Tanzanian ICT entrepreneur, Rose Funja, shows off one of the drones she uses as a key tool in her data mapping business. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Feb 11 2019 (IPS)

Six years ago while wondering how best to use her engineering skills, Tanzanian ICT entrepreneur Rose Funja decided to enter an innovation competition. Years later she has turned a digital idea into a viable business that helps smallholder farmers across the East African nation access credit.   

In Tanzania farmers struggle to obtain credit because many do not have bankable assets or a record of performance to offer as collateral. But Funja had an idea to help farmers, particularly women, obtain proof of land ownership that they could use as collateral to access credit.

It was a smart solution: using geographical information system (GIS) technology to generate useful information for farmers.

“A farmer might have a big piece of land, but if they do not have legal claim to it they cannot use it productively,” Funja tells IPS.

In 2013, she entered the AgriHack Talent Programme for East Africa, a competition organised by the Netherlands-based Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA).

Fungi’s idea was named second runner-up in the competition and she received a cash prize and mentorship from Buni Innovation Hub in Tanzania. In 2015, with a partner and students from the Bagamoyo University in Tanzania, Funja developed AgrInfo. She began working full-time in the business just a year later.

Now AgrInfo profiles farmers, the size and location of their farms, and the crops they grow on them. This data is then posted onto an online platform that financial institutions can access and use to assess the creditworthiness of farmers and their eligibility to qualify for loans.

“Actionable, real-time information is key in making decisions, especially in farming,” says Funja, who has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and a Master’s in Communication and Information Systems Engineering.

The African Development Bank notes that up to 12 million youth enter the job market across the continent each year while only three million jobs are created, leaving many unemployed. However, agribusiness offers innovative approaches for the youth to develop and roll out smart ICT solutions for smallholder farmers.

“ICTs are a game changer for agriculture development. Technology is offering young people economic benefits from selling goods and services using online platforms,” Funja tells IPS.

AgrInfo has been able to help, for a small fee, over 300 smallholder farmers in Tanzania’s capital city of Dodoma obtain access to financial institutions after mapping their farms.

“We have helped farmers know what they have and [they have been able to] use their land to access credit and buy inputs,” Funja says. Success has come about through trial and error, passion, and through creating value, explains Funja.

Plans are in the pipeline to grow the number of subscribers to the service to one million, and to extend the service to other actors in the agriculture value chain, such as government extension services.

A flying start

When she first started the business Funja used GIS and hand-held GPS gadgets to gather data.

Then in 2017 she was exposed, through CTA, to the applied use of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and was trained in the business aspect of operating drones. UAS is based on drone technology and provides information faster and more accurately. Funja went on to become one of the pioneer multi-copter drone pilots in Tanzania.

CTA has collaborated with Parrot, a French drone manufacturer, to support technology start-ups develop precision agriculture in Africa. Running for two years from 2017 till this year, the CTA project aims to help establish approximately 30 enterprises that are run mainly by young entrepreneurs in African countries where there is enabling legislation.

Drones, though a relatively new technology in Africa, offer new opportunities to young ICT entrepreneurs to help farmers increase productivity, sustainability and profitability. Digital tools help in improving land tenure, assessing crops, pests and diseases, according to research by the CTA.

“Considering the fact that in 2017 drones were a new tech for Africa, our project played an important role in establishing an enabling environment,” Giacomo Rambaldi, Senior Programme Coordinator at CTA, tells IPS. “It supported the African Union’s (AU) appointed High Level African Panel on Emerging Techs in selecting ‘drones for precision agriculture’ as one of the most promising technologies which would foster Africa’s development.”

In January 2018, the AU Executive Council recommended that all Member States harness the opportunities offered by drones for agriculture.

Africa should prioritise the adoption, deployment and up scaling of drones for precision agriculture through capacity-building, supporting infrastructure, regulatory strengthening, research and development and stakeholder engagement, says a 2018 report titled Drones on the horizon: Transforming Africa’s Agriculture.

The report notes that optimising agricultural profit through increasing productivity and improved yield has been the result of the application of several innovative developments over the years, one of them being the use of drone technology.

“Whilst such interventions and the green revolution in particular, have benefited many developing countries, this has not been the case in Africa. This situation calls for a review of agricultural policies and practices, and an explicit understanding that enabling policies for the promotion of such drone technologies must be formulated,” the report recommends.

Drones for agriculture development

Funja tells IPS that while digital enterprises are attractive they need smart management, finances and full-time commitment.

“A digital application is just a tool, but value sells. If there is no value, there is no business,” says Funja.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations says drone technology has great potential to support and address some of the most pressing problems faced by agriculture in accessing actionable real-time quality data. The agriculture sector will be the second-largest user of drones in the world in the next five years, according to research by Goldman Sachs.

Investment in ICTs could play a pivotal role in accelerating Africa’s agricultural transformation and can increase both the productivity and income of smallholder farmers, says development consultancy firm Dalberg Global Development Advisors.

“Africa sits on the majority of the world’s uncultivated arable land, but unlocking that large agricultural potential will require strategic deployment of ICT capabilities,” Andres Johannes Enghild, a consultant at Dalberg’s New York office tells IPS. “If new ICT solutions are harnessed well, they could, for example, improve market linkages for farmers and attract international investors.”

Despite Africa’s agricultural potential, it remains the region with the highest food and malnutrition rates in the world.

Today, farmers have limited access to better agronomic farming practices, an area where ICT can make a major difference. And Funja is of the entrepreneurs making this possible.

On the question of privacy rights, supporters of drone journalism wonder: Is this a new ethical problem, or an old ethical problem with new technology? Credit: Richard Unten/cc by 2.0

By Kitty Stapp
NEW YORK, Jun 5 2015 (IPS)

For some, the word “drone” immediately conjures up ominous phrases like “targeted assassination” and “precision strike.”

Others, like the online retail behemoth Amazon, see the technology as way to rapidly deliver the goods to millions of customers."Blanket bans or restrictions are not a substitute for actual published rules that respect press freedoms and balance them with safety and privacy issues." -- Professor Matt Waite

In truth, the potential applications are almost limitless. Drones are commonly used in law enforcement, scientific research, search and rescue, crop spraying and a host of other fields.

A province in China is now deploying drone “quadcopters” to bust students who try to cheat on the country’s notoriously gruelling college entrance exam.

But drone technology also has the capacity to revolutionise the way journalists do their work – if civilian authorities give the green light, which is far from certain.

“Journalists around the world, from South America to the Middle East and beyond, all see the advantages of this technology and want to use it immediately,” says Professor Matt Waite of the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications.

“But it’s a very vulnerable time for the use of drones in journalism and this idea goes to the heart of a handful of problems around the world, namely press freedoms and aviation regulations,” he tells IPS. “Many countries are struggling to figure out how to regulate these devices, and many see journalists launching a flying camera as a threat to the government.”

Waite noted that countries with a less than free press have quickly banned the devices shortly after someone uses them, particularly if they show something the government doesn’t want the public to see. Or, instead of coming up with rules to govern conduct or application, the government simply bans the devices.

“Nepal is a perfect example,” he says. “The terrible earthquakes happened there, did massive damage and the world’s attention turned to Nepal. With it came hordes of international journalists, many of whom brought small drone platforms with them. Within a week, the government of Nepal banned drones.

“More specifically, it required government permission to fly them, and I’ve tried several times to get the requirements from the Nepalese civil aviation authority and have been ignored. Were there people flying drones in Nepal? Absolutely, from journalists to NGOs to private citizens. Were some people behaving badly and flying in places and in ways they shouldn’t have? Yes.

“But blanket bans or restrictions are not a substitute for actual published rules that respect press freedoms and balance them with safety and privacy issues.”

A drone, also known as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), is simply an aircraft without a human pilot aboard, operated either by an onboard computer or remotely by a person. They can carry cameras and other data-gathering devices, and have already been used to report news stories ranging from fires to London’s Crossrail project.

In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which regulates the country’s airspace, has yet to establish rules for integrating drones into the National Airspace System (NAS), though Congress has called for the FAA to establish such regulations by this year.

In May 2014, more than a dozen media organisations challenged the government’s ban on the use of drones by journalists, saying the FAA’s position violates First Amendment protections for news gathering. However, legislation on commercial unmanned aviation, including for use by journalists, remains at a standstill.

“Unfortunately, I think this is going to be emblematic of the next five years — governments are going to struggle to regulate the devices and their use is going to swing on a pendulum between use and restrictions,” Waite says.

“And, for the next five years, the world is going to be a giant patchwork of rules, where what’s allowed in one country is not going to be just across the border. And the differences between countries are going to be vast.”

Waite does predict progress on the issue over the longer term, noting that in a decade or so, the technology will be so prevalent that all countries will be forced to have rules.

“Journalists around the world will find the rules will allow them to fly their cameras into the sky and we’ll see this tool come into its full potential,” he says.

Matthew Schroyer of the Professional Society of Drone Journalists, which advocates for the ethical and responsible use of drone technology, says he sees two similar trends playing out in the next five to 10 years.

“One is that the barrier for entry is continuing to fall, not just thanks to the decreasing cost of the technology, but also because manufacturers are realising that drones can be more successful when they are easier to operate,” he tells IPS.

“So in that sense, drone journalism may not be such as specialised or technical field in the future, but something that becomes part of the standard journalism toolkit, just like the camera and the cell phone. That also means that drone journalism will begin to be seen less as special production, but as something that is ordinary, expected, and even mundane. That’s a helpful trend for citizens and journalists.”

He sees drone technology as having the potential to vastly enhance the investigative news-gathering process, particularly as the world grapples with a host of interlocking problems like climate change and sustainability.

“Another trend is seeing the drone not just as an eye in the sky for citizens and journalists, but as a means to collect all manner of geospatial data. Cameras are just one many types of sensors that drones can carry, and other types of sensors can detect things like plant photosynthesis, water quality, various chemicals, and other useful information that we can’t see with our own eyes,” Schroyer says.

“This means more data-driven stories that look at the real impact of natural and man-made disasters, resource extraction, land use, agriculture, and climate change. This sounds like science, but journalists need to be ready to seek information like a scientist and think like a scientist in order to carry journalism forward.”

But it all comes with a giant “if,” he cautions.

“We are seeing backlash from governments on drones, and it may not come as a surprise that these are the same places where the rights of journalists have not been protected. In order to see this future, journalists have to prove the value of the drones to the public, act safely and responsibly, and engage the public and the government about the technology in general.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Heightened tensions with longtime foe Armenia over breakaway Nagorno Karabakh and mediator Russia’s Ukrainian adventure appear to be pushing Caspian-Sea energy power Azerbaijan ever more strongly toward a military strategy of self-reliance.

The strategy comes via two approaches: first, a build-up in Azerbaijani-made military equipment, including drones co-produced with Israel; and, second, a new defense troika with longtime strategic partners Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and neighbouring Georgia, a NATO-member-hopeful.

Nor is this a strategy just left to paper. On Sep. 11, Azerbaijani Defense Minister Yaver Jamalov announced to reporters that Azerbaijan plans to export 100 drones, co-produced at a local Azerbaijani-Israeli plant, to “one of the NATO countries.” The remarks headlined the country’s first international defense-industry show, ADEX-2014, held on Sep. 11-13 in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku.

Jamalov did not specify the country or the terms of the sale, but the prospect of the deal reinforces the fact, long clear in foreign policy, that Baku sees itself as a regional military force that need no longer pay heed to the likes or dislikes of Russia.

