Bone of Contention: US Drone Attacks

Continuous drone attacks by the United States government keeps undermining the process of including the tribal people of the Waziristan area into the efforts to fight terrorism.

Recently US attack on the funeral procession killed the 15 members of shepherd Resham Khan. This left the Resham Khan traumatized and had to be admitted to the psychiatric section of an Islamabad hospital.

It is established truth that both Pakistan and US needs these tribal people on their side if they want to end the roots of terrorism from the area of FATA but these continuous attacks with very high civilian causality rate is only helping militants as they use the anger among the local public to get safe passage and recruitment purposes.

Psychiatrist at the Islamabad hospital said, “If you expect them to love the government, you would be foolish to think so.”

High civilian casualties in the air attacks along with issue of violation of sovereignty is considered one of the major reasons of growing anger among Pakistanis feel against the United States, seeing them as an assault on the nation’s sovereignty. Now over 84 percent of the tribal local believe that drone attacks are killing civilian population.

While ‘New American Foundation’ claimed that only 435 civilians were killed in these attacks since 2004, figures are horrifying if one takes a look at the independent media reports.

Out of 60 drone attacks carried out by the US only 10 were able to strike their intended targets in the FATA region of Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009. When data is collected from the independent media reports it show that these attacks resulted in the death of 14 Al Qaeda leaders and 687 innocent Pakistani civilians.

Two drone attacks in 2006 resulted in the death of 98 civilians and another three attacks in 2007 resulted in the death of 66 Pakistanis and none of these attacks resulted in the death of a single Al Qaeda leader. The Faulty intelligence of the Americans based on the unreliable and biased Afghan intelligence agencies is resulting in the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians most of which are women and children.