The recently-revealed tragic deaths of two Western hostages in drone strikes on a relatively empty housing complex in northern Pakistan near the Afghanistan border underlines that the Obama administration is killing people from the air without knowing who they are and is killing significant numbers of innocent civilians. Just as hostages don’t move around outside so that spy cameras can observe them, so too, in gender-segregated Pushtun society, women are often immured at home and so the CIA or U.S. military who are running the drones do not know if they are in the sights.
Contrary to assurances given by President Obama a couple of years ago, the U.S. government admits that it had no idea who it was targeting when it hit that building. Indiscriminate fire is a recognized war crime, and it seems to characterize the U.S. drone program. These are the figures for the U.S. drone assassination program in Pakistan, according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism:
Total strikes: 415
Obama strikes: 364
Total killed: 2,449-3,949
Civilians killed: 423-962
Children killed: 172-207
Injured: 1,144-1,722
That is, as many as a fourth of those killed by U.S. drone assassinations are non-combatants. Death by drone is inherently lawless. There is no constitutional or legal framework within which the U.S. government can blow people away at will. For a while in the 1970s through 1990s, assassination was outlawed. Now it is back, but has taken this freakish form where bureaucrats thousands of miles away fire missiles from large toy airplanes. The U.S. is not at war with Pakistan, so this action is not part of a war effort. You can’t be at war with an organization—a state of war has a technical legal definition.
The U.S. government maintains that it is only shooting when it sees a high value target. This is a lie. They had no idea who was in the building. The U.S. government maintains that it kills hardly any local civilians with its drone assassinations, whereas journalists on the ground find evidence of substantial non-combatant deaths. The killing of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto was not just a tragedy, it revealed the U.S. assassination technique for the world to see.
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Juan Cole is an academic and commentator on the Middle East and South Asia. He is also Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
Juan R. I. Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three and a half decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context, and he has written widely about Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and South Asia. His books include Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires; The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East; Engaging the Muslim World; and Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East.