While Azerbaijan has spent “several billion dollars” over the last decade importing a range of Russian-made military equipment, politics now have become an issue, commented military expert Azad Isazade, a former Azerbaijani defense-ministry official.

As it looks on the plans for a trade union with Azerbaijani enemy Armenia, Baku increasingly feels that Moscow’s interests in resolving the 26-year-long Karabakh conflict are more closely aligned with those of Armenia, where Russia already has troops stationed.

By focusing its attention on its own military-production capabilities or on military partnerships with other countries, “the Azerbaijani government wanted to balance the pro-Armenian position of Moscow,” Isazade said.

Elhan Shahinoglu, head of the non-profit Atlas Research Center in Baku, agreed. “I think that after the last meeting of the Azerbaijani, Armenian and Russian presidents in Sochi [in August], [Azerbaijani President] Ilham Aliyev has lost any hope that Moscow is going to play a positive role in the Karabakh conflict’s resolution,” he commented.

The Kremlin’s support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and intervention in the conflict there does little to reassure Baku on this point.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has not specifically addressed such misgivings, but, in his opening remarks at ADEX-2014, commented that “in the current world, countries have to keep facing new security challenges, which make cooperation and the exchange of modern military technologies more important.”

Azerbaijan is due to receive 100 Russian-made T-90C tanks in early 2015, but the shipment is based on a 2010 contract, Trend news agency reported, citing an adviser to Russia’s state-owned weapons-export company, Rosobornexport. Azerbaijan has not announced any more such contracts.

Defense Minister Jamalov claims that Azerbaijan expects by the end of 2015 to be able to meet almost all of its own needs for ammunition and tank and artillery shells, formerly mostly supplied by Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

Israel, which imports most of its natural gas from Azerbaijan, appears to play a leading role in Azerbaijan’s makeover into a materiel-manufacturer. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon visited Azerbaijan for the first time this month to meet President Aliyev and attend ADEX-2014.

At the exhibition, Azerbaijan presented models of two drones produced in conjunction with an unnamed Israeli company – one for reconnaissance ( “Aerostar”) and one for combat-missions ( “Orbiter 2M”).

Overall, 200 companies from 34 countries, including the United States and Russia, took part in the event, which featured products ranging from armored troop carriers to sniper guns.

Only one contract with an Azerbaijani company was signed during the show, however, an Azerbaijani defense-industry representative commented to EurasiaNet.org.

South Africa’s Paramount Group, a privately owned defense company which claims to be the largest in Africa, plans to create a joint venture with Azerbaijan’s private AirTechService to work on upgrades to military helicopters and some jets.

The defense industry representative, who asked not to be named, noted, however, that other countries expected to take an interest in Azerbaijani materiel include Arab Persian-Gulf states, and, in Central Asia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

NATO member states Estonia, Bulgaria, Lativa, Lithuania, Poland and Romania, all of which have indicated they will increase defense spending in response to the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, also feature among the sales-targets, the representative said.

But weapons manufacturing alone does not provide Azerbaijan with a sense of security.

Like other former Soviet republics, Azerbaijan, with one eye on the Karabakh flare-up and another on the Ukrainian civil war, is trying to find new ways to protect itself from Russian pressure, noted Shahinoglu.

On Aug. 19, Defense Minister Hasanov met with Georgian Defense Minister Irakli Alasania and Turkish Defense Minister Ismet Yilmaz in the exclave of Nakhchivan, President Aliyev’s ancestral home, to address the “military-political situation in the region,” as the government-friendly AzerNews put it.

After the meeting, Georgian Defense Minister Alasania, the most publicly talkative of the three, said the trio plans to defend collectively regional pipelines and railroads – strategic projects in which all three already cooperate – in case of military aggression in any of the three countries.

Joint military exercises also will be held, although the 30,000-troop exercises currently underway in Azerbaijan only include Azerbaijani forces.

While one Russian security analyst has questioned the pact’s significance since Turkey and Azerbaijan already are military allies, defense expert Isazade countered that Turkey’s presence will constrain Moscow in its treatment of Georgia and Azerbaijan, and reassure the international community that energy resources will be protected.

“If there would be just an alliance of Baku and Tbilisi, Moscow would not care,” he elaborated. “But Turkey, which is a NATO member and also has wide links and cooperation with Russia, is an important factor of stability for the region.”

So far, no official response has come from Moscow.

Originally published by EurasiaNet.org

Shahin Abbasov is a freelance correspondent based in Baku.    

By Hazel Henderson
ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida, Dec 17 2013 (Columnist Service)

The debate over structural unemployment, automation and jobless economic growth began in the 1960s as car factories replaced workers with robots.

Futurists like myself saw these technologies taking over sectors of industrial economies as opportunities for a transition to “post-industrial” information and services-based “leisure societies,” and to develop human potential, lifelong learning, research, preventive healthcare, the arts, entertainment, sports and tourism.

Some parts of our vision have materialised: tourism and entertainment are major global industries. Research has produced medical breakthroughs, new sectors based on IT, the internet, 3-D printing and drones as well as democratising education electronically in massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Alas, missing today are our futurist visions which included a key corollary to this IT takeover of work: unconditional guaranteed incomes to provide the needed purchasing power to keep up aggregate demand for this new cornucopia of goods and services. We also held that if workers were replaced by machines, they would need to own a piece of those machines.

Hazel Henderson

This debate is back, as inequality reaches crisis levels in Europe and the U.S. with the share of incomes from increased productivity falling for workers while capital owners’ and executives’ returns soar to new heights. This inequality now leads to further stagnation in many economies.

Guaranteed cash transfers directly to poorer citizens are raising living standards in Mexico’s “Oportunidades” and Brazil’s “Bolsa Familia” payments which have pulled millions up into the middle class.

These payments, called conditional cash transactions (CCTs), only require that children attend school and get medical check-ups. In Europe, the movement for unconditional basic incomes responding to widespread rising structural unemployment has led to widespread demonstrations and to a ballot initiative in Switzerland.

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley IT giants Amazon, Google and others in Japan are targeting more sectors for takeover, as they have disrupted retailing, entertainment, news media, finance and other industries.

Google’s driverless cars will threaten millions of entry-level jobs for people driving taxis and trucks. Computer scientist advisor to Microsoft Jaron Lanier paints the future digital takeover vividly in Who Owns the Future (2013). He calls for a new economy based on digital value-sharing where all personal information given by individuals to Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, LinkedIn or other such firms, be paid for, since this data provides these firms with their key asset.

Selling personal information, using Big Data for marketing, not to mention handing it over to governments, is a basic IT business model.

Google’s next big projects beyond rolling out Google glasses, with all their privacy implications, is producing robots they say will relieve humans from drudgery. This claim has been used by automation enthusiasts for decades.

Economists have also avoided the implications of jobless productivity: recommending more education and re-training, while sidestepping the more controversial examination of laissez faire economic theories. Yet, unemployment faces many graduates, many thousands of whom work as janitors and part-timers. Government policies often redistribute growth unfairly in tax breaks, subsidies to powerful interests in exchange for political contributions.

All these trends revive the big questions asked for decades: what is the purpose of technology? Why does the hare of private sector technology always outrun the tortoise of social innovation? In 1974, the U.S. set up its Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) on which I served, to answer these questions: how would the benefits and impacts of new technologies affect different groups in society, as well as the environment and overall quality of life?

Take Amazon’s plan to deliver packages quickly using drones. How many are benefited by this and how many may be inconvenienced, annoyed or even injured by all these drones in our public air space? For those millions living near Amazon’s massive distribution warehouses, will such a constant plague of these locust drones overhead spoil their quality of life?

Or take the new proposals that drones may be able to take over crop-pollination from bees, whose populations are threatened by hive collapse or nicotinoid pesticides (New Scientist, Nov. 16, 2013, p. 43). Can drones really replace bees to sustain our human food supply? Who benefits and who loses?

OTA asked all these inconvenient questions until it was shut down by Republicans in Congress in 1996. Their view was to leave all such questions to the magic of the marketplace.

Today, as the digital revolution accelerates with drones and robots populating our societies, all these questions re-emerge, as well as who pays. Will Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, et al., begin paying their users for their personal data, or help pay for the guaranteed incomes for those displaced people whose labour is no longer needed? We are now re-connecting all these dots and our future will depend on new answers.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

Local leaders at a protest camp against drones in Hayatabad town in Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Dec 9 2013 (IPS)

More than 300 U.S. drone attacks have killed 2,160 militants and 67 civilians in Pakistan since 2008, according to Pakistani defence ministry data. But people living in the affected areas are now questioning these figures, asking why they never get to know the names of the militants or see the bodies.

Residents of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which border Afghanistan and where most of the drone strikes have been carried out, say many more civilians may be dying in the attacks than officially revealed.

“The attacks by U.S. drones are a complete mystery. No one is sure of the Taliban or Al-Qaeda casualties, but we know the names of the locals killed in these attacks,” says Sadiqullah Shah, a 51-year-old teacher in FATA’s North Waziristan Agency.The media issues such news without any proof. Neither journalists nor local people get to see the bodies of the terrorists.

“Except for top names like Nek Muhammad Wazir, Baitullah Mehsud and Hakeemullah Mehsud, the local population has not got confirmation of the deaths of other Al-Qaeda or Taliban operatives,” Shah told IPS.

After the Taliban government in Afghanistan fell in 2001, many of its operatives crossed over to Pakistan and set up bases in FATA’s Waziristan region. These very areas are now being targeted by U.S. drones in the hunt for terrorists.

But not everyone is convinced.

“There is no evidence that the drones are killing only militants, but we know of civilian families that have lost members in these air strikes,” Dr Sherin Mazari, information secretary of the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI) told IPS.

Headed by former cricketer Imran Khan, PTI claims that more than 1,500 civilians have been killed by U.S. drones. The party, which leads the government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, has blocked NATO supplies bound for Afghanistan through the province to protest against drone attacks.

Mazari said the Pakistan government endorsed the American argument that the attacks were aimed at Al-Qaeda and Taliban members, but it was yet to reveal the names of the militants and civilians killed.

FATA comes under the federal government, and is therefore required to publish the names of the victims, said Mazari, who is also a member of the National Assembly.

Naming four victims of a U.S. drone attack in Hangu district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on Nov. 21, Dr Mazari said they were all students of a madrassa (Islamic seminary). The province is adjacent to FATA.

Locals say missiles fired by pilot-less aircraft have imperiled their lives.

Rafiq Rehman, a schoolteacher in North Waziristan, said in October last year his mother was killed in a drone attack while working in the fields. His daughter and son were injured.

“I visited the U.S. and testified before a Congressional Committee about my mother’s death,” he said.

Muhammad Ali, a policeman in Miramshah subdistrict of North Waziristan, said the attacks had indeed claimed innocent lives. “Drone aircraft have killed some militants, but the local population living near militant hideouts is often hit.”

In Pakistan, it is not uncommon for law enforcement agencies to show the bodies of criminals to the public, but that is not the case with militants said to have been killed by drones, say local people.

After every drone strike, most media outlets run similar news.

A senior reporter in the area told IPS on condition of anonymity, “We run whatever news is given to us by the army after every drone strike. The area is teeming with militants and curfew is in place, so going to the scene of a drone strike is not possible.”

The media therefore issues such news without any proof. Neither journalists nor local people get to see the bodies of the terrorists, the reporter said.

Adnan Khan, a 21-year-old Waziristan resident who is studying international relations at the University of Peshawar, said it was hard to tell who was attacking whom.

