bone of contention for Pakistan in its relationship with the U.S. is the latter’s continued policy of carrying out drone strikes in its tribal regions.

“The continuation of drone operations, now that the Pakistani government has made it clear in every possible way that it wants them to stop, is a very serious irritant to U.S.-Pakistani relations, and there’s no getting around that,” says Riedel, who is currently a senior fellow at Brookings, a think tank here.

The attacks are designed to eliminate those suspected as militants, but reports say they also cause many civilian deaths.

Speaking on Pakistani television, Kerry made a statement seemingly intended to assuage concern over this issue.

“I think the programme will end, as we have eliminated most of the threat and continue to eliminate it,” he told the cameras, adding that he hoped the end would come “very soon”.

In a State Department press conference which followed that speech, however, spokeswoman Marie Harf qualified that statement, saying there was no exact timeline, and that it would depend on “the situation on the ground”.

Sharif, who assumed leadership in June, has supported more lenient counter-terrorism policies, including dialogue with the groups responsible for acts of violence against the Pakistani state. His government has made it clear that it wants a halt to all drone strikes.

Hussain, for one, doubts the lengths Islamabad is willing to go to see that desire realised.

“The U.S. and Pakistan will continue to have a conflict of view on this issue, but they are not going to let everything else come to a standstill because of it,” Hussain told IPS.

“Pakistan will continue to make noises and the U.S. will continue to carry out drone attacks,” he added, referring to the complaints made by Pakistani officials about the U.S. strikes.

While Kerry praised the unprecedented success of the election of Sharif, calling it an “historic transition”, he also took the opportunity while speaking in Islamabad to warn of the dangers of not combating extremism.

“The choice for Pakistan is clear: Will the forces of violent extremism be allowed to grow more dominant, eventually overpowering the moderate majority?” Kerry asked.

While the U.S. is once again on speaking terms with Pakistan at the highest level, it has a long way to go to regain the sympathy of the Pakistani public opinion.

Research indicates that over 70 percent of Pakistanis hold an unfavourable opinion of the U.S.

“Pakistani public opinion remains harshly anti-American and harshly anti-drones, and I don’t think anything Secretary Kerry has said is going to change that,” Riedel tells IPS.

Further, there is a “fundamental divide”, the Brookings scholar says, between the interests of Washington and those of Islamabad.

“The U.S. is at war with the Afghan Taliban, while Pakistan is supporting it,” he notes.

He further points out that, even when talks were under way before the problems in 2011, they never really produced much. Therefore he is sceptical about how much will come out of this rejuvenated relationship.

“While it is a modest step in the right direction, I don’t think people should have exaggerated expectations.”

As Barack Obama renews his lease on the White House for another four years, his administration is debating how best to respond to a growing internal and public controversy over his first term’s non-battlefield counter-terrorist weapon of choice: armed drones.

Armed Predator drone firing Hellfire missile. Credit: public domain

For months, senior administration officials have reportedly been haggling over the terms of a so-called “playbook” for the use of drones against suspected terrorists that will provide detailed rules for who will be included on so-called “kill lists”, under what circumstances drones can be used to kill them, and what agency can do the killing.

The debate has also included whether or not – and to what extent – the government should make those rules, and the legal justifications that purportedly underlie them, public.

How the debate turns out could be critical to Obama’s hopes of reducing the size of Washington’s military “footprint” in the Middle East, notably by withdrawing ground forces while still pursuing a counter-terrorist strategy to disrupt and destroy Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Over the past four years, drone strikes have played the pre-eminent role in that strategy.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which operates the drone programme in Pakistan and shares responsibility for drone operations with Pentagon forces in Yemen, has reportedly argued for greater leeway in carrying out strikes.

On the other hand, Obama’s counter-terrorism chief and, significantly, his nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan, has reportedly called for tighter rules, greater restraint, and more transparency.

According to a Washington Post account published Monday, the haggling is now coming to an end in a series of compromises that, among other things, will permit the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to continue its controversial Afghanistan-based drone programme against targets in neighbouring Pakistan for the next one to two years under the existing rules.

That covers the period when Washington is expected to draw down its military presence in Afghanistan from the current 66,000 troops to 10,000 or less.

