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US fails to prevent deadly drone strikes as promised
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Last month, Faisal bin Ali Jaber traveled from his home in Yemen to Washington, DC, to ask why a United States drone had fired missiles at, and killed, his brother-in-law, a cleric who had spoken out against Al Qaeda.
Also killed in the attack was Jaber’s nephew, a police officer who had come to offer protection to his uncle. US Congressional representatives and government officials met Jaber and expressed their condolences, but provided no explanations. Nor has the US admitted that it made a mistake.
A week later, General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr, the US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, did apologize for a drone attack that killed a child and seriously wounded two women in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.
The incident’s timing was particularly unfortunate, as it coincided with efforts to reach an agreement to keep a residual deployment of US troops in Afghanistan beyond the planned 2014 departure of foreign combat forces.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai had referred to civilian casualties caused by US forces as a reason for not signing the agreement.
“For years,” Karzai said in a statement issued after the strike, “our people are being killed and their houses are being destroyed under the pretext of the war on terror.”
Real civilian casualties
The war on terror is real enough, and not just a pretext, but so are the civilian casualties that have been occurring for years.
Before Barack Obama became president, he argued that because the US did not have enough troops on the ground in Afghanistan, it was “air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.”
As Karzai’s statement shows, the problems have not gone away. Nor have they been limited to Afghanistan. Civilian casualties caused by the US have been a major source of difficulties in US-Pakistan relations as well.
In September, Ben Emmerson, the United Nations special envoy on human rights and counterterrorism, reported that the US had caused at least 400 civilian deaths in Pakistan, with another 200 of those killed being “probable noncombatants.” (Apart from the problem of knowing who was killed, there is the separate question of how, in a war with no armies, one defines a combatant. Does cooking for militants warrant being killed?)
In May, in a speech at the National Defense University, Obama defended America’s use of drones. Obama acknowledged that innocent people had been killed in US drone attacks, but defended the strikes on the grounds that by eliminating Al Qaeda operatives, they have disrupted terrorist plots and saved lives.
Obama did, however, promise a change of policy, indicating that before any strike was undertaken, he would require “near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set.”
Since that speech, the frequency of strikes in Yemen and Pakistan has declined, but civilian casualties have continued, albeit at a lower rate. The “near-certainty” standard appears not to have been met.
The Obama administration’s refusal to apologize to Faisal bin Ali Jaber, or even to explain what went wrong, indicates that this promise has yet to be fulfilled.
Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and laureate professor at the University of Melbourne. His books include “Animal Liberation,” “Practical Ethics,” “One World,” and “The Life You Can Save.” He should not be confused with Peter W Singer, of the Brookings Institution, the author of “Wired for War.” Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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