“We have to believe intelligence agencies when they say some Al-Qaeda leader has been killed in a drone strike. But how can we believe that the missiles hit only militants while sparing the innocent?”

Muhammad Sultan, a shopkeeper in Miramshah, said the local population was constantly afraid of coming under attack even as the drones had struck fear in the hearts of militants.

“Militants keep changing their location due to the fear of drone strikes. Drones have killed those who were out of the Pakistan army’s reach in Waziristan,” he told IPS.

The drones are believed to fly in from the Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan.

A protest in Peshawar challenges the legality of the drone strikes. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Nov 2 2013 (IPS)

The drone attack that killed Tehreek Taliban Pakistan chief Hakimullah Mahsud this week seems also to have killed hopes that drone attacks will end.

“After the recent debate in international media about U.S-led drone attacks, there was some hope these illegal strikes would end,” Muhammad Bashir a dental surgeon from North Waziristan Agency, tells IPS.

But the attack coming a day before talks between the Pakistani government and the Pakistani Taliban has sabotaged peace talks, the Pakistani government says."There’s no precise data about the civilians killed in these attacks because these took place near the Pak-Afghan border. It was not possible for media or the general public to visit the scenes.”

It is not just the Taliban who fear drone attacks. Bashir left North Waziristan a year back. He says they passed sleepless nights due to fear of drones that were meant to target terrorists. “Every day we see dozens of drone aircraft buzzing over people live in constant fear. There’s no precise data about the civilians killed in these attacks because these took place near the Pak-Afghan border. It was not possible for media or the general public to visit the scenes.”

But Pakistan’s ministry of defense told parliament Oct. 31  that only 67 civilians were among 2,227 people killed in 317 drone strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) since 2008. Pakistan had recently told the UN that at least 400 civilians had been killed in drone attacks since 2004.

The Pakistani defence ministry statement endorses the U.S. position that these attacks have killed only a few civilians. The government had been blaming the U.S. for breach of its sovereignty.

Bashir says the attacks don’t do any good, and only increase the number of U.S. enemies. Many people know relatives of drone victims, he says.

“The strikes cause fear in women and children as there is no guarantee that these missile will kill terrorists. These are more likely to destroy places located near the target.”

Isa Ahmed says he left his village in North Waziristan to live in nearby Bannu, one of the 25 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, because of endless drone strikes and the militancy. Most people, he says, support the anti-drone campaign.

Former cricket captain Imran Khan who leads the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf Party (PTI) is a strong opponent of drone strikes. He says the people hope the drone strikes would end as a result of international pressure, not because Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s recent meeting with President Barack Obama. A global consensus is building that these attacks are against human rights and international law, he says.

“The government has been mandated by all political parties to stop drones at the All Parties Conference held on Sep. 27 but the prime minister isn’t interested in talks with Taliban,” he tells IPS.

The worst-affected is the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province where Khan’s party rules. Most bomb and suicide attacks by the Taliban have been carried out here.

“The Taliban, who are based in based in FATA, are targeting people in adjacent KP. There’s an urgent need to talk to them for the sake of peace on the soil and protection of the people,” Khan says.

The Taliban have described these attacks as a weakness of the government. “The government must stop the drone attacks before peace talks with Taliban,” Taliban spokesman Shahidullah Shahid told media. Without ending these strikes, there will no dialogue, and attacks on the army and police will continue, he warned in a statement Oct. 10.

Najamul Islam, a teacher from North Waziristan Agency is hopeful that strikes will end. Reports by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International challenging the legality of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen have strengthened hopes.

“Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is under scathing criticism for his failure to stop drone strikes in FATA,” says Islam. Sharif’s U.S. visit is seen as complete disappointment for local population, he says.

Not everyone is convinced by government figures that these attacks kill only a few civilians. A HRW documentary screened in Pakistan Oct. 26 says that only 47 terrorists were killed in drone attacks among a total of 1,500 surveyed.

The U.S. must be held accountable for drone killings, HRW says. “These unlawful killings could amount to war crimes on the part of the U.S.”

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.

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

The United States and Colombia are the leaders in mental anxiety in the Americas.

Both have good reasons: Colombia has witnessed the longest lasting violence in any contemporary country: from 1949, with some interruptions, then on again from 1964 with the notorious guerilla group, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

The U.S., with its conviction that evil is lurking around every corner, domestic and global, believes it better have the arms to handle those bad guys.

Both countries have among the highest rates of structural violence, and the most unequal distributions of economic wealth, in the world.

There is a difference, though: one country submits its problem to third party mediation, of all places in Havana, facilitated by Cuba and Norway; the other submits its problem to nobody, nor does anyone seem to offer their services.

Colombia admits openly to the world that it does not have sufficient capacity for self-regulation; from the U.S. no such admission has been forthcoming.

Recently there was news from Havana: a breakthrough in the peace negotiations about a rather basic economic issue: land, and land reform – a redistribution of land, and of better land, to small impoverished peasants.

There are four other problems on the agenda: political participation (the problem being real democracy), ceasefire, drugs, and the rights of the victims and the bereaved in a country where four million have been displaced and thousands kidnapped and killed.

Reasons to celebrate? Wait. The class differences in a country ruled by the triumvirate of landowners, the military and clerics (like three brothers in many families – the Iberian heritage) force upon us a sad prediction: there will be one more military coup in the chain of coups, supported by the Church.

Let us not pray. Let us hope for disarmament of the FARC and the other guerrillas (particularly the reactionary paramilitary) and control of the army, lest we end up with Nepal: disarmament to the left, not centre-right.

To produce food, not only land, but also water, seeds, manure and some technology are needed. Water and seeds may become privatised – by Monsanto – so where does the credit to buy these inputs come from? And at what price?

What’s needed is collective, cooperative farming on communal land with direct democracy for decisions, not corruptible multi-party national elections. And can farming compete with drug commissions when drugs change hands until finally traveling via submarines to the U.S.? Or on the long road to the Mexican border?

Small farms cannot compete; cooperatives would do better. Well, let’s hope.

Expand the zones of peace, have them intersect, and aim at all of huge Colombia.

The U.S.: On May 23, President Barack Obama concluded that he should pull back the drones, and close the Guantanamo prison. Does he have the guts to do so, by executive orders, using vetoes?

There will be no military coup in the U.S. There are permanent, structural links between the Pentagon, Congress, the military industry and the media (owned by the former, and for whom news of peace is bad news) designed to keep the war industry going.

That industry has one major purpose: to stamp out any initiative to eliminate the special status of the dollar as the world’s “reserve currency” – like by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, by Iran, now by BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) – so that the U.S. can pay by printing money, and even get the naive to buy U.S. bonds, meaning lending the U.S. petro-dollars or China dollars.

Alas, the U.S.’ efforts are self-defeating. The more wars against terror for U.S. security, the more insecurity and terrorism; the more wars to save the dollar, the closer the collapse of the currency of that bankrupt country: by inflation, by stock exchange crashes, by serving debts rather than people.

The synergy of these three factors will catch up with the economy. In the meantime Monsanto is at work, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other lobbies threatening anyone whose voting is not to their liking that they will not be reelected.

The finance industry is at work forcing the administration to withdraw one step behind the other from the tiny measures introduced after the Grand Repression to control the finance industry.

The U.S. Supreme Court did its part of the job granting money to politicians under “freedom of expression.”

And Obama did his job, offering to cut Social Security entitlements in return for some compromise with Republicans, the average retirement package in the U.S. now being only 40 percent of a salary as opposed to 70 percent in developed countries.

Montesquieu’s plan of separating legislative, executive and judiciary power so that they check each other does not work. In the U.S. today all three powers are on the same course set by the finance industry, to which the dollar status is key.

Politicians are bought and cowed and the president once again betrays those who elected him. Democracy does not work. The U.S. blessing – the Occupy Movement – was itself occupied: by armies of FBI agents.

All of this and worse was Colombia’s fate; the answer was FARC, armed revolt. Will there be a similar armed revolt in the U.S., given that the guns are well distributed?

For Anglo-American global direct violence, yes. As the suspected Boston bombers said, an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims, an eye for an eye – except when it comes to domestic structural violence.

Let us hope for the revival of Montesquieu and democracy or, if not, submission to outside mediation.

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama prepares to take the stage as he is introduced at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., May 23, 2013. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 24 2013 (IPS)

Responding to growing criticism by human rights groups and foreign governments, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday announced potentially significant shifts in what his predecessor called the “global war on terror”.

In a major policy address at the National Defense University here, Obama said drone strikes against terrorist suspects abroad will be carried out under substantially more limited conditions than during his first term in office.

He also renewed his drive to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which currently only holds 166 prisoners.

In particular, he announced the lifting of a three-year-old moratorium on repatriating Yemeni detainees to their homeland and the appointment in the near future of senior officials at both the State Department and the Pentagon to expedite the transfer the 30 other prisoners who have been cleared for release to third countries.

In addition, he said he will press Congress to amend and ultimately repeal its 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against Al-Qaeda and others deemed responsible for the 9/11 attacks “(in order) to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing.”

The AUMF created the legal basis for most of the actions – and alleged excesses — by U.S. military and intelligence agencies against alleged terrorists and their supporters since 9/11.

“The AUMF is now nearly 12 years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core Al-Qaeda is a shell of its former self,” he declared. “Groups like AQAP (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves Al-Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States.”

“Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states,” he warned.

His remarks gained a cautious – if somewhat sceptical and impatient – welcome from some of the groups that have harshly criticised Obama’s for his failure to make a more decisive break with some of former President George W. Bush’s policies and to close Guantanamo, and his heavy first-term reliance on drone strikes against Al-Qaeda and other terrorist suspects.

“President Obama is right to say that we cannot be on a war footing forever – but the time to take our country off the global warpath and fully restore the rule of law is now, not at some indeterminate future point,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Romero especially praised Obama’s initial moves to transfer detainees at Guantanamo but noted that he had failed to offer a plan to deal with those prisoners who are considered too dangerous to release but who cannot be tried in U.S. courts for lack of admissible evidence. He also called the new curbs on drone strikes “promising” but criticised Obama’s continued defence of targeted killings.

Obama’s speech came amidst growing controversy over his use of drone strikes in countries – particularly Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia – with which the U.S. is not at war. Since 9/11, the U.S. has conducted more than 400 strikes in the three countries with a total death toll estimated to range between 3,300 and nearly 5,000, depending on the source. The vast majority of these strikes were carried out during Obama’s first term.

While top administration officials have claimed that almost all of the victims were suspected high-level terrorists, human rights groups, as well as local sources, have insisted that many civilian non-combatants – as well as low-level members of militant groups — have also been killed.

In a letter sent to Obama last month, some of the country’s leading human rights groups, including the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights First, questioned the legality of the criteria used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to select targets.

Earlier this month, the legal adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Harold Koh, also criticised the administration for the lack of transparency and discipline surrounding the drone programme.

In his speech Thursday, Obama acknowledged the “wide gap” between his government and independent assessments of casualties, but he strongly defended the programme as effective, particularly in crippling Al-Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leadership, legal under the AUMF, and more humane than the alternative in that “(c)onventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage.”

“To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties – not just in our cities at home and facilities abroad, but also in the very places – like Sana’a and Kabul and Mogadishu – where terrorists seek a foothold,” he said.

According to a “Fact Sheet” released by the White House, lethal force can be used outside of areas of active hostilities when there is a “near certainty that a terrorist target who poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons” is present and that non-combatants will not be injured or killed. In addition, U.S. officials must determine that capture is not feasible and that local authorities cannot or will not effectively address the threat.

