The US has released, for the first time, its breakdown of who was killed in a total of 473 drone strikes between 2009 and 2015 carried out in what the Obama administration terms ‘places that are not active warzones’. The figures, which apply to Pakistan, Libya and Yemen, state that 64-116 civilians and up to 2, 581 combatants were killed in drone strikes. There are many problems with this report – all of which stem from the use of drone warfare – beginning with the very premise of the report. The US might believe that such places are not warzones because its own troops are not fighting pitched battles there. But by lobbing bombs from the sky it is, according to all precepts of international law, waging unilateral war in these countries. Our tribal areas, and Libya and Yemen may not be warzones for US troops but the residents of these places may have different views. The second problem is with the US definition of combatants. A New York Times report in 2012 revealed that the US counts every military-age male killed in a drone strike as a militant unless it is conclusively proven otherwise. This shows the collective guilt applied to people living in these areas, which is surely borne out of a belief that they are all terrorists unless proven otherwise. Many of those listed as combatants are actually civilians killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There are other reasons to doubt the veracity of the numbers. Those who are not as self-interested as the US government in massaging the figures have come up with very different totals. A 2013 study by Stanford University and New York University claimed that only two percent of drone attacks hit their intended targets while the Bureau of Investigative Journalism claimed that from nearly 3,000 casualties in drone strikes from 2004-2012 the victims included at least 880 civilians; and that since Obama took office in 2008 there had been at least 360 civilian killings. Even the lowest independent estimate of the timeframe considered by the report by the New America Foundation and Long War Journal put civilian deaths at 250. None of this will be enough to get the US to reconsider its wanton violation of human rights and the blowback that creates in the form of increased radicalisation. No number of condemnations at the international fora will get the US to stop violating international law so blatantly. The war machine must be fed and so drone attacks will continue and the data will be manipulated to support the waging of further war.https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/132505-Droning-lies
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