Caution: Blue Skies Ahead

Published in

RealPolitics

7 min readAug 23, 2016

Why Drones are Not the Solution

Photo Credit: Paul Ridgeway, US Air Force

One of the most controversial discussions within the realm of defense and foreign policy is that of the use of drones. While factions exist on both sides of the issue, one unanimous conclusion is that the direction our nation decides to take with drone policy will shape our nation’s international identity. RealPolitics will explore both sides of the argument; today, Jack Fitzgerald offers an argument against drones.

In a field in Pakistan, on the day before Eid, a 13 year-old boy was helping his grandmother pick okra for the holiday. Breathing in the warm July air, the boy looked around to admire the blue skies, the lush green fields, and the flowers in the mountains. Then, suddenly, the ground shook. Black smoke shot into the air. A rod of shrapnel flew into the boy’s leg. By the time the dust settled, his grandmother had been lost.

That boy’s name is Zubair Rehman, and that explosion was a drone strike. On October 29, 2013, he came before the House of Representatives to tell his story. He testified:

“I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey. And for a short period of time, the mental tension and fear eases. When the skies brighten, though, the drones return and so too does the fear.”

His story left the room in silence, and the translator in tears. However, the American people paid no heed. Of the 435 members of the House, a mere 5 showed up to the hearing. 58% of Americans continue to support drone strikes, a war strategy which has now become a defining cornerstone of President Obama’s foreign policy. Essentially, Americans are convinced drones are the solution. Zubair would beg to differ.

Channeling the predominant American position, Hunter Frase recently published an article championing drones as a ‘practical solution’ to foreign warfare. He argues that drone strikes see relatively low rates of civilian casualties and present unique benefits to the US military; however, reality speaks to the contrary.

The article’s primary claim is that drone strikes see lower levels of civilian casualties than other forms of warfare, such as manned strikes and ground-based warfare. To back this up, the article cites a database from the New America Foundation which had found the civilian casualty rate of drone strikes to be 20%. That is certainly a low figure compared to other forms of warfare, but this figure is incredibly questionable. That database documented only reported drone strikes within Pakistan, which presents two major problems in methodology. First, Pakistan sees, at most, 43% of US drone strikes, so the database fails to account for 57% of all drone activity. Second, a vast number of drone strikes go unreported.

When those two methodology issues are eliminated, a much more realistic, and much higher, rate of civilian casualties is found. The Intercept is an independent news organization dedicated to reporting government information from whistleblowers, and in October of 2015, they obtained a cache of secret government files which documented the US military’s kill and capture operations between 2011 and 2013, a crucial period in the development of the drone war. Their publication solves for the two major methodology issues of the New America Foundation database, because it details US drone operations in all countries, and doesn’t rely on local sources to report whether there had been a strike, because the government reports directly confirm the strike.

When this more comprehensive methodology is utilized, the results are shocking. The publication found that the civilian casualty rate of drone strikes is as high as 90%. That figure is higher than the civilian casualty rate of any US military operation analyzed in Frase’s article, even surpassing the 75% civilian casualty rate of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

It isn’t difficult to understand why drones kill so many civilians. It is nearly impossible to perfectly see your target from 35,000 feet, and, under current law, targets don’t even have to be specifically identified. Basically, we don’t always know who we’re killing, and even when we do, our targets aren’t usually true threats to national security. Current drone protocol requires proof that a given target presents an “imminent threat,” but according to Justice Department memos on the enforcement of drone protocol, the verification of an ‘imminent threat’ “does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” That’s just as much an affront to human rights as it is to the definition of the word ‘imminent’.

Intentional killings aren’t even the biggest worry in drone strike deaths. In fact, the vast majority of deaths in drone strikes are collateral and/or accidental. Reprieve, a UK-based human rights advocacy group, released a study in November of 2014 which analyzed drone strike deaths in Yemen and Pakistan (an analysis field representing over 60% of all US drone activity) between November 2002 and August 2014. They found that though only 41 people had been targeted in drone strikes, 1147 people had been killed, meaning that over 96% of all drone deaths in the analysis were accidental. Further, they found that these 41 targets ‘died’ in attacks over and over again before they were actually confirmed to be killed, suggesting that even when we think we know who we’re killing, we might not have the slightest idea.

It would be nice to think that targeted killings are indeed ‘targeted’. However, all the evidence, research, and stories of those who have seen their families and friends unjustly killed before their eyes paint a picture of a much more dismal reality.

The article further asserts that drone warfare presents a unique benefit to the US military by saving lives in manned airstrikes. However, though drone strikes do save lives in the immediate short term, they force us to pay an even steeper price down the line- the creation of terrorism itself.

The vast majority of Muslims are not inclined to align with terrorists. The only way to get peaceful, law-abiding citizens to join terrorists is to give them some common ground, and drone strikes create that common ground. They provide tangibility to the anti-West ideology that groups like ISIL and al-Qaeda peddle, becoming one of the biggest selling points of ISIL’s recruitment message.

Evidence seems to support the idea that drone strikes create more danger than peace. Former State Department official Nabeel Khoury once estimated that every terrorist killed in a drone strike creates 40–60 new enemies. Documented evidence indeed indicates that terrorist attacks, and deaths in terrorist attacks, have seen major upticks since Obama’s expansion of drone strikes:

At the end of the day, even though drone strikes on net save the lives of 109 American pilots per year, the hatred they breed has fueled a terrorist group which, in a period of just 2 years, has killed 4229 soldiers(see references), on top of 18,802 civilians in Iraq and Syria alone.

When people abroad see the stars and stripes on our soldiers’ uniforms, they don’t see the pride, the freedom, or the bravery; they see the red of blood spilled, the whites of eyes rolled into the back of the head, and the blues of unjustly losing loved ones. Against that flag, they’re proud to fight. In their shoes, wouldn’t you be?

All this barely scratches the surface of the terror drones have instilled into the everyday lives of those whose heads they hover over. Zubair said it best:

“I know Americans think drones are the answer. But I wish they could understand how I and other children in my community see drones. Drones terrify us. We used to play outside all of the time. Now, when we step outside to play, we hear the scary buzz from above and run back inside… People are afraid to even leave their houses, much less travel great distances… There are few schools in my community, but now many children have stopped going to the few that exist. This is a big problem in my community as what everyone really wants and needs is education. But education isn’t possible as long as the drones circle overhead.”

Our drone policies have made people fear the sky. Children can’t play outside or go to school because they’re afraid that, in a flash of fire and smoke, they will become just another part of the statistics. These are not numbers, they are people- and as we consider policies for the future, that’s something we can’t forget.

Most Americans have never heard Zubair’s story- but for our country, for our world, and for children like Zubair, it is a story we can never allow to be forgotten.

Caution: Blue Skies Ahead

References

Written by Jack Fitzgerald