Since 2008, militants in Pakistan have torched over 5,000 vehicles carrying NATO supplies to Afghanistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

The United States is laying meticulous plans ahead of its 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, but it has clearly overlooked how its continued drones strikes on the tribal areas of neighbouring Pakistan will affect the much-anticipated pullout.

Last week, a group of militants belonging to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) torched three containers stuffed with supplies for NATO troops in Afghanistan, as they trundled along the stony mountain pass known as Torkham Road in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

The militants claimed the attack on the convoy of 12 containers was payback for the drone strike on May 29 that killed TTP Deputy Leader Waliur Rehman in North Waziristan province, one of seven zones comprising the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

The incident last month brought the total number of drone strikes on the region to over 355 since 2005. But while the U.S. government has hitherto been happy to turn a blind eye to various forms of protest against its campaign of remote warfare – from civilian marches, to government statements – the burning of NATO-bound vehicles might signal a turning point in its controversial foreign policy.

Muhammad Mushtaq, an office-bearer of the NATO Suppliers Association – a local collective of drivers, cleaners and vehicle owners involved in the transport of supplies across the border – told IPS, “Since 2008, more than 5,000 NATO vehicles have been burnt down in Peshawar and the Khyber Agency, all of them en route to Afghanistan to replenish the forces engaged in a war against terrorism since 2002.”

In the process, he said, not only have roughly 10 million dollars worth of equipment and supplies been reduced to ashes, but more than 500 people, including drivers and cleaners, have lost their lives.

In December 2008, 160 NATO vehicles carrying Humvees destined for Afghanistan were burnt in a single attack near Peshawar, capital of the KP, Mushtaq said. The militants later paraded triumphantly amid billowing flames that blackened the sky.

Most of the vehicles heading to Afghanistan carry military equipment, food, and other logistical supplies for the roughly 100,000 foreign troops stationed there, Retired Major Anwar Khan, a security analyst, told IPS.

“This same route will also likely be used for the withdrawal of heavy military hardware as well as soldiers,” he said. Thus, if drone strikes continue, the U.S. risks leaving its main access and exit route vulnerable to attacks.

Khan says that the U.S. and its coalition partners in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ must revisit their military strategy if they are determined to stick to the 2014 date. “Otherwise, the chances of their withdrawal and peace in Pakistan and Afghanistan will remain a dream.”

An eye for an eye 

When U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government in Kabul in 2001, it signaled the beginning of a war that would drag on for over a decade.

Members of the deposed regime, along with their supporters, fled en masse into the mountains that form the rugged 1,200-kilometre-long border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, prompting the latter to throw in its lot with the U.S. in the hopes of preventing the militants from taking root in its own, volatile tribal zones.

But promises to destroy the Al Qaeda network charged with carrying out the bombing of the U.S.’s twin towers on Sep. 11, 2001, have failed to bear fruit, with many commentators observing that the militants are stronger than ever.

Last May, against the backdrop of rising costs, a mounting death toll and loud public opposition to the war, U.S. President Barack Obama signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, agreeing to withdraw forces by 2014 and hand over power to the locally elected government.

But experts like Pervez Jamal, professor of political science at the University of Peshawar, believe this plan will fall flat unless immediate measures are taken to appease the TTP.

As Khan pointed out, “The burning of vehicles has already made the war against terrorism more expensive for the U.S. and its allies.”

Currently, 70 percent of supplies for Western forces in landlocked Afghanistan come through Pakistan, where they arrive by ship at the Arabian Sea port of Karachi before travelling 3,000 kilometres to the Bagram Airfield in Kabul.

In November 2011, the Pakistan government ordered the closure of this supply route when U.S. forces attacked a Pakistani security post in FATA’s Mohmand Agency, killing 24 soldiers.

Deprived of a land route, the U.S. was forced to explore alternative, aerial routes through Russia and the former Soviet republics that border Afghanistan. During this time, the cost of transporting supplies went from 17 million dollars to 104 million dollars.