The fact sheet appeared to signal an end to so-called “signature strikes” that have been used against groups of men whose precise is identity is unknown but who, based on surveillance, are believed to be members of Al-Qaeda or affiliated groups.

If the target is a U.S. citizen, such as Anwar Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric who the administration alleged had become an operational leader of AQAP and was killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen, Obama said there would be an additional layer of review and that he would engage Congress on the possibility of establishing a secret court or an independent oversight board in the executive branch.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department disclosed that three other U.S. citizens – none of whom were specifically targeted – have been killed in drone strikes outside Afghanistan.

On Guantanamo, where 102 of the 166 remaining detainees are participating in a three-month-old hunger strike, Obama said he would permit the 56 Yemenis there whose have been cleared for release to return home “on a case-by-case basis”. He also re-affirmed his determination to transfer all remaining detainees to super-max or military prisons on U.S. territory – a move that Congress has so far strongly resisted. He also said he would insist that every detainee have access to the courts to review their case.

In addition to addressing the festering drone issue and Guantanamo, however, the main thrust of Thursday’s speech appeared designed to mark what Obama called a “crossroads” in the struggle against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and how the threat from them has changed.

“Lethal yet less capable Al-Qaeda affiliates. Threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad. Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism,” he said. “We must take these threats seriously, and do all we can to confront them. But as we shape our response, we have to recognise that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.”

“Beyond Afghanistan,” he said later, “we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ – but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”

Obama also disclosed he had signed a Presidential Policy Guidance Wednesday to codify the more restrictive guidelines governing the use of force.

White House officials who brief reporters before the speech suggested that, among other provisions, the Guidance called for gradually shifting responsibility for drone strikes and targeted killings from the CIA to the Pentagon – a reform long sought by human-rights groups.

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

When international human rights groups launch a global campaign next week to ban “fully autonomous weapons”, they will follow in the footsteps of the highly-successful 1990s collective worldwide effort to ban anti-personnel landmines and blinding lasers.

The new campaign, to be launched in London, will be aimed primarily at the United States: the only country with a formal policy on fully autonomous weapons, also called “killer robots”, equipped with the capacity to choose and fire on targets without human intervention."Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield would take technology too far." -- HRW's Steve Goose

Asked about the tried and tested model campaign, Steve Goose, executive director of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS, “Yes, we envision the ‘Campaign to Stop Killer Robots’ functioning in a similar fashion to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), as well as the Cluster Munitions Coalition.”

Killer robots are considered more deadly than the predator drone, the U.S. weapon of choice against suspected terrorists in the current wave of targeted killings, particularly in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.

According to HRW, fully autonomous weapons are in development in several countries and could be deployed within the next couple of decades.

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.”

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

The report was jointly published by HRW and the Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC).

“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.

He said many of the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) deeply involved in the current efforts are part of the new campaign, although there are also some important new members.

“We are also looking at the prohibition on blinding lasers (1995 Protocol IV to the Convention on Conventional Weapons) as a model, in that it was also a pre-emptive ban, taking effect before the weapons were produced and fielded, as we are looking to do with fully autonomous weapons,” he said.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) led the charge on blinding lasers, said Goose, who was also chair of the ICBL and Cluster Munitions Coalition (ICBL-CMC).

Jayantha Dhanapala, a former U.N. under-secretary-general for Disarmament Affairs, told IPS that following on the success of the Arms Trade Treaty negotiations last month, and without prejudice to the campaign to ban the semi-autonomous drones, “We must prevent high-tech militaries of the more developed countries producing and deploying killer robots making accountability under international humanitarian law impossible.

“I am happy that the Pugwash Conferences for Science & World Affairs is with the coalition of civil society groups that is launching this important campaign to pre-empt the production of a new generation of fully autonomous robotic weapons,” said Dhanapala, president of Pugwash, a think tank comprising scientists and decision makers against nuclear weapons, and which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.

The ICBL, a global network of more than 100 countries led by Jody Williams, won the Nobel Peace prize in 1997, and the treaty prohibiting the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel landmines was adopted in 1997 and came into force in 1999.

The United States is considered 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 in acquiring or developing the technology.

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

In the November report, both HRW and IHRC 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 countries will take the lead if a resolution to ban killer robots is brought before the United Nations, Goose told IPS the forum in which the issue of fully autonomous weapons will be taken up is an open question, and it is too early to answer.

He said it may depend on how the issue develops and what governments are leading the way.

“Likewise, it is too early to say what governments will want to champion this issue,” he added. “In our preliminary discussions, there are many governments that are very interested in and concerned about fully autonomous weapons.

“But we are at the very early stages — our campaign will not even be launched until next Tuesday,” he noted.

Jordi Muñoz began building drones as a hobby in 2007 and is now a founding partner of a fast-growing company in the field. Credit: Courtesy of Jordi Muñoz

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 11 2013 (IPS)

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones, have earned a bad reputation due to their controversial use by the United States in its “war on terrorism”, yet they have almost unlimited potential as tools for scientific research.

The word “drone” is most commonly associated with the remotely piloted and heavily armed aircraft that are used by the United States to strike down suspected terrorists, but have also caused a great many civilian deaths in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

However, more than 40 countries around the world either deploy or manufacture drones, according to reports consulted for an article published by IPS.

These unmanned airplanes and helicopters are used for such diverse purposes as drawing maps, exploring the ocean floor, measuring temperature or pollution levels, monitoring weather phenomena, and the surveillance of high-risk areas or archaeological sites.

Last month, the U.S. space agency NASA sent drones into the plume of the Turrialba volcano in Costa Rica to study its chemical composition.

“The technology is emerging, the first applications have just barely begun. Society itself has learned to accept drones beyond their military uses, because they have seen the different ways they can be used. It’s just a matter of time” until they become more widely developed and used, said young Mexican entrepreneur Jordi Muñoz, co-founder of 3D Robotics, a pioneer in the manufacture of drones in Mexico.

His story mirrors the evolution of drones, which he began to build in 2007 with the help of 500 dollars provided by U.S. physicist Chris Anderson.

“He gave me the money purely on trust. It was the best 500 dollars I ever invested. I decided to build a drone. I was developing the automatic pilot and I went on Google to look for information when I came across a forum. I went in, registered, and saw that they were posting things about homemade drones,” recalled Muñoz, who is currently finishing a degree in computer engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States.

The forum was DIY (“Do It Yourself”) Drones, an online community created by Anderson in 2007 as a space for hobbyists who build their own UAVs to share experiences, electronic codes and component maps.

“I started to post videos, write code, and document and publish what I was doing,” Muñoz told Tierramérica*. His work caught the attention of Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine until this past January and now the young Mexican’s partner in 3D Robotics.

The company does not sell UAVs for military use. The vehicles are designed in the southwest U.S. city of San Diego and assembled across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. They receive between 100 and 150 orders daily from clients in the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Israel and Japan.

3D Robotics currently employs 60 people and hopes to expand its staff to 100 by the end of the year. Since its founding in 2009, the company has earned around 10 million dollars through sales and received another five million from three U.S. funds that provide financing for tech firms.

“In 2013 we want to professionalise all of our products. There have been huge advances, everything has now been greatly simplified, and we want to make drones easy to use. But we need engineers to write code, for manufacturing,” said Muñoz.

Working on the basis of open licensing, a network of engineers around the world work together to improve codes and develop more advanced products.

In 2012, Muñoz was chosen as one of the top ten innovators under 35 in Mexico by Technology Review, which is published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A drone is equipped with a high-speed processor, battery, GPS receiver, compass and sensors like an accelerometer and gyroscope. Unmanned planes can fly for up to three hours, and helicopters for half an hour. Connected to a modem, they can transmit real-time data in a range of up to 60 kilometres.

In Mexico there are no regulations on the use of drones, although the government uses them to fight drug trafficking, some companies use them to supervise construction, and universities use them for scientific research.

At the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV), three researchers are building prototypes for surveillance and security, with an eye towards commercial production.

“We lost a bit of time. If we had done it five years ago, we would be on a par with other countries. It wasn’t given much importance, so there was no research. We have a great deal of potential, above all because the students we are training start out with a more advanced awareness,” Hugo Rodríguez, a mechatronics researcher at CINVESTAV, told Tierramérica.

“The models will continue to improve, and we will gain experience by solving new problems. We could have a marketable prototype within a short time, with trained human resources,” said Rodríguez, who has a doctorate in automation and signal treatment from the University of Paris XI.

Since 2007, the centre’s specialists have designed a four-engine plane, two fixed-wing aircraft and two helicopters, and have experimented with their automatic controls.

“As this work continues to develop, a marketable technological application could emerge. We’ve been approached by companies, but we didn’t have a prototype ready yet,” said Rodríguez.

Seven students have graduated with Master’s degrees in mechatronics since 2007, and two Master’s degree candidates and two doctoral candidates are now working on this initiative.

Although the commercial use of drones is currently prohibited in the United States – they are only permitted for scientific or recreational uses – the government is preparing to integrate them into the national airspace in 2015. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates that as many as 30,000 non-military UAVs will be in the sky by the end of the decade, for a range of different purposes.

A recent study, “The Economic Impact of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the United States”, predicts that in the first three years of integration, more than 70,000 jobs will be created.

The study, published in March by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), an industry group, estimates that between 2015 and 2017, the economic impact of drone integration will be greater than 13 billion dollars and could reach 82 billion by 2025, in terms of revenues earned by manufacturers and suppliers from the sale of new products as well as “the taxes and monies that flow into communities and support the local businesses.”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

The RQ-7B Shadow 200 tactical UAV is wheeled off the runway after a reconnaissance mission in Iraq Aug. 11, 2008. Credit: U.S. military/public domain

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 7 2013 (IPS)

The “drone”, one of the eminently controversial lethal weapons deployed by the United States in its war against terrorism, is obviously a dirty word in the U.N. lexicon.

So when Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Herve Ladsous was asked about U.N. plans to use drones in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), he demurred.

“I would not use the word drones,” he told reporters Wednesday, opting for a military euphemism: “unmanned aerial vehicles” (UAVs).

Ladsous said the United Nations plans to use “unarmed UAVs” only for surveillance purposes – but with the express permission of the government of DRC and neighbouring countries.

“We will see how this experiment works,” he said, adding that the United Nations will be “open” to sharing whatever intelligence it gathers with regional bodies in Africa, besides U.N. force commanders on the ground.

The “green light” for the use of unarmed drones in DRC – a country battling a violent insurgency – was given by the 15-member Security Council last November, and is aimed at monitoring the movement of armed groups by the 17,500-strong U.N. Organisation Stabilisation Mission in DRC (MONUSCO).

But some U.N. diplomats fear that U.N. drones may eventually be armed, if and when the conflict in DRC takes a turn for the worse.

The drones used by the United States are fully armed and have resulted in the killings of both suspected terrorists and civilians in countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

According to published reports, more than 40 countries either deploy or manufacture drones.

Larry Dickerson, defence systems analyst at Forecast International, a U.S. defence marketing research firm, told IPS that besides the United States, there is a very long list of countries manufacturing these UAVs.

These countries include U.K., Israel, France, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Canada, Greece, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, Russia, China, South Korea, Austria, India, South Africa, Japan and Singapore.

Ben Emmerson, a British lawyer and U.N. special rapporteur for human rights and counterterrorism, is in the process of preparing an investigative report on the use of drones.

He is focusing on 25 drone strikes, specifically in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the Palestinian territories (by Israeli drones), where these attacks have reportedly resulted in civilian deaths.

