US President Barack Obama’s smug assertion that he had ruled out a drone attack on the Osama bin Laden haven in Abbottabad to avoid civilian casualties is a joke. It is, in fact, a cruel joke on hundreds of innocent people who have been blown to smithereens on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier in brazen drone attacks. When so many could have been passed off as collateral damage in the war on terror earlier, there was no reason why they could not have carried out a drone attack one last, furtive time, since they were cocksure of Osama being there in that farmhouse.
The point here is not about what Obama ought to have done, or hatch more conspiracy theories about the murky Osama killing affair, but that of the drone attacks themselves.
It is said that the US President was concerned about “hearts and minds” of the people when he vetoed a drone attack. This should come as a something of a revelation to those tracking the drone killings on the so-called Af-Pak theatre. The US, all these days, seemed not so much concerned about the “hearts and minds” of the people who lost their near and dear ones in clandestine American bombings. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, 957 civilians were killed in drone attacks in 2010 alone.
The military, intelligence and political establishments in Pakistan have traditionally worked closely with the US. Herein lies the paradox, for the US is probably as much hated in Pakistan as it is elsewhere in the Muslim world. There are innumerable reasons for this, many of them Islamic in nature. Some, of course, are not; the killings of innocent civilians being one of them. What has been angering people more had been the impunity with which the US had been carrying out these attacks.
This particular statement of Obama, therefore, needs to be seen in the light of what had happened in Pakistan in the run-up to the supposed killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2.
Pakistan, albeit fleetingly, had wrested the initiative from the US after the arrest of contract CIA operaativeRaymond Davis in January this year. Joint operations between the CIA and the ISI were suspended. Drone attacks too came to a standstill. Until, of course, Davis was released after some US bullying. Shortly after, on March 17, a drone strike on a gathering in North Waziristan killed more than 40 people. Some Pakistani Taliban members were killed, but most victims included tribal elders and members of the local government militia force. These people had gathered at a jirga to discuss the issue of payment for the sale of a chromite mine by a tribe. Among those killed were 13 children.
The tribal leaders issued an understandably bellicose statement saying, “We are a people who wait 100 years to exact revenge. We never forgive our enemy.” Public outrage swept across Pakistan. It was about the same “hearts and minds” that Obama talked about after the Osama killing.
The US could not ignore public opinion any more. In the last week of April it decided to shift its terror-killer drones from Pakistan to Afghanistan after Islamabad asked it to shut down UAV bases on its territory. Pakistan asked CIA to remove its personnel from the Shamsi airbase, about 350 km southwest of Baluchistan's capital Quetta, where some of the drones are based. Pakistan, however, was told in retorst that CIA would not reduce the drone strikes until Pakistan launched a military operation against the Haqqani network in North Waziristan. That, so far, has not happened. You never know what the Pakistan security authorities want to do, till they do it.
But one area which leaves little room for doubt is the tacit understanding between former Presidents Pervez Musharraf and George W Bush had about Pakistan looking the other way every time a drone attack would be carried out. The Pakistani establishment remained shamelessly Janus-faced all these years. On one hand, it publicly deplored the wanton killings of civilians, and on the other it waged a ruthless war against the impoverished and neglected Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and adjacent Swat Valley. News from this area very rarely trickles out; millions there have been driven out of their homes. Journalists are routinely attacked, threatened, even killed; the blackout continues.
What is also certain is that tens and thousands of ordinary, innocent Afghans have paid the price for Osama’s capture/killing. And so have thousands of people in Pakistan. Conspiracy theory or not, Osama is gone for sure. But what will linger on would be the seething anger and the thirst for revenge in the “hearts and minds” of the people that Obama is so concerned about.
And if you browse around the Web for photographs of CIA drone attacks on Pakistani soil, you will know for certain who the real terrorist is.
