By: Tom Parker, Policy Director for Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Human Rights at Amnesty International USA
The New York Times reported that the US military has killed more than 400 militants in 80 drone strikes for the loss of only 20 civilian casualties.As modern warfare becomes more and more like the hit videogame of the same name, those with their fingers on the trigger can’t just close their eyes and put their faith in technology.
The New York Times reported on Friday that in the past two years the US military
has killed more than 400 militants in 80 drone strikes for the loss of only 20
civilian casualties.
Pentagon sources credit the increased sophistication of modern weapons systems
and intelligence collection platforms for this record of success. This is a
bold claim and one that Amnesty International has been trying to investigate
on the ground in a very hostile operational environment.
At present, reliable facts are hard to come by. However, we can say with the
confidence derived from hard-earned experience that these numbers are unlikely
to stand up to scrutiny. A similar conflict in which airborne platforms have
been used by a sophisticated modern military to target insurgent and other armed
groups is the second Intifada which engulfed the Gaza Strip in September 2000.
Between September 2000 and September 2002 Israel’s intelligence-led policy
of targeted killing, claimed the lives of approximately eighty Palestinian militants
and fifty innocent bystanders.
In one well-documented incident in July 2002 the Israelis dropped a laser-guided
bomb on a house occupied by Hamas official Salah Shahada. Shahada was killed
along with thirteen others, ten of whom were children.
This was a sophisticated program with significant prior action review that killed
two civilians for every three militants. Bare in mind this is an environment
and target with which the Israelis were intimately familiar and on which they
possessed excellent intelligence. Both factors are absent from US drone operations
in Pakistan.
The United States also has a well-established track record of overstating the
effectiveness of its aerial operations. At the end of the 1999 air war in Kosovo
US Secretary of Defense William Cohen claimed that the US had crippled the Serb
military, destroying half of the Serb Army’s artillery and a third of
its armored vehicles.
The United States Air Force after-action review team that spent months combing
the territory of Kosovo to find evidence to support only 58 out of 744 supposedly
confirmed hits – 32 destroyed armored vehicles, not the 340 claimed, and
20 destroyed artillery pieces, not 450.
The claim made by Defense Department sources in the New York Times is that
the technology has improved to a point that there is almost no room for error.
Yet friendly fire incidents and wrongful targeting have been commonplace features
of the conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan – as a recent scandal in
Germany illustrates all too well.
In September 2009 German NATO troops called in an air strike on two petrol
tankers that killed as many as 90 people near the town of Kunduz. German officials
initially reported that all 90 casualties were Taliban insurgents but were forced
to retract this claim and admit dozens of civilian fatalities.
A German government minister and a senior general were forced to resign for
the roles they played in the attempted cover-up.
This was hardly an isolated incident. In November 2008 a US airstrike killed
as many as 37 wedding guests, including 23 children, at a family celebration
in Shah Wali Kot district of Kandahar.
This is one of several incidents in which wedding parties have been mistakenly
targeted with dozens of innocent victims killed each time. On at least two occasions
in Afghanistan US aircraft have even engaged and killed Canadian NATO troops.
So what do you think? The reports of the clinical efficiency of the drone campaign
come from the same Department of Defense that in January 2009 issued a statement
claiming that as many as 61 former inmates of Guantanamo had "returned
to terrorism."
On closer inspection this number proved to consist of 18 supposedly confirmed
cases and 43 suspected cases. It next emerged that the DoD was defining ‘terrorism’
so broadly that 8 of those on the list were accused of nothing more than making
critical statements about US detention policy.
The final figure for the number of confirmed cases in which former GTMO detainees
have subsequently been engaged in terrorist activities, including support functions
such as recruitment, comes out at 15 – a quarter of the original figure
put out by the DoD.
History teaches us that the claim that US drone strikes have killed only one
civilian for every twenty combatants is unlikely to be true. But of greater
concern is the apparent hubris behind the claim itself.
The fog of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan has not dissipated. If anything,
the situation on the ground is as confused as it has ever been. Mistakes have
been made and will continue to be made.
As modern warfare becomes more and more like the hit videogame of the same
name, those with their fingers on the trigger can’t just close their eyes
and put their faith in technology. It will let them down, as it has every warrior
before them, and innocent civilians will pay the price.