The report is expected to be presented to the General Assembly next October or November.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has already expressed “concern” on the use of armed drones for targeted killings, “as it raises questions about compliance with the fundamental principle of distinction between combatants and non-combatants.”

Associate U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters last month that drone attacks have also reportedly caused “substantial casualties, raising questions about the ability to ensure full compliance with the principle of proportionality”.

He said the secretary-general has asked relevant member states to be transparent about the circumstances in which drones are used, and the means by which they ensure that attacks involving drones comply with international law.

According to Amnesty International, there have been more than 300 drone strikes in Pakistan alone over the last few years, which have killed both civilians as well as suspected militants.

Responding to a report that the administration of President Barack Obama was finalising guidelines for “targeted killings” by drones, Susan Lee, Amnesty’s Americas programme director, said bluntly: “There already exists a rulebook for these issues: it is called international law.”

Any policy on so-called targeted killings by the U.S. government, she said, should not only be fully disclosed, but must comply with international law.

To date, the justifications publicly offered by senior Obama administration officials have shown only that U.S. government policy appears to permit extrajudicial executions in violation of international law, Lee added.

Asked how far behind are China and Russia in deploying drones in conflict situations, Dickerson told IPS that both countries are increasing their UAV inventories, “but remain far behind the United States in terms of numbers fielded and the sophistication of these systems.”

“Neither have the battlefield experience in the operation of UAVs that the U.S. military gained over the last 10 years,” he said.

Dickerson also said that the United States has the largest market share and produces more UAVs than any other country in the world.

He said the worldwide market for UAVs is worth a staggering 70.9 billion dollars over the next 10 years: 39.2 billion dollars related to the production of these systems; 28.7 billion dollars for research and development spending; and around 3.0 billion dollars for UAV services contracts.

A ScanEagle UAV sits on a catapult in Iraq prior to launch. Credit: public domain

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 26 2013 (IPS)

On the long meadows of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, a man pilots an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) – more commonly referred to as drones – in figure eights to the amusement of his Labrador.

A few miles north on the other side of the East River, U.N. delegates mull over a more serious idea for drones – their deployment, for surveillance purposes, into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Drones are a generative technology – a carte blanche platform that inspires a variety of functions, shaped by the actors who wield them. Among other applications, drones are used to gather data from hurricanes, deliver humanitarian aid packages in areas of conflict, fight fires, map territories for conservation, launch hellfire missiles and gather intelligence.

Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law, told IPS that privacy issues surrounding the use of drones are also limiting the technology’s constructive potential.

Surveillance drones in the U.S.

“In the U.S., it is a core principle that the government does not invade people’s privacy and collect information about their innocent activities just in case they do something wrong,” explained Allie Bohm, an advocacy and policy strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“Surveillance drones certainly have the technological capacity to surreptitiously collect information about all of us, even when we are not suspected of a crime,” Bohm told IPS.

According to Bohm, U.S. courts are currently debating the constitutionality of drone technologies, since there are no binding laws governing their use. “Our privacy laws currently are not strong enough to ensure that this new technology will be used consistently with our democratic values,” she said.

However, “congress has required the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) to open domestic airspace to drones in 2014”, she added, noting that the Department of Homeland Security has already started domestic drone programmes, such as in Oklahoma.

Calo, an expert on issues surrounding robotics and privacy, predicted that the visceral reactions people have in response to surveillance drones will lead the government to re-examine the adequacy of U.S. privacy laws.

“The issue with drone surveillance is that it is cheaper than previous forms of aerial surveillance, which rely on planes and helicopters that are expensive to purchase, maintain and operate.

“Whenever surveillance becomes cheaper or easier, you tend to see more of it,” he explained.

Psychological toll of constant surveillance

Unwelcome mental states such as fear and anxiety often stem from the belief that one is being watched or monitored, argues Calo in his essay entitled “The Boundaries of Privacy Harm”.

“There are studies suggesting, among other things, that people experience discomfort buying certain items with a camera present,” he told IPS.

“People are sometimes less creative when observed and have trouble accomplishing complex tasks,” he added.

When asked what the psychological effects that U.N. surveillance drones in the DRC may have on the civilians they fly over, Calo said, “I think the effects could be quite disconcerting.”

Drones in the DRC

The U.N. was not the first to think of flying drones in the DRC. Biologists Lian Pin Koh and Serge Wich, co-founders of conservationdrones.org, fly low-cost drones over a variety of countries to gather data for research and conservation purposes.

“In December 2012, our team brought a conservation drone to Odzala National Park in the Congo as part of an initiative by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Netherlands to explore the potential of drones for detecting poachers,” Koh, an assistant professor of applied ecology and conservation at ETH Zürich, told IPS.

“We are currently working with others to develop a long-distance telemetry system for video and control over the plane. This will make it much more usable to detect poachers from a distance and react faster,” added Wich, a professor of primate biology at Liverpool John Moores University.

“We have had no experience with people firing at it from the ground, but when flying at 150 (metres) high, they are quite small and hard to see and probably hard to shoot out of the sky with an AK-47,” said Wich.

“But none of those (projects) are in a phase that we can determine success yet. That will take some time,” he noted.

While presenting at the 2012 Fuller Symposium on Conservation Crime in Washington, D.C., Koh said, “One of the concerns Serge and I have been talking about is what would happen if these low-cost drones get into the wrong hands.

“It might be the case that poachers start using these drones to start looking for valuable wildlife that they can then go after,” he warned.

“Governments will have to start coming up with legislations of who is allowed and not allowed to fly these drones and under what conditions,” he added.

André-Michel Essoungou, U.N. public affairs officer at the Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the Department of Field Support, told IPS, “If and when we were to use UAVs, on a trial basis in the DRC, the usual procedures and consultations with legislative bodies will be respected.

“Ultimately, the use of UAVs will be done only in full cooperation with the government of the DRC. And to introduce them, we would need the support of member states to equip the mission,” he said.

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.

San Diego Veterans for Peace demonstrate weekly near General Atomics against domestic and military drones. Credit: Dave Patterson/IPS

By Judith Scherr
OAKLAND, California, Dec 7 2012 (IPS)

Better known as drones, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles piloted by military in the U.S. hunt and kill suspected enemy combatants abroad. Now the drones are coming home to beef up local law enforcement.

But people across the U.S. are pushing back, contending that domestic drones could invade personal privacy or chill free speech by monitoring political activities.

“They want to use it for intelligence gathering – that’s spying,” Linda Lye of the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union told media at a hastily called press conference Dec. 4 outside the Alameda County administration building in downtown Oakland.

That morning, the Alameda County sheriff’s request for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors’ acceptance of Homeland Security grant funds for a drone was almost buried in a 66-item meeting agenda.

But when the Northern California ACLU – a member of Alameda County Against Drones – learned of the sheriff’s request, they called the press conference to expose a process they said ignored the community. The sheriff subsequently removed his request from the agenda.

And so, rather than a cursory board review, the supervisors’ Public Protection Committee will hold a comprehensive discussion on the drone question in January.

“Public policy should not be made by stealth attack,” Lye said, calling for debate on “the important questions of whether a drone is even appropriate in our community and if so, what safeguards should be in place before we buy a drone.”

Speakers at the press conference pointed to special circumstances in Oakland that call for protection against law enforcement abuse.

“When we see in the (sheriff’s Jul. 20 application to Homeland Security) that the drones could be used for large crowd control, naturally everybody thinks of Occupy Oakland,” said Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, referring to alleged police abuse of Occupy activists.

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Department is just one of many law enforcement agencies across the country lining up for free money for drones from Homeland Security. They often point to popular uses for the technology, such as searching for missing children or escaped convicts.

But those concerned with privacy issues note that the technology allows drones to peer through walls and ceilings, monitor cell phone calls and texts, read license plates, recognise faces and record a person’s every move.

Some domestic drones, like the ShadowHawk acquired by Monterey, Texas, are able to carry “less lethal” weapons, such as tear gas and rubber bullets.

As the Afghanistan war winds down, the defence industry is intensifying its push for domestic drones, which Susan Aluise, writing in investorplace.com, calls the “next market opportunity”.

“Just when you think the (drone) market cannot go any higher, it does,” says Forecast International’s unmanned vehicles analyst Larry Dickerson, quoted on the Defense Professionals website. “No matter how many systems are built, operators want more.”

Dickerson estimates the industry’s value over the next decade at 70.9 billion dollars, with the civilian market worth 600 million to one billion dollars.

The industry is fueled by a 60-person congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus whose members have pocketed some eight million dollars in drone-related campaign contributions over the past four years, according to a Hearst Newspaper and Center for Responsive Politics investigation.

Citizens concerned with drone misuse are lobbying local officials. Buffalo, New York and Portland, Oregon activists want their city governments to ban drones entirely from airspace above the city.

Syracuse, New York petitioners are calling for an ordinance that “declares Syracuse and its airspace to be a SURVEILLANCE DRONE FREE ZONE wherein such drones are banned from airspace over the City of Syracuse until Federal legislation is adopted that adequately protects the population as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

San Diego Veterans for Peace and their allies take their protest each Thursday to a busy corner near General Atomics, the manufacturer of Predator and Reaper drones.

“The technology’s not going to go away; we want oversight,” said VFP activist Dave Patterson, whose sign reads, “G.A. drones surveil America. Is that OK?”

Like Alameda County, Buffalo, Syracuse, Portland and San Diego don’t have drones.

Seattle does – but they’re not deployed, except for training missions. Like activists in Alameda County, Seattle residents were unaware when Seattle police initially pursued a Homeland Security grant for the drones.

They also were unaware of their delivery in 2010. The Seattle City Council and community learned of the drones in April of this year, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation uncovered the 82,500-dollar acquisition through a freedom of information request.

Police insist they did not keep the drones a secret, but concede they could have kept the public better informed.

Alerted to the acquisition, the ACLU of Washington sounded the alarm, saying in an April press release that, while drones could have valid domestic uses, they also “provide an unprecedented ability for the government to engage in surveillance of the activities of law-abiding people.”

Seattle Councilmember Bruce Harrell, chair of the Public Safety, Civil Rights and Technology Committee, said at a meeting in May that he was concerned that “the federal government is coming in making funds available through Homeland Security…and basically getting into the city’s business.”

In a recent phone interview with IPS, Seattle City Council President Sally Clark said if she had discretion over the grant funds, she’d opt to spend the money on city priorities, such as paying for an additional police officer.

Seattle’s Public Safety Committee will take up drone regulation in January. Harrell told IPS he’d like the law to restrict use of the drone to monitoring specific individuals named in a warrant, rather than allowing general surveillance. He said he’d like the law to require an officer with the rank of sergeant or above to authorise drone missions, and he wants public logs kept for each drone deployment.

He said the drones won’t fly until regulations are in place. Moreover, he said the council “put a requirement in our budget for next year, 2013, that there be no more purchases of drones.”

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

By Walter García and Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Sep 13 2012 (IPS)

Political parties are stepping up opposition to the U.S. drone strikes and a planned operation to cleanse border areas of militants.

“Till now only the Imran Khan-led Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (Movement for Justice Party) staunchly opposed the U.S. drones and the military campaign in Waziristan,” Muhammad Azeem, former mayor in Mardan, one of the 25 districts of the troubled northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province told IPS. “As elections get nearer, the other parties are also now trying to exploit anti-American sentiments and muster electoral support.”

Drones have been hitting targets in the northern border areas of Pakistan, such as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) governed directly by the federal government.

Elections are due in Pakistan next year.