Unable to sustain these costs, the U.S. government issued an apology for the attack, and the supply route was re-opened in 2012, with the understanding that it would remain functional until 2015, to facilitate a smooth withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But this agreement is now in jeopardy.

The burning of supplies also spells danger for the 10,000 troops tasked with remaining on the ground to assist the 350,000 Afghan National Security Forces with the political transition.

The local security force currently lacks training and military equipment; without the promise of reinforcements, some experts say they will be no match for an attempted power grab by the militants.

Javed Hasham, an Afghan war analyst based in Peshawar, told IPS that the Taliban are capable of destroying convoys very easily. Torkham Road is an exposed mountain pass, with no security outposts along the way. The Taliban, familiar with the terrain, have hideouts in hills and houses that overlook the winding road.

Attacks on supply convoys had recorded a massive decrease over the past four months but have recently picked up again, keeping pace with increased drone strikes.

Hasham believes it unlikely that even the Pakistan government, which is loathe to support the Taliban, will not chastise the militants for these attacks, as it, too, sees the drone strikes as a severe encroachment on national sovereignty.

“The only way forward is for the U.S. to put its drone strikes on hold,” Hasham said.

Members of the PTI party protest the U.S. operation in Abbottabad that killed Osama Bin Laden. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Jun 13 2013 (IPS)

Though the constant hum of unmanned aerial vehicles flying overhead makes a strong case for staying indoors, residents of Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency are emerging in droves from their humble homes, some no bigger than huts constructed from mud and stones.

They have come out to protest the drone strikes on this devastated region, a hotbed of militant activity located on Pakistan’s northern border with Afghanistan, which is quickly becoming ground zero in the United States’ ‘War on Terror’.

"We watch the drones all day long in fear, even though we know that most attacks happen after sunset.” -- Rasool Bacha
Since 2004, 355 drone strikes have killed 3,336 people and injured scores more, according to a conservative estimate by the U.S.–based New America Foundation.

But while the U.S. government claims to be singling out militants and “Al Qaeda affiliates” for attack by remote-controlled aircraft capable of raining missiles down from a height of 10,000 feet, residents of this mountainous province say that civilians are taking a bigger hit.

Imad Ali, who has lived in North Waziristan his whole life, lost two sons in a drone attack. He told IPS that the pilotless planes appear unable to distinguish between civil and military targets, and called the strikes “indiscriminate and unacceptable.”

Now Ali, like many others in this Agency of 30,000, is joining mass rallies spearheaded by the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI), a major opposition party under the leadership of former cricket legend Imran Khan, to call for an end to strikes on unsuspecting non-combatants.

“I lost my wife and elder daughter to drone attacks in February,” Muhammad Rafiq, a schoolteacher in South Waziristan, told IPS, adding that civilian opposition to the attacks will keep growing as long as innocent people are losing their lives.

Victim of a drone strike lies in a hospital bed in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

“We pass sleepless nights due to the looming threat of drone strikes. The situation is especially difficult for children who fear they could be killed at any minute,” he added.

With so many people busy counting the dead, the injured often get relegated to the footnotes of this story; like Rasool Bacha, who was fast asleep in his home in Dattakhlel, a small village close to the Afghan border, when he was struck by shrapnel from a drone attack this past January.

“Later in the morning I discovered that the strike had also killed four of my neighbours,” Bacha told IPS in the hospital where he is currently undergoing physiotherapy after surgery.

“All the victims were poor farmers,” he added, “and had no relation to the militants. It is simply not true that the drones kill only militants – when they rain down they destroy everything that comes in their way.”

Every day, eight to 12 unmanned aircrafts hover in the sky, he said. “We watch them all day long in fear, even though we know that most attacks happen after sunset.”

Enter the politicians

While residents are mainly concerned with the immediate threat to their daily lives, political parties have seized on widespread discontent to advance their position that the attacks constitute an assault on national sovereignty.

