End the 'Drone War'

Stop the murder of innocent people!

The killing of individuals whose names are unknown, against whom no evidence has been provided, and who are able neither to surrender nor identify themselves as friendly to unmanned aerial robots is surely a hideous manifestation of the increasing depravity of the ever-expanding "Global War on Terror". While the ongoing atrocities in Waziristan are a gross moral failure for the United States, they are also an abdication of the basic duty of the Pakistani government to protect its citizenry and its sovereignty.

Over the past three years, the steady buzzing of Predator drones overhead has become a grim and terrifying fact of life for many residents of Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (KP). So pervasive is the sense of fear that doctors there report a huge upsurge in the usage of tranquilisers and sleeping pills among the civilian population. Drone strikes are believed to have been responsible for the deaths of a conservatively estimated 2,283 individuals over this period, and the injuries of thousands more.

The CIA-administered drone programme has operated largely in the shadows, and has led to what can only be described as a culture of impunity and wantonness with regards to the use of deadly force. A recent Wall Street Journal report on the programme revealed that the majority of drone strikes are "signature strikes", described as those in which the targets are large groups of people whose identities are not known. In effect, the CIA is killing large numbers of people by aerial remote control in Pakistan without knowing who they are, and it is in this context in which reports have surfaced detailing heavy civilian casualties among the population of the KP.

The Pakistani government, while publicly denouncing the strikes, in fact both acquiesces to and assists in the facilitation of them, while US counter-terrorism chief John Brennan has stated that in his view there "hasn't been a single collateral death" as a result of the programme. These words and actions from both US and Pakistani officials are indicative of an utter disregard for the observably innocent victims of the drone war. Against this background, a campaign for legal redress and a halt to the bombing has begun.

By the CIA's own admission, drone strikes are often carried out without having any knowledge as to who is being killed. So low is the standard of care and so little is the respect for the lives of the people of Waziristan that simply being an individual travelling at night or standing in a large group is enough warrant to be killed by a Hellfire missile fired by an operator sitting thousands of miles away in suburban Nevada. In a reflection of the attitude with which American drone operators view the people in their target sights, the term for human beings, often apparently innocent, who have been killed on their computer monitors is "bugsplat".

The people living in Pakistan's tribal areas are real people, not faceless, nameless, evil abstractions who can be killed wantonly and forgotten the next day. The KP is one the most isolated and economically neglected corners of the Pakistani state. As such, both the Pakistani and American governments have taken an extremely cavalier attitude towards the deaths of its residents. Casually murdered by remote control planes piloted from across the world, without even a pretense of legal justification, the civilians of Waziristan have little recourse to defend themselves and their families from the industrial-scale carnage which has been unleashed on their region.

It is often said that terrorists have a disregard for the sanctity of human life. By this standard, the actions of the CIA and its Pakistani government enablers certainly fit the description of terrorism. The extrajudicial murder of large numbers of innocent people is not an acceptable by-product of the war in Afghanistan - which itself is largely an elective enterprise today.

The residents of Waziristan are disenfranchised, isolated and neglected by their federal government. Every day the CIA drone war in the KP continues as a travesty and an affront to the basic human right to live free of the threat of murder. Militant activity is the natural by-product of the elective war still being fought in Afghanistan. Punishing and terrorising the civilians of Waziristan for this is a crime, as well as a tactic which will inevitably fuel further conflict.

The time has come to reign in the drone war, wind down the campaign across the border, and to bring to a close this ugly, painful chapter in history.

And, that's the Truth!