The religio-political parties under the banner of Muttahida Majlis Amal (MMA) swept the election in 2003 due to their Taliban connection, and formed governments in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan province.

After coming to power in these provinces, they abandoned the Taliban and were eliminated in the 2008 election.

Now both the major religious parties – Jamaat Islam (JI) and Jamiat Ulemai Islam (JUI) – have come out of hibernation to play upon anti-American sentiments and denounce the government’s planned operation in Waziristan, which falls within FATA.

On Sep. 5, JI chief Munawar Hassan told a rally in Nowshera town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that his party will not let the government launch a military offensive in Waziristan.

“American agents want to create unrest in the country by pushing the army for a North Waziristan operation but we won’t let that happen,” he told the rally where banners carried slogans against the U.S., and against Pakistani rulers.

“The military operation is in progress in all seven agencies of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas since 2005 but none of the political leaders bothered,” political analyst Javid Hussain told IPS.

He said Pakistan’s solidarity, freedom and autonomy were at stake due to the interference of the U.S. and its allies in local affairs.

JUI head Maulana Fazlur Rehman likewise has been criticising the U.S. in his public meetings and press conferences.

On Sep. 3, Rehman told a news conference in Islamabad that “we won’t abandon the tribal residents if the military campaign is launched there.”

Even the smallest political parties have realised that opposition to the military operation and the drone strikes could pay dividends in the election.

“Drone strikes are against the country’s sovereignty,” Dr Ikramullah Khan of the Swabi Qaumi Mahaz party told IPS. “These have killed innocent women and children, which is against the United Nations charter and conventions.” He said the impending military action in North Waziristan would spell disaster.

About 300,000 of the population of 5.8 million in FATA have been displaced by military operations, Dr Ikramullah Khan said. Military action in North Waziristan would make more people homeless and bring no results, he said.

Chief of the ruling Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) Aftab Ahmed Khan said use of force has fed terrorism in tribal areas and elsewhere.

“We would never allow the government to launch military action in North Waziristan because it would produce more terrorists rather than paving way for peace,” he told IPS.

The prevalent unrest in FATA could be resolved by dialogue, he said. The military action would affect the poor population who had already been suffering heavily from the military operations, Aftab Ahmed Khan said.

President Asif Ali Zardari from the PPP, widower of Benazir Bhutto, is using delaying tactics to start the North Waziristan operation despite U.S. pressure. The Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) also wants the government to stay away from the operation and adopt the path of dialogue.

Staunch opponent of drone strikes and the military operation Imran Khan has gone a step further.

“We will hit drones when I become prime minister,” Imran Khan told IPS from Dubai. “Talks are the only solution to the problem in Waziristan and elsewhere,” he said.

“We will enter Waziristan with 100,000 people on October 6,” he told a news conference in Islamabad earlier on Aug. 30. “I would take international media to let them know the quantum of destruction caused by drone attacks.”

The government should step down if it cannot protect the lives of common people, he said.

The U.S.-led war on terror is increasing terrorism and there was no end in sight, he said. “Killing innocent people in drone strikes and military operations will produce terrorists.”

The Awami National Party, a bitter opponent of the Taliban, is also hesitant to support drone strikes. “Drone strikes are against the country’s sovereignty and we would never support them,” ANP leader Bashir Ahmed Bilour told IPS.

Family members of three U.S. citizens killed last year in drone strikes in Yemen filed a lawsuit here Wednesday accusing U.S. intelligence and military officials of violating the victims’ rights under the U.S. constitution and international law.

Prepared by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the lawsuit marks a major legal challenge to the U.S. policy of extrajudicial “targeted killings” of suspected terrorists far from traditional battlefields, such as Afghanistan.

“These killings rely on vague legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never presented to the courts,” according to the 17-page complaint, which noted that the practice has “resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, including many hundreds of civilian bystanders,” in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Sudan, and the Philippines since 2001.

Such killings have become increasingly controversial, especially under the administration of President Barack Obama, which has increasingly used drones strikes as the “weapon of choice” in combating alleged Islamist extremists. The number of such strikes in these countries has more than doubled since Obama became president in 2009.

Human rights groups and international jurists, including two U.N. special rapporteurs on extra-judicial killings, have questioned the legality of such killings, suggesting they may constitute war crimes.

At the same time, many policy analysts have argued that their impact may be counter-productive in that the collateral damage they sometimes cause both alienates public opinion in countries where they are carried out and aids recruitment by extremist groups.

The suit filed Monday, however, focuses on two specific drone strikes last fall.

The first, which took place last Sep. 30, killed two U.S. citizens: Anwar Al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric, an effective English-speaking propagandist who, according to the Obama administration, served as “leader of external operations” for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and Samir Khan, along with three non-U.S. nationals.

As a result of his activities, Al-Awlaki had reportedly been on a “kill list” maintained by the administration and, as such, was the target of the strike. Khan, who edited aN Islamist magazine associated with AQAP, was not on the list but happened to be travelling with Awlaki when their vehicle was struck, according to U.S. officials.

The second attack took place two weeks later, on Oct. 14, at an outdoor restaurant some 300 kms away. Killed in that strike were Anwar Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulahman, and six other civilian bystanders, including another teenager.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, U.S. officials told reporters the younger Awlaki, whom they initially insisted was an adult, that Ibrahim al-Banna, allegedly a senior AQAP operative, was the target, although it is not clear that he was there at the time.

“When a 16-year-old boy who has never been charged with a crime nor ever alleged to have committed a violent act is blown to pieces by U.S. missiles, alarm bells should go off,” CCR senior attorney Pardiss Kebriaei noted Monday.

The plaintiffs in the case include Nasser Al-Awlaqi, the father and grandfather of Anwar and Abdulrahamn, respectively, and Sarah Khan, Samir Khan’s mother.

When information leaked out in 2010 that Anwar Al-Awlaqi was on a kill list, his father, represented by the ACLU and CCR, sued the government.

The suit asked the courts to order the government to disclose the legal standard it was using to place U.S. citizens on such a list and to rule that, outside the context of an armed conflict, the government should be permitted to carry out targeted killings of U.S. citizens only if they posed an imminent threat to life or physical safety.

The trial judge dismissed the case, however, on a procedural point – that Awlaqi’s father lacked “standing” before the court because he could not represent the interests of his son, who was then still alive.

Now that Awlaki is dead, however, ACLU and CCR attorneys said the issue of standing should no longer be an obstacle. They noted that both Awlaki’s father and Khan’s mother are the legal representatives of their deceased family members’ estates.

In answer to the growing controversies over drone strikes, particularly against U.S. citizens, the administration has sought to defend itself, even while it has declined to officially acknowledge responsibility for them.

In a speech in March, Attorney-General Eric Holder offered a partial view of the administration’s legal position, which is reportedly spelled out in a longer memo that remains classified.

“It does not require judicial approval before the president may use force abroad against a senior operational leader of a foreign terrorist organisation with which the United States is at war – even if that individual happens to be a U.S. citizen,” he asserted in an apparent reference to Awlaki’s alleged role and position in AQAP.

While experts have questioned whether Awlaki was indeed a senior operational leader in the group, he reportedly helped recruit the so-called “underwear bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian national who tried to blow up a U.S. commercial jet over Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009.

“‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same when it comes to national security,” Holder argued in perhaps the most legally controversial passage in his speech. “The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

He also implicitly defended the killings of Khan and Awlaki’s son, insisting that the U.S. complies with the laws of war. Noting that “only lawful targets – such as combatants, civilians directly participating in hostilities, and military objectives of war – may be targeted intentionally,” he stressed that “under the principle of proportionality, the anticipated collateral damage must not be excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage.”

In May, White House Counter-Terrorism Adviser John Brennan went somewhat further than Holder, confirming for the first time officially that the U.S. uses drones “against specific Al-Qaeda terrorists”. But he did not disclose any further information about specific strikes or the criteria by which used by the CIA or its military counterparts decide for conducting strikes.

Later that month, the New York Times published previously unknown details about how the “kill list” is drawn up, a process that it said involves more than 100 members of the government’s national-security bureaucracy and one in which Obama himself personally approves every target.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys noted Wednesday that Obama was named as a defendant due to the immunity accorded the president during his term in office.

The administration had no comment on the lawsuit, but experts said it will likely seek its dismissal on the grounds that it risked disclosing “state secrets” and that it raises a “political question” that the judiciary is not fit to review. The latter doctrine permits the courts to avoid cases that are particularly controversial.

“The killings at the hart of the case – of three U.S. citizens, including a 16-year-old, in Yemen where the U.S. was not at war – provide the judiciary a chance to do what Americans tell judges around the world to do,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, an expert on international law at the University of Notre Dame who has been particularly outspoken against targeted killings. “Have the courage to apply the law to those wielding political power.”

As to the state secrets argument, plaintiffs’ attorneys said so many government officials have spoken about the drone programme on the record that the administration could not credibly claim that whatever came out in trial could jeopardise national security.

“This suit is an effort to enforce the Constitution’s guarantee against the deprivation of life without due process of law,” said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director. “The Constitution does not permit a bureaucratised programme under which Americans far from any battlefield are summarily killing by their own government on the basis of shifting legal standards and allegations never tested in court.”

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

Civilian deaths due to drone strikes in Pakistan are falling rapidly, and the death rate is now close to zero – or so asserts a New America Foundation (NAF) report.

The report was authored by Peter Bergen and Jennifer Rowland of NAF, a public policy think tank based in Washington DC. Bergen is the cable news channel CNN’s national security analyst and a director of NAF, and Rowland is a programme associate.

The report states that since 2004, there have been 310 drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, killing between 1,870 and 2,873 individuals, of whom 1,577 to 2,402 were described as militants in reliable press accounts. This would put the overall civilian fatality rate at 16 percent.

Bergen and Rowland say that they used data compiled by the NAF, and the most “reliable press sources” which include the New York Times, Reuters, Washington Post, Associated Press to name a few, and leading English media outlets in Pakistan: Dawn, Express Tribune and Geo TV.

However, some sceptics challenge the accuracy of the report, based on NAF’s statistical database.

Chris Woods of the Bureau for Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) believes that NAF has not only underestimated the number of strikes and civilian deaths, but adds that civilian death percentages need to be treated with extreme caution.

“It (NAF) relies only on a small number of media reports immediately following a strike. Sometimes we learn crucial facts days, weeks or even months after an initial attack,” he told IPS.

“In February of this year, for example, a major investigation by Associated Press, based on 80 eyewitness testimonies from civilians in Waziristan, found previously unknown evidence of civilian deaths in 20 percent of the sampled strikes. Unfortunately, NAF has not incorporated these important findings into its data,” said Woods.

TBIJ’s own data puts the total number of drone strikes at 355, with a minimum of 2,513 people killed, of whom between 482 and 835 were civilians.

CNN’s controversial graph released with the report puts civilian deaths at zero for 2012.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, a sociologist and journalist, is scathing in his criticism of the report.

“NAF plays fast and loose with its statistics, and in some cases it deliberately misreports,” he told IPS. “Two particularly egregious cases where civilian casualties were actually reported even in the U.S. press were either omitted or misreported in the database.”

For example, as reported by Ahmed for Al-Jazeera, 82 children were killed at a seminary in Bajaur on Oct. 30, 2006. The NAF database continues to list the number as “80 militants”.

In another incident on Aug. 14, 2010, the AP reported seven civilian deaths, which are still listed as seven “militant” deaths in the database.