One prominent critic of drone warfare has already criticised the anticipated exclusion of Pakistan from the so-called playbook.

“…(I)f the United States decides not to apply the, quote, playbook to Pakistan, it’s essentially meaningless, because 85 percent of all the targeted killings that the U.S. has conducted in non-battlefield settings since 9/11 have occurred in Pakistan,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) whose recently published report, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies”, is shaping much of the current debate.

“So the vast majority of targeted killings and drone strikes will not be covered under the playbook,” he told a press teleconference convened by CFR Tuesday.

Since 9/11, U.S. forces have conducted some 425 targeted killings – all but a few through drone strikes — in at least three countries – Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Altogether, they are believed to have killed more than 3,000 people – more than the 9/11 death toll itself. How many of those killed have been actual members of terrorist organisations, as opposed to civilians, has itself been a matter of intense debate.

The resort to drone strikes evoked controversy from the outset, not only because it marked a reversal of the policy against assassinations upheld by Republican and Democratic presidents alike since CIA assassinations were first exposed in the early 1970’s, but also because of the novelty of long-distance killing.

Typically, the operator of an armed drone sits before a video screen in a secure facility as far away as the state of Nevada, as much as 13,000 kms from the target.

Particularly controversial has been so-called “signature strikes.” While early drone strikes targeted specific identified suspected terrorists included on a “kill list” compiled by various U.S. agencies, “signature strikes”, which have been carried out to devastating effect in Pakistan, in particular, have targeted groups of suspected terrorists whose precise identity is unknown.

According to the former Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Adm. Dennis Blair, the distance between the drone operator and the target should not by itself be controversial. Drones, he told the same CFR teleconference, should be thought of as “long-range snipers, in the military sense”.

Depending on the specific circumstances, he also defended signature strikes. “If we are fighting in Afghanistan, for example, and we know that across the border in Pakistan there are Taliban groups who are gathering and training, …I think we could authorise either snipers – people with rifles – or drones to shoot at armed men who we see getting into pickup trucks and heading towards the Afghanistan border.”

At the same time, however, Blair expressed strong reservations about several aspects of current policy, notably the involvement of the CIA which, due to its covert nature, is precluded from speaking publicly about or defending its operations.

“I strongly believe that a great majority of the use of drones should be done under military command,” he said. “The reason that we have covert action is to be able to deny it.” But that pretence is not sustainable in long campaigns such as the one in Pakistan, he noted.

“The current open-secret, covert-action drone programme in Pakistan …does not nothing except to enable the Pakistanis to allow to do it (kill targets), unofficially, and then officially to attack us for it and thereby make us extremely unpopular in Pakistan and interferes with all sorts of other objectives (we have) with Pakistan.”

Zenko agreed, noting that drone policy is “poorly co-ordinated with other elements of national power in the countries where it’s being used,” he said.

“And you can talk to the U.S. ambassadors to Pakistan or Yemen (and) …to the USAID contractors who are trying to do sort of soft-power efforts there, and they will tell you that when you go to the tribal areas of Pakistan or …southern Yemen, drones are the face of U.S. foreign policy.

“Because we don’t articulate and describe our vision for how these are used very well, we essentially …allow the Taliban and …the Pakistani government to tell our story about drones, which is a tremendous strategic communications lapse.”

Both men called for the playbook to be made public when it is completed. “A classified playbook does not reassure the American people who I think are the primary ones that need to be convinced that their government is doing the right thing,” said Blair.

While Zenko said the playbook itself could be “useful”, other critics have described it worrisome.”

Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst for the Middle East and South Asia, also questioned its value on his blog.

“Having a playbook on assassinations sounds like it is apt to be a useful guide for making the quick decision whether to pull the trigger on a Hellfire missile when a suspected terrorist is in the sights of a drone. But it probably will not, as far as we know, be of any help in weighing larger important issues such as whether such a killing is likely to generate more future anti-U.S. terrorism because of the anger over collateral casualties than it will prevent taking a bad guy out of commission.”

“By routinizing and institutionalizing a case-by-case set of criteria, there is even the hazard that officials will devote less deliberation than they otherwise would have to such larger considerations because they have the comfort and reassurance of following a manual,” he wrote.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

MQ-9 Reaper drone. Rights groups fear such weapons are precursors to greater autonomy for machines on the battlefield. Credit: U.S. Air Force

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 19 2012 (IPS)

The predator drone – an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) – is one of the relatively new lethal weapons used by the United States for targeted killings of suspected terrorists, particularly in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.