Following the latest series of strikes – that killed the deputy chief of the outlawed Tehreek Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Waliur Rehman, on May 29 in North Waziristan – Pakistan’s newly elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif labeled the attack “a violation of international law” and urged the United States to “respect the sovereignty of other countries.”

On Jun. 4, the PTI – which formed a coalition in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province after winning a landslide victory in the May 11 general elections here – submitted a resolution to the KP assembly condemning, and calling for an immediate cessation of, the attacks.

Echoing Sharif’s words on sovereignty, PTI Spokesperson Shaukat Ali Yousafzai was quick to point out that his party was the first to take up the issue as far back as May 21, 2011 following a strike that halted a NATO convoy heading for Afghanistan through the KP.

He told IPS his party also held a rally in Waziristan, whose population has borne the lion’s share of the attacks.

As elections draw nearer, other parties keen to “exploit anti-American sentiments and muster electoral support” are also stepping up opposition to the U.S. strikes and a planned operation to cleanse border areas of militants, according to Muhammad Azeem, former mayor of Mardan, one of 25 districts that comprise the troubled KP province.

He told IPS that the political grouping Muttahida Majlis e-Amal (MMA), which gathered various religious parties under one banner to win a sweeping victory in the 2003 elections, governed the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the southeastern Balochistan province until it fell out of favour with the Taliban in 2008.

Now, parties like the Jamaat Islam (JI) and Jamiat Ulemai Islam (JUI) have taken up the cudgels on behalf of civilians living in terror of drone strikes, and have promised to guard tribal populations from a military offensive by the government.

But as political analyst Javid Hussain pointed out, this military operation against which parties are now crying foul has been ongoing in all seven agencies of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) since 2005, leaving 300,000 of the region’s 5.8 million people homeless.

“None of the political leaders bothered about it until now,” he told IPS, adding that politicians are only interested in the issue of drones insofar as they pay dividends in the election.

Earlier this month, the Peshawar High Court declared drone strikes illegal and asked the government to move a resolution against the use of drones in the United Nations, Muhammad Arif, political science lecturer at the Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, told IPS.

The court made its announcement in response to a legal petition filed last year by the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, an Islamabad-based legal charity, on behalf of the families of up to 50 people killed when missiles stuck a tribal gathering, or jirga, in March 2011.

“The National Assembly has passed several resolutions terming these aerial attacks unlawful, and demanding that they be stopped, but they continue unabated,” Wali Khan said.

On May 23, the tribal population was further disappointed when U.S. President Barack Obama made it categorically clear that drones will continue to target “Al Qaeda and its affiliates” because they killed U.S. citizens.

Victims of drone attacks readied for burial in Miranshah, North Waziristan. Credit: Haji Mohammad Mujtaba/IPS

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, May 11 2013 (IPS)

Adding fuel to a long-simmering dispute between the U.S. and Pakistan, a Peshawar High Court declared CIA drone strikes illegal on Thursday, referring to such attacks in Pakistan’s tribal belt as “war crime(s)”.

The court called for its nation’s “use of force, if need be” to prevent further civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes. It also ordered Pakistani delegates at the U.N. to bring forth the issue with the Security Council, where Pakistan is currently a non-permanent member.“Because the administration has been so opaque, a left-right coalition running from Code Pink to Rand Paul has now spoken out against the drone programme.” -- Harold Hongju Koh

Chief Justice Dost Muhammad Khan, who presided over the case, cited a litany of broken international laws and agreements, ranging from the U.N. Charter to the U.N. Millennium Declaration and the Geneva Conventions. He also called for the U.S. government to redress Pakistani civilian victims of U.S. drone strikes, and for U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to establish a war crimes tribunal to investigate further injustices.

However, Masood Khan, the permanent representative of Pakistan to the U.N., did not address the topic of U.S. drone strikes in his statement on counterterrorism to the Security Council today, despite the Peshawar ruling.