Likening Bergen’s report to propaganda, Ahmed argues that there are no “reliable press accounts” when it comes to Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). He says that the redefinition of the term “militant” – which now encompasses any male citizen over the age of 18 in a combat zone – has not only skewed reporting figures, but given license to more indiscriminate targeting.

Not one to cut the Pakistani government any slack, Ahmed says that it is in the interest of the United States as well as Pakistani authorities to lowball the figures. Pakistani officials would want to minimise public anger and outrage, and reporting militant deaths plays well to this particular stance.

“The Pakistani government doesn’t even make an effort to confirm the identity or category of the victims. I’ve asked people in FATA. They confirm that no one from the Pakistani government/military ever visits after an attack to confirm who the actual victims were. It’s convenient to declare them all ‘militant’,” said Ahmed.

Members of PTI party protest US operation in Abbottabad, near Peshawar Press Club on May 14. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jun 28 2012 (IPS)

Despite President Barack Obama’s stated policy of using foreign aid to improve public perception of the United States in Pakistan, two major new reports suggest that U.S. policies are exacerbating an already soured relationship.

According to the non-profit Pew Research Center, nearly three-quarters of Pakistanis today “consider the U.S. an enemy”. That number has risen repeatedly over the past several years, from 64 percent in 2009 to 69 percent in 2011 to 74 percent in 2012.

Just eight percent of Pakistanis say they view the U.S. as a partner.

Further, the report, released on Wednesday, notes that a full 35 percent of respondents said that improving relations with the United States is unimportant, up 13 points from last year.

These figures stand in stark contrast to the Pew’s findings on how Pakistanis view China. Nearly 90 percent of those polled saw China as a partner, and just two percent as an enemy.

The view of the U.S. is even more critical than that of India, Pakistan’s traditional nemesis. A full 22 percent reported having a favourable view of India, up from just 14 percent last year.

More importantly, even as a majority (59 percent) name India as Pakistan’s greatest threat – well more than the Taliban (23 percent) or Al-Qaeda (4) – nearly two-thirds of Pakistanis say that it is important to improve relations with India. A similar number support greater bilateral trade and continued talks between the two countries.

For many observers, it is hard to see these numbers as anything but a repudiation of President Obama’s policies in Pakistan.

Only 17 percent, for instance, back U.S. drone strikes, a programme that has massively expanded under President Obama.

Despite Obama’s stated – and largely successful – aim of improving the view of the United States around the world, “Pakistan is the only country where ratings for Obama are no better than the ratings President George W. Bush received during his final year in office,” according to another Pew report released in mid-June.

Security focus

Beyond the drone issue, much of Pakistani public perception of the U.S. is driven by U.S. foreign aid to the country, both military and civilian – particularly the breakdown between those two.

In October 2009, months after President Obama took over power, the U.S. Congress voted to triple civilian assistance to Pakistan, amounting to some 7.5 billion dollars through 2014.

This constituted a significant turnaround from the approach of the previous decade – since the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001 – under which U.S. military assistance in Pakistan was double the civilian funding.

According to a new report released on Wednesday by the International Crisis Group (ICG), a watchdog based in Brussels, “Lopsided focus on security aid after the 11 September 2011 attacks has not delivered counter-terrorism dividends, but entrenched the military’s control over state institutions and policy, delaying reforms and aggravating Pakistani public perceptions that the U.S. is only interested in investing in a security client.”

Thus, the 2009 bill’s goal, as supported by President Obama, was to significantly increase U.S. support for civilian institutions.

Yet in fact, ICG’s researchers note, the attempt to diversify away from a security-heavy budget has not lived up to the initial plans. Thus far, the goal of providing 1.5 billion dollars per year has fallen short by around a third, by 414 million dollars in fiscal year 2011 and by an estimated 500 million dollars in FY2012.

In fact, during that time, the United States’ civilian foreign-aid agency, USAID, has reportedly begun to cut back on its Pakistan programmes.

Further, ICG warns that the space in which USAID, as well as international and Pakistani NGOs it funds, has to work has been “shrinking as a result of the Obama administration’s aid policy”.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani military, supported by the civilian bureaucracy, is said to have strengthened its oversight of aid delivery.

Still, while the deteriorating bilateral relationship has led U.S. lawmakers to call for a significant – or complete – reduction in assistance for Pakistan, ICG cautions against retaliatory cutting of development funding.

“Re-orientation of funding from military security purposes to long-term democracy and capacity building support is the best way to guarantee the West’s and Pakistan’s long-term interests in a dangerous region,” the report concludes. “But aid policies must be better targeted, designed and executed.”

Indeed, according to the Pew report, around four in 10 Pakistanis view both U.S. economic and military aid as “mostly negative”.

Turning that around, ICG suggests, will entail looking beyond the inherently short-term view of a security mindset, including giving USAID “a greater say in devising foreign policy development goals and reset(ting) the priorities of civilian assistance to focus on democratic strengthening, capacity building, economic growth and civilian law enforcement.”

Such policy prescriptions are echoed in a new open letter, released last week, sent to the U.S. State Department from Nancy Birdsall, the president of the Center for Global Development, a think tank here in Washington that has been tracking the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in the aftermath of the 2009 legislation.

Birdsall writes that, in formulating aid packages for Pakistan, Washington officials need to adopt “a greater emphasis on elements of the machinery of democracy that are independent of government”.

In a nod to the Pew’s findings, ICG also suggests allowing local organisations to decide how and even whether to publicly trumpet a project’s links to USAID.

As President Barack Obama’s administration becomes further enmeshed in what many are calling an undeclared war in Yemen, observers here are urging the government to broaden its policy approach to the country beyond counterterrorism.

“This is not a state that has failed, but rather a state that faces considerable challenges – and the time left to work with Yemen on starting to turn this around is limited,” Barbara Bodine, a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, said here on Tuesday.

“It will take the international community and specifically the United States having a much broader focus of where we are putting our assistance. It needs to be broader and longer term, focused far more on stability and sustainability challenges rather than focusing solely on the security challenges.”

Bodine, speaking at a panel discussion organised by the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, said that over a half-century of relations, the U.S. has never decided on what sort of relationship it wants with Yemen.

Today, Yemen’s 26 million people find themselves saddled with an unemployment rate of nearly 40 percent, still higher among the youth. One of the poorest countries in the region despite an oil-dependent economy, Yemen last week was singled out by several humanitarian groups warning that 40 percent of the country’s children are on the edge of chronic malnutrition – the second highest such rate in the world.

Over the decades, “U.S. attention and assistance has waxed and waned, buffeted by events that have often had very little bearing on Yemen itself,” Bodine said.

“Our economic assistance swings wildly, our military assistance has been very erratic, and our diplomatic rhetoric towards Yemen has also been inconsistent. Beyond clichéd incantations of current policy dynamics – and the most current is, of course, counterterrorism – the U.S. has had a hard time finding why and whether we need to be there.”

On Monday, a group of Washington policy analysts, including Bodine, sent an open letter to President Obama, noting that “A broader approach that places emphasis on the underlying economic and political problems will better serve the stability of Yemen and, accordingly, (U.S.) national security interests, rather than a primary focus on counterterrorism efforts and direct military involvement.”

It continues: “The US should recalibrate its economic and governance assistance so that it represents a greater proportion of overall assistance compared with military and security assistance. The US needs to ensure that its focus is on achieving long-term goals, not only short-term objectives.”

Quicksand

To a great extent, the United States’ short-term, invariably security-focused approach to Yemen has been epitomised by the Obama administration’s ratcheting-up of drone strikes in Yemen over the past four months. Their aim is Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Yemeni wing of the terror network.

On Monday, a U.S. drone reportedly killed three AQAP members near the southern port of Aden. The strikes were the first time the United States has launched attacks in the province and constituted the 24th drone assault in Yemen this year, according to the Long War Journal, a reputed blog focused on the “war on terror”.

According to the same source, this is more than the 23 such attacks in Pakistan this year, despite the latter having received far more coverage and public criticism.

Yet much as in Pakistan, the public’s strengthening resentment at drone strikes – particularly the killing of civilians – in Yemen suggests to many that the consequences of such attacks are outweighing the benefits.

The open letter to President Obama also highlights this issue, urging the U.S. government to “Reevaluate (the) strategy of drone strikes with the recognition that this approach is generating significant anti-American sentiment and could strengthen the appeal of extremist groups.”

Indeed, AQAP has reportedly tripled in size since drone strikes in Yemen began in 2009.

Those attacks have been ramped up particularly since this February, when the country’s new president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Al-Hadi, took over power. That event was a major turning point in the country’s tenuous and ongoing transition from the three-and-a-half-decade rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh.

“What’s happening is that both President Hadi and President Obama are getting rather deep into a mutually dependent relationship,” Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen scholar at Princeton University and another signatory to the open letter, said on Tuesday.

When Hadi came to power, Johnsen says, he did not have a very deep support base in Yemen, and hence needed significant support from the U.S. and the international community. At the same time, the U.S. needs Hadi in order to continue its targeting of AQAP.

“Despite everything that President Obama and his staff has attempted to do, I think it finds itself in real danger of being in exactly the position today that it wanted to avoid in 2009 – that is, being in an open-ended conflict in Yemen against Al-Qaeda with no real way of knowing whether it’s winning,” Johnsen says.

“In fact, if you look at certain barometres, it seems that it’s losing – the more it tries, the more it is sucked deeper into this quicksand.”

Last week, for the first time, President Obama admitted in a letter to Congress that the U.S. military had carried out “a limited number” of strikes against AQAP. Beyond this, however, there has been almost no officially confirmed information on what is increasingly looking like a full-blown war in Yemen.

“If this war is worth waging, it’s worth waging openly. And it’s worth having a strategy with a clearly defined, achievable goal,” argue commentators Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman in a recent essay for the Danger Room blog.

“Does anyone know what that is in Yemen? Is it the end of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula? The containment of AQAP? A functional Yemeni government that can fight AQAP without U.S. aid? We’ve gotten so used to fighting in the shadows for so long, we barely even ask our leadership what victory looks like.”

They are unpopular all over the world, with one exception. According to a new Pew Research Center poll, the only country where a majority of citizens support drone strikes is the country that uses the new technology most regularly: the United States.

Only 28 percent of U.S. citizens oppose drone strikes, compared to 62 percent who approve of their use. Once again, they prove the exception to the rule.

Armed Predator drone firing a Hellfire missile. Credit: Public domain

As Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt write in alternating chapters in their terrifying new book “Terminator Planet”, drones have been part of U.S. exceptionalism from their very beginning. They were introduced in the late 1990s to conduct surveillance during the Kosovo conflict, and they soon became a major element of the U.S. dominance of airspace.

As the two authors point out, even before the introduction of drones, U.S. pilots had such overwhelming air superiority that Pentagon chief Robert Gates, in a 2011 speech, could declare that the United States hadn’t lost a plane during air combat or a soldier from enemy aircraft attack in 40 years.

With a persistent economic crisis putting cost-cutting pressure on the Pentagon budget, drones have become a low-cost method of preserving U.S. military dominance and thus the status of the United States as the single global superpower. As Engelhardt points out, drones are an integral part of “guarding the empire on the cheap as well as on the sly, via the CIA.”

But drones have played another key role in extending the tradition of U.S. exceptionalism. The Barack Obama administration, inheriting the counter-terrorism programme from its predecessor, expanded the use of drones to kill top Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

“No more poison-dart-tipped umbrellas, as in past KGB operations, or toxic cigars as in CIA ones – not now that assassination has taken to the skies as an everyday, all-year-round activity,” writes Engelhardt.