And since it is unmanned and remotely controlled, the drone does not risk the lives of U.S. soldiers.

But the weapon has increasingly come under fire because of the collateral damage in the spillover killings of innocent civilians, including women and children.

On Monday, a report jointly published by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) has warned of an even more deadly weapon: killer robots.

Described as fully autonomous, these weapons will have the capability to select and fire on targets without human intervention in future wars.

The primary concern of HRW and IHRC is the impact fully autonomous weapons would have on the protection of civilians during times of war.

In the report released Monday, they called on governments to pre-emptively ban these yet-to-be deployed weapons because of the danger they pose to civilians in armed conflict.

Asked how feasible it was to garner support at the United Nations for an international convention to ban such killer robots, Steve Goose, arms division director at Human Rights Watch, told IPS that many governments are not yet aware of the status of development of, and plans to produce fully autonomous weapons systems.

So, a good deal of education needs to be done, he said.

“But we are convinced that the obvious and undeniable inconsistency of these future weapons with existing international humanitarian law, and the degree to which they will be repugnant to the public conscience, will make an international prohibition on killer robots achievable in the near term,” said Goose.

Asked how drones differ from fully autonomous weapons, Goose said drones have a “man in the loop” – a human has remote control, a human selects the target and decides when to fire the weapon.

The 50-page report titled “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots” expresses concern over these fully autonomous weapons, which would inherently lack human qualities that provide legal and non-legal cheques on the killing of civilians.

In addition, the obstacles to holding anyone accountable for harm caused by the weapons would weaken the law’s power to deter future violations.

“Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield would take technology too far,” said Goose, pointing out that human control of robotic warfare is essential to minimising civilian deaths and injuries.

Fully autonomous weapons do not yet exist, and major powers, including the United States, have not made a decision to deploy them, according to the report. However, the most high-tech militaries are developing or have already deployed precursors that illustrate the push toward greater autonomy for machines on the battlefield, it said.

The United States is a leader in the technological development of killer robots, while several other countries, including China, Germany, Israel, South Korea, Russia, and the United Kingdom have also been involved.

“Many experts predict that full autonomy for weapons could be achieved in 20 to 30 years, and some think even sooner,” HRW said.

Both HRW and IHRC Monday called for an international treaty that would absolutely prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons.

They also called on individual nations to pass laws and adopt policies as important measures to prevent development, production, and use of such weapons at the domestic level.

Asked what weapons are currently banned under international conventions, Goose told IPS that banned weapons include poison gas, chemical and biological weapons, blinding lasers, antipersonnel mines, and cluster munitions.

The 1995 ban on blinding lasers (spearheaded by the International Committee of the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch) is a key example of banning a weapon before it was widely produced or fielded by armed forces – a preemptive ban such as HRW and others are aiming for with fully autonomous weapons, Goose said.

The report analyses whether the technology would comply with international humanitarian law and preserve other cheques on the killing of civilians.

But it finds that fully autonomous weapons would not only be unable to meet legal standards but would also undermine essential non-legal safeguards for civilians.

“Our research and analysis strongly conclude that fully autonomous weapons should be banned and that governments should urgently pursue that end,” the report says.

U.S. counterterrorism measures are under intense scrutiny from United Nations (U.N.) experts and civil rights groups declaring drone strikes illegal under current frameworks.

During the 20th Session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva from Jun. 18 to Jul. 6, these experts declared such measures in urgent need of greater accountability and transparency.

Targeted-killing programs, including drone strikes, are “a strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability”, wrote former special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Philip Alston in his 2010 report to the council.

A drone launches from the deck of the USS Lassen. The legality of U.S. drone strikes is coming under increasing scrutiny and questioning. Credit: Official U.S. Navy Imagery/ CC by 2.0

Two years later, strategies that the United States justifies as a necessary response to terrorism remain questionable both in legality and according to humanitarian principles.

Collateral Damage

Used by the United States in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, drones have quickly become the counterterrorist weapon of choice. Accompanying drone strikes is collateral damage – military terminology for civilian casualties – which has subsequently become a central issue.

