ordinary pakistanis welcome drone attacks to eliminate scourge of taliban and al qaeda
Satish Kumar
Zball (nee Ekball), ordinary people in Pakistan want US drone to
continue with the mission of eliminating extremist militants from
Pakistan. The people of Waziristan are suffering a brutal kind of
occupation under the Taliban and al Qaeda. Therefore, they welcome the
drone attacks
Saturday, January 02, 2010
analysis: Drone attacks: challenging some fabrications —Farhat Taj
There is a deep abyss between the perceptions of the people of
Waziristan, the most drone-hit area and the wider Pakistani society on
the other side of the River Indus. For the latter, the US drone
attacks on Waziristan are a violation of Pakistani’s sovereignty.
Politicians, religious leaders, media analysts and anchorpersons
express sensational clamour over the supposed ‘civilian casualties’ in
the drone attacks. I have been discussing the issue of drone attacks
with hundreds of people of Waziristan. They see the US drone attacks
as their liberators from the clutches of the terrorists into which,
they say, their state has wilfully thrown them. The purpose of today’s
column is, one, to challenge the Pakistani and US media reports about
the civilian casualties in the drone attacks and, two, to express the
view of the people of Waziristan, who are equally terrified by the
Taliban and the intelligence agencies of Pakistan. I personally met
these people in the Pakhtunkhwa province, where they live as
internally displaced persons (IDPs), and in the Federally Administered
Tribal Areas (FATA).
I would challenge both the US and Pakistani media to provide
verifiable evidence of civilian ‘casualties’ because of drone attacks
on Waziristan, i.e. names of the people killed, names of their
villages, dates and locations of the strikes and, above all, the
methodology of the information that they collected. If they can’t meet
the challenge, I would request them to stop throwing around fabricated
figures of ‘civilian casualties’ that confuse people around the world
and provide propaganda material to the pro-Taliban and al Qaeda forces
in the politics and media of Pakistan.
I pose that challenge because no one is in a position to give a
correct estimate of how many individuals have been killed so far in
drone attacks. On the basis of American media estimates, 600 to 700
‘civilian population’ have been killed. The Pakistani government, pro-
Taliban political parties like Jamaat-e-Islami, Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-
Islam, Tehrik-e-Insaf, and the media are quoting the same figure.
Neither the government of Pakistan nor the media have any access to
the area and no system is in place to arrive at precise estimates. The
Pakistani government and media take the figure appearing in the
American media as an admission by the American government. The US
media too do not have access to the area. Moreover, the area is simply
not accessible for any kind of independent journalistic or scholarly
work on drone attacks. The Taliban simply kill anyone doing so.
The reason why these estimates about civilian ‘casualties’ in the US
and Pakistani media are wrong is that after every attack the
terrorists cordon off the area and no one, including the local
villagers, is allowed to come even near the targeted place. The
militants themselves collect the bodies, burry the dead and then issue
the statement that all of them were innocent civilians. This has been
part of their propaganda to provide excuses to the pro-Taliban and al
Qaeda media persons and political forces in Pakistan to generate
public sympathies for the terrorists. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan
(TTP) or other militants have never admitted to the killing of any
important figure of al Qaeda or the TTP. One exception is the killing
of Baitullah Mehsud that the TTP reluctantly admitted several days
after his death. According to the people of Waziristan, the only
civilians who have been killed so far in the drone attacks are women
or children of the militants in whose houses/compounds they hold
meetings. But that, too, used to happen in the past. Now they don’t
hold meetings at places where women and children of the al Qaeda and
TTP militants reside. Moreover, in this case too no one is in a
position to give even an approximate number of the women and children
of the terrorists killed in drone attacks.
The people of Waziristan are suffering a brutal kind of occupation
under the Taliban and al Qaeda. It is in this context that they would
welcome anyone, Americans, Israelis, Indians or even the devil, to rid
them of the Taliban and al Qaeda. Therefore, they welcome the drone
attacks. Secondly, the people feel comfortable with the drones because
of their precision and targeted strikes. People usually appreciate
drone attacks when they compare it with the Pakistan Army’s attacks,
which always result in collateral damage. Especially the people of
Waziristan have been terrified by the use of long-range artillery and
air strikes of the Pakistan Army and Air Force. People complain that
not a single TTP or al Qaeda member has been killed so far by the
Pakistan Army, whereas a lot of collateral damage has taken place.
Thousands of houses have been destroyed and hundreds of innocent
civilians have been killed by the Pakistan Army. On the other hand,
drone attacks have never targeted the civilian population except, they
informed, in one case when the funeral procession of Khwazh Wali, a
TTP commander, was hit. In that attack too, many TTP militants were
killed including Bilal (the TTP commander of Zangara area) and two
Arab members of al Qaeda. But some civilians were also killed. After
the attack people got the excuse of not attending the funeral of slain
TTP militants or offering them food, which they used to do out of
compulsion in order to put themselves in the TTP’s good books. “It
(this drone attack) was a blessing in disguise,” several people
commented.
I have heard people particularly appreciating the precision of drone
strikes. People say that when a drone would hover over the skies, they
wouldn’t be disturbed and would carry on their usual business because
they would be sure that it does not target the civilians, but the same
people would run for shelter when a Pakistani jet would appear in the
skies because of its indiscriminate firing. They say that even in the
same compound only the exact room — where a high value target (HVT) is
present — is targeted. Thus others in the same compound are spared.
The people of Waziristan have been complaining why the drones are only
restricted to targeting the Arabs. They want the drones to attack the
TTP leadership, the Uzbek/Tajik/Turkmen, Punjabi and Pakhtun Taliban.
I have heard even religious people of Waziristan cursing the jihad and
welcoming even Indian or Israeli support to help them get rid of the
TTP and foreign militants. The TTP and foreign militants had made them
hostages and occupied their houses by force. The Taliban have publicly
killed even the religious scholars in Waziristan.
I have yet to come across a non-TTP resident of Waziristan who
supports the Taliban or al Qaeda. Till recently they were terrified by
the TTP to the extent that they would not open their mouth to oppose
them. But now, having been displaced and out of their reach, some of
them speak against them openly and many more than before in private
conversations. They express their fear of the intelligence agencies of
Pakistan whenever speaking against the Taliban. They see the two as
two sides of the same coin.
What we read and hear in the print and electronic media of Pakistan
about drone attacks as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty or
resulting in killing innocent civilians is not true so far as the
people of Waziristan are concerned. According to them, al Qaeda and
the TTP are dead scared of drone attacks and their leadership spends
sleepless nights. This is a cause of pleasure for the tormented people
of Waziristan.
Moreover, al Qaeda and the Taliban have done everything to stop the
drone attacks by killing hundreds of innocent civilians on the pretext
of their being American spies. They thought that by overwhelming the
innocent people of Waziristan with terror tactics they would deter any
potential informer, but they have failed. On many occasions the
Taliban and al Qaeda have killed the alleged US spies in front of
crowds of hundreds, even thousands of tribesmen. Interestingly, no one
in Pakistan has raised objection to killings of the people of
Waziristan on charges of spying for the US. This, the people of
Waziristan informed, is a source of torture for them that their fellow
Pakistanis condemn the killing of the terrorists but fall into deadly
silence over the routine murders of tribesmen accused of spying for
the US by the terrorists occupying their land.
<http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?
page=2010\01\02\story_2-1-2010_pg3_5>