Philip G. Alston, a former U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, told IPS, “There is an important symbolism in the findings of the Peshawar Court.”

Alston applauded the court’s determination to highlight the fact that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) drone strikes are inconsistent with international law. However, he noted, the legal reasoning behind the ruling was not “impeccable”.

“I doubt that either the (U.S.) or Pakistani governments will be moved by the far-reaching orders issued by the court,” he said, “but the message being sent is nonetheless an important one.”

Muhammad Khan’s sweeping judgments on May 9 came two days before his country’s presidential elections. Mirza Shahzad Akbar – a legal fellow at Reprieve and a Pakistani lawyer who defended victims in the Peshawar case – referred to the High Court’s decision as a “landmark judgment”.

He stated in a press release, “This judgment will also prove to be a test for the new government: if drone strikes continue and the government fails to act, it will run the risk of contempt of court.”

In 2010, Akbar assisted the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in a terrorism case involving a Pakistani diplomat. But their relationship turned sour when Akbar and his legal charity, the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, decided to sue the CIA for launching a drone strike on Mar. 17, 2011 that killed a group of Pakistani civilians.

When Akbar planned a trip form Pakistan to New York in June 2011 to speak at Columbia Law School, the U.S. State Department initially refused to grant him a visa.

In February 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama pledged in his State of the Union address to make his counter-terrorism strategy – including the “targeting, detention, and prosecution of terrorists” – more legally accountable and transparent.

Asked if Obama had held true to his words, Brett Kaufman, the National Security Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project, told IPS, “No. Despite repeated promises from President Obama and the new CIA director John Brennan and the Attorney General Eric Holder during a hearing before the Senate, the (Obama) administration has not taken any efforts to increase transparency.”

Asked if there was any pressure from the legislative or judicial branches to curb executive powers over U.S. targeted drone strikes, Kaufman said, “I think the best example of legislative pressure came before and during the confirmation hearing for John Brennan, the CIA director.”

He explained, “At the same time, there was the leak of the white paper to NBC News. In the wake of all of that, the government released an official version of the white paper and granted access to two committees in the Senate to view the actual underlying Office of Legal Counsel memoranda that authorised the killings of U.S. citizens by the executive branch.

“After the confirmation of Mr. Brennan… there hasn’t been nearly as much legislative pressure,” he said.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates 368 total CIA drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004-13, of which 312 occurred under Obama’s direction. It also estimates that between 2,541 and 3,533 people were killed, 411-844 of which are civilians, and 168-197 of which are children.

Last month, U.S. protestors launched “April Days of Action” to protest military bases, universities and companies where drones are used, supported and built. The protests – which sought to raise awareness about U.S. drone strikes – were partly inspired by Republican Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster of John Brennan’s nomination as CIA director. Paul’s filibuster highlighted Brennan’s opaque drone policies.

Obama’s former legal aids – Jeh Charles Johnson and Harold Hongju Koh – also cautioned against continued government secrecy over drone programmes.

Johnson, the former general counsel for the Department of Defence, entertained the idea of establishing a “national security court” or a “drone court” during his Mar. 18 keynote address at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School.

“The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy,” he said. Johnson noted, however, the many complications of creating of such a court to oversee executive power in counterterrorism operations.

Koh, a former legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State who defended Obama’s drone policy in 2010, addressed CIA drone strikes at the Oxford Union in the U.K. on May 7. He admitted that the Obama administration “has not done enough to be transparent about legal standards and the decision-making process that it has been applying.”

Koh added, “Because the administration has been so opaque, a left-right coalition running from Code Pink to Rand Paul has now spoken out against the drone programme.” Koh noted that the lack of transparency is the core issue, rather than the drone strikes per se.

Asked if the CIA has improved its transparency measures for drone strikes, Alston, the John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, said, “Unfortunately, the terms CIA and transparency cannot realistically be used in the same sentence.  Like other intelligence agencies, it is dedicated to the highest possible level of opacity, not transparency.  That is the very reason why it should not be carrying out lethal operations.”