Drone technology itself is not inaccurate. But targets are often imprecise, as they are based on intelligence pinpointing suspected terrorists or areas of suspicious activity. Ensuring that innocent bystanders are absent from populated areas where terrorist activity has been identified is a challenge that all airborne military operations face.

In Pakistan, many civil rights activists vehemently oppose U.S. drone attacks. Among them is former cricketer Imran Kahn, leader of the Tehreek-e-Insaf party, who believes drone attacks are illegal on the grounds that they kill innocent civilians.

At the Human Rights Council Tuesday, Christof Heyns, current special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, called for more transparency and accountability from the United States. He urged that a framework be developed and adhered to, and pressed for accurate records of civilian deaths.

According to a recent report in the New York Times, the U.S. government’s current method for counting civilian deaths takes an exceptionally broad view of legitimate targets, deeming all males of military age to be terrorist combatants.

This methodology goes some way towards explaining the gulf between the calculations of independent media reports and official figures, which claim that civilian casualties are minimal.

An Associated Press investigation found that “the drone strikes were killing far fewer civilians than many Pakistanis are led to believe and that a significant majority of the dead were combatants”. Other reports, however, estimate hundreds of civilian casualties in the Pakistani region.

Dangerous global rules

“The United States has cobbled together its own legal framework for targeted killing, with standards that are far less stringent than the law allows,” Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told the council Wednesday.

Shamsi also took issue with the lack of transparency of military programs based on “a secret legal criteria, entirely secret evidence, and a secret process”, she said.

In defence of its policy of secrecy, the U.S. government filed a 50-page brief just before a midnight deadline, Wednesday, which stated that “whether or not the CIA has the authority to be, or is in fact, directly involved in targeted lethal operations remains classified”.

The report came in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU last year, which requested transparency on the killing of three American citizens in Yemen last year.

“The international community’s concern about the U.S. targeted killing program is continuing to grow because of the unlawfully broad authority our government asserts to kill ‘suspected terrorists’ far from any battlefield, without meaningful transparency or accountability,” Shamsi told IPS.

The lack of a legal framework allows for drone strikes to be implemented at will, in non-conflict zones and on the basis of loosely defined terrorist threats, without permission from the host nation.

“I think we’re in for very dangerous precedents that can be used by countries on all sides,” Heynes, the special rapporteur, said, voicing his concern regarding legal loopholes.

“In essence, drones cancel out national sovereignty,” Tom Engelhardt, co-author of Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050, told IPS. “The rules of the game are one country’s sovereignty trumps that of another.”

It is estimated that more than 50 nations have drones, are developing them, or are planning to buy them.

Citing a recent contributor to his blog, TomDispatch, Engelhardt described the unmanned aircraft as  “a technology that has morphed into a policy”.

Fuelling terror

In a written speech submitted to the council, John Brennan, U.S. counterterrorism chief, deemed the use of drones a legal, ethical and wise way of conducting sensitive counterterror operations.

According to Dyke Weatherington, deputy director responsible for acquisition oversight for the Department of Defence’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), “combatant commanders and warfighters place value in the inherent features of unmanned systems – especially their persistence, versatility, and reduced risk to human life.”

But disregarding national boundaries and the inability to distinguish innocent civilians from terrorists in targeted vicinities render drones a questionable means of countering terrorism.

In a report to the council Wednesday, Ben Emmerson, special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, underscored the U.N. General Assembly’s consensus that counterterrorism measures that abuse human rights actually help spread terrorism.

The deaths of innocent civilians alienate communities and hand terrorists a propaganda tool that can bolster recruitment.

“Human rights abuses have all too often contributed to the grievances which cause people to make the wrong choices and to resort to terrorism,” according to the unedited document.

“The Special Rapporteur strongly believes that human rights compliant counter-terrorism measures help to prevent the recruitment of individuals to acts of terrorism.”

Heyns urged compliance with humanitarian law through “strategies applied to prevent casualties, as well as measures in place to provide prompt, thorough, effective and independent public investigation of alleged violations”.

Nevertheless, he told reporters at the council’s meeting, “I don’t think we have the full answer to the legal framework; we certainly don’t have the answer to the accountability issues.”