The United States has asserted its right to conduct these assassinations outside of war zones in the face of global public opinion, U.N. reports, and international law.

In this collection of essays that originally appeared on the TomDispatch website, Nick Turse provides a comprehensive mapping of the new drone world the Pentagon and the CIA have created. The Reapers and Predators and Global Hawks take off from the al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the bases at Incirlik in Turkey and Sigonella in Italy, from new sites in Djibouti and Ethiopia and the Seychelles, across Afghanistan, and now even in Asia.

The military has come to rely more and more on the new technology. One in three military aircraft are robots. In 2004, Reapers flew 71 hours. In 2006, this number had gone up to 3,123 hours. By 2009, the flying time had increased to 25,391 hours.

With manpower tied up in operations in Afghanistan, anti-base movements challenging large concentrations of U.S. soldiers abroad, and bureaucrats in Washington desperately looking for places to cut the U.S. budget, drones appear as an attractive alternative.

“We are moving toward an ever greater outsourcing of war to things that cannot protest, cannot vote with their feet (or wings), and for whom there is no ‘home front’ or even a home at all,” Engelhardt observes.

The global unpopularity of drones stems in large part from their fallibility. The pilots and screeners viewing the footage from the safety of bases in the United States make a lot of mistakes and end up killing a lot of civilians, several hundred in Pakistan alone, including nearly 200 children.

So far, U.S. citizens are immune to these effects of drones. They have been reassured by the Obama administration that drones surgically remove the cancer and leave the surrounding healthy tissue intact.

Moreover, the United States continues to maintain a major technological edge in the research and development of drones. The risk of a drone attack on the United States remains low, though the George W. Bush administration justified its attack on Iraq in part on the belief that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction against the United States via drones.

But drone attacks have also generated enormous anti-U.S. sentiment, as the Pew poll suggests. The Times Square bomber, whose car bomb failed to detonate in Times Square in New York in 2010, was motivated to act in part because of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.

Also, other countries – Israel, Russia, China, even Iran – have entered the drone business. It may only be a matter of time before the United States loses its dominant market share.

Turse and Engelhardt are divided on the question of whether drones represent a fundamental revolution in military affairs or simply an extension of an earlier trend toward air superiority.

“Such machines are not, of course, advanced cyborgs,” Engelhardt writes. “They are in some ways not even all that advanced.”

Moreover, modern air defence systems can rather easily bring down these drones. They have been effective only in places where they are largely unchallenged.

On the other hand, in the same way that the exponential growth of the web not only revolutionised communication but transformed the way humans think, drones may well be precipitating a change in how the United States, and increasingly the rest of the world, is thinking about war and national boundaries. The two authors describe various futuristic scenarios that pit autonomous drones, preprogrammed to target and fight, against each other.

In one of these scenarios, drawn from a Pentagon document titled the “Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, FY 2011-2036,” U.S. drones detect and neutralise other drones tampering with an undersea oil pipeline off the coast of West Africa. This projection into the future of drones anticipates that the United States maintains its lead in drone technology.

The other scenario that the authors return to again and again is from Hollywood: the “Terminator” movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg sent from the future to the present to kill the woman who would eventually give birth to a rebel leader. That leader, John Connor, is in charge of the human resistance to the robots that rule the planet.

The Pentagon is betting on the first scenario. Turse and Engelhardt are concerned that a naïve faith in technology, a consistent belief in U.S. exceptionalism, and the exponential spread of drones around the world may well bring about a world much closer to Hollywood’s nightmare vision.

British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith joins the campaign against Drones. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, May 17 2012 (IPS)

Growing numbers of activists are beginning to counter U.S. Drone attacks into Pakistani territory. The activists are confronting the U.S., but increasingly now the Pakistani government for allowing such attacks to continue.

The Tehreek Insaf party led by former Pakistani cricket captain Imran Khan first stepped up the political heat against the Drones. Civil society groups, including Pakistani lawyers, and now also groups from the U.S. and Britain have joined the campaign.

“We believe Drone strikes are illegal according to international law because they kill innocent people,” Imran Khan told IPS from Islamabad. “The U.S. or any other country has no right to violate frontiers of an independent state.”

The cricketer-turned-politician blames the Pakistani government for its “indifference” to the killing of innocent tribesmen in the Drone attacks. “They have sold out our sovereignty to our enemies.”

“A Drone attack killed the first ever head of outlawed Tehreek Taliban, Neik Mohammad Wazir in 2004,” Prof Ziaullah at the Government College in Charsadda, one of 25 districts of the border state Khyber Pakhtunkhwa told IPS. “But lately attacks have assumed political dimensions largely due to Khan’s protests.”

Those began on Apr. 23 last year when Tehreek Insaf activists blocked the road to NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) vehicles in Hayatabad town for two days. U.S.-led NATO attacks on two checkpoints in Salala Mohmand Agency earlier this year which killed 28 soldiers sparked off mass protests, forcing the government to halt NATO supplies to Afghanistan through Pakistan.

On Mar. 13, the National Assembly passed a resolution against Drone strikes in the border areas. Civil society activists are now pressuring the Pakistani government to do more to block such attacks.

The Foundation for Fundamental Rights (FFR), a Pakistan based legal charity, filed two constitutional petitions last week before the Peshawar High Court against the Federation of Pakistan, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defence among others for failure to stop the attacks on Pakistan.

One petition is on behalf of victims of a Drone strike on members of a Jirga (council) on Mar. 17 last year. The second petition was filed by Noor Khan, whose father Malik Daud Khan, head of the North Waziristan Loya Jirga, was assassinated along with 50 other tribal elders and others last year by CIA operated Drones.

Shahzad Akbar acting on behalf of the victims told media representatives at the launch of the petition that Malik Daud Khan was a respected member of the local community and head of the North Waziristan Loya Jirga, a peaceful council of local elders. He is arguing that such attacks are illegal.

British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith also addressed the press conference. “The first role of any government must be to protect its own citizens from harm, when they are innocent of any crime,” Smith said. “If my child were killed by a Predator Drone in the English countryside, I would expect there to be very serious and immediate consequences. A Pakistani child should enjoy the same protection.”

Smith, whose organisation Reprieve is reported to have helped secure the release of 65 prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, said: “We can kill people without any risk to ourselves and that’s why the politicians like it.”

FFR works with Reprieve in campaigning on behalf of Drone victims. Reprieve has filed a similar petition in London seeking an end to the involvement of British secret services in Drone strikes in Pakistan. Reprieve and FFR have also filed a complaint before the UN Human Rights Council.

As of May 6, in all 2,193 people have been killed in 230 Drone strikes in Pakistan’s border regions of North and South Waziristan. Most of those killed have been Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders who had taken refuge after dismissal of their government in Kabul.

According to official information from the U.S., 831 were killed in 90 attacks in 2010, up from 536 in 46 attacks in 2009. In 2011, 548 were killed in 59 attacks. This year 110 have been killed in 15 attacks, all in North Waziristan.

U.S. officials say the region is now the international headquarters of Al-Qaeda. John Brennan, the top counter-terrorism adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama told a meeting in Washington early this month that rigorous standards were applied to such attacks, and they were being carried out with laser-like precision.

He said nothing in international law prohibits the U.S. from using lethal force against enemies outside of an active battlefield.

Activists are challenging such claims. Nancy Maneiar, a peace activist with the U.S.-based anti-war Code Pink Group told a meeting in Washington Saturday last week, “We apologise to the people of Pakistan for the strikes that have killed so many civilians. The CIA needs to be held accountable for their strikes.” (END)

Grasshoppers and other insects might become the next generation of drones, if researchers with the Israeli research centre Technion who are studying the movements of these insects succeed. Ultimately, they hope to be able to remotely control where the insects fly.

Since their introduction more than a half-century ago, drones have dramatically increased in complexity, as the Israeli research would suggest. But they also remain as controversial as they are fascinating, as a new book by Medea Benjamin launched in New York in early May, “Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control,” demonstrates.

The book is the result of in-depth research on drones, their proliferation and their impact on civilians. It also presents an overview of the controversy surrounding, opposition to and activism against this technology. Benjamin is an activist in and leader of the peace movement and the struggle for human rights and social justice.

Today, fifty countries have acquired regular drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, for either military or civilian use, or for research purposes, says Benjamin. The U.S. Army introduced drones during World War II and the Korean War, but it was not until the Vietnam War that drones were used to gather intelligence.

During the Balkan Wars in the 1990s, the Predator drone –the most common type of unmanned aircraft – was equipped with its own satellite communications system, which was used to gather information on refugee flows and Serbian air defences.

The first ‘killer drones’

During the NATO Kosovo campaign in 1999, however, drones were equipped with missiles, “transforming them from spy planes into killer drones”, Benjamin writes.

Drones currently serve a wide range of purposes, and the title of one chapter in Benjamin’s book aptly reflects the proliferation of drone technology: “Here a drone, there a drone, everywhere a drone”.

The U.S. police use drones to track drug smugglers and to monitor the U.S.-Mexican border, while German police sent out an unmanned vehicle the size of a child’s toy airplane during an anti-nuclear march in 2010.

U.S. “killer drones”, however, have been in use since 2002, primarily in Afghanistan, and since 2004 they have been used in Pakistan. They are also used in Yemen.

In Pakistan, there have been 321 drone strikes since then (as of May 2, 2012), only 52 of which occurred under the administration of former president George W. Bush. An astonishing 269 have been carried under the Obama administration, who took office in 2009.

While the United States has claimed that 175 Al Qaeda suspects are hiding in Pakistan, drone strikes there have killed more than 3,000 people, mostly civilians.

These numbers were presented during the book’s launch by Shazad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer, activist and head of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, which has conducted research in Pakistan and is trying to obtain compensation from the United States for the families of the unintended victims of drone strikes.

The failures of ‘precision’ weapons

In his talk, Akbar made clear that high-technology precision arms are not always as precise as they’re proclaimed to be. He brought up several examples of whole families that had been blown up by U.S. drones.

The “collateral damage” – military speech for unintended killings – is only one of many objections to drones listed by Benjamin and Akbar.

Another area of concern is the bypassing of legal and judicial instruments, where instead of arresting suspects and bringing them to court, the United States simply kills them.

Akbar told the story of a man called Tarik, an Al Qaeda suspect who was killed by a drone in Pakistan’s capital city of Islamabad. “Tarik was only one mile away from the U.S. embassy. He could have been arrested and even be tortured in Guantanamo, at least that would have saved his life,” Akbar pointed out somewhat sarcastically.

“This is just racist,” Benjamin said, adding that the U.S. government thought it was legitimate to kill non- U.S. citizens in order to save the lives of its own people.

Whether drones are necessary for national security is a hotly contested idea, with opponents arguing that drones actually increase the danger for the United States in several ways, one of which is by turning people against the country.

In her book, Benjamin also deals with the issue of the legality of unmanned aerial vehicles.

According to Benjamin, former president George W. Bush deemed it a legal tool in the nation’s war on terror. Under President Obama, the U.S. drone program, overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has been stepped up significantly.

“It breaks my heart to see how we have let Barack Obama get away with operating beyond the confines of international law,” Benjamin said during the book launch.

Only recently did John Brennan, the U.S. official in charge of counterterrorism, formally admit that the United States engages in attacks using armed drones.

According to Brennan, who spoke on April 30 at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington, the drone programme is “legal”, “ethical” and “wise”.

He added that the United States was respecting national sovereignty and international law, but he refused to apologise for civilian killings resulting from attacks by this deadly weapon.

(END)