Women's rights and reproductive health are critical factors in sustainable development. Credit:Ignatius Banda/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 22 2012 (IPS)

What does birth control have to do with reducing global emissions?

Everything, women around the world would say,  because they know how closely linked reproductive health is to issues ranging from poverty and food security to climate change and beyond. This message was precisely what female leaders brought to the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, but not many were listening, least of all the Vatican.

“The only way to respond to increasing human numbers and dwindling resources is through the empowerment of women,” said Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway and former director-general of the World Health Organisation.

“It is through giving women access to education, knowledge, to paid income, independence and of course access to reproductive health services, reproductive rights, access to family planning,” she elaborated, adding that no other way existed to change the current “pattern of human consumption”.

Female leaders have long been trying to tell the world that sustainable development is not just about deforestation, climate change and carbon emissions. Equally as important to sustainable development are gender equality and human rights, which include sexual and reproductive rights.

But the reality is that globally, 215 million women who want to avoid pregnancy are not using effective methods of contraception. More than two and five pregnancies are unplanned, and approximately 287,000 girls and women die each year from pregnancy-related causes. The world has a ways to go to ensure that women have access to full reproductive rights and health.

Yet twenty years ago, the Rio earth summit saw unanimous agreement that sustainable development cannot be realised without gender equality.

So the current state of negotiations – to be fighting over something that was recognised 20 years ago – are frustrating for people like Rebecca Lefton, a policy analyst focusing on international climate change and women at the Washington, DC-based think tank Centre for American Progress, who has been following the negotiations for several months.

To the dismay of many development NGOs, the Rio+20 outcome document has no reference to women’s reproductive rights. Credit: Sujoy Dhar.

She watched the draft of the summit’s outcome text start off at 19 pages, balloon to hundreds, and then be cropped down to 49 pages. To her dismay, she found that references to women’s reproductive rights and gender equality were being scrapped.

“Women’s rights and gender equality were affirmed but not as strongly as they could be,” Lefton told TerraViva. “To some extent (they) saw a reasonable backsliding; I don’t think the text would be reopened to be revised or tweaked.”

Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), tried to sound optimistic, telling journalists, “In the first draft there was no mention to health at all, and now the entire Cairo agenda is there, which implicitly addresses reproductive rights. There are many elements we can work with.”

Even Brundtland said, “It looked quite bad some weeks ago, in the preparing process for this meeting. Not only reproductive rights, but in most paragraphs it was hard to get in women’s rights and their place in the economy to stimulate economies, and to protect (the) environment.”

“In the last week or two, this has improved,” she said. “The declaration has many weaknesses, but there are key passages on women as central partners in decision-making….All of that is better than what we had in Rio twenty years ago.”

The United States, Norway and several women’s rights organisations have fought to keep the text’s language strong, but the Holy See (the Vatican) led the opposition to remove references that ensured women’s reproductive rights.

“The result is that the final text has no reference to reproductive rights and commits to promotion rather than ensuring equal access of women to health care, education, basic services and economic opportunities,” said Lefton, adding that the Vatican equates reproductive rights and health with abortion – an inaccurate comparison, at best.

Yet female heads of state and government gathered at the Rio+20 women leader’s summit remained undaunted and pledged that the document they signed would not be lost in the “forest of declarations on gender issues”. They urged governments, civil society and the private sector to prioritise gender equality and women’s empowerment in their sustainable development efforts.

“We know from research that advancing gender equality is not just good for women, it is good for all of us. When women enjoy equal rights and opportunities, poverty, hunger and poor health decline and economic growth rises,” said Michelle Bachelet, executive director of U.N. Women.

Cate Owren, executive director of Women’s Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO), criticised the removal of references to reproductive rights from the Rio outcome document. “Political compromises for the sake of an agreement should not have cost us our rights – nor our planet,” she said.