US drone missiles slaughtered 700 Pakistani civilians in 2009

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US drone missiles slaughtered 700 Pakistani civilians in 2009

US drone missile attacks have claimed the lives of over 700 Pakistani
civilians since Barack Obama took office a year ago, according to
figures released this week by officials in Islamabad. The escalation
of Washington’s AfPak war, now in full swing, will mean the slaughter
of thousands more men, women and children in 2010.

The grim death toll was announced in the Pakistani English-language
daily Dawn Monday, just as news of the latest strike by a Hellfire
missile made its way from an impoverished village near the Afghanistan
border.

The missile strike left dead and buried in the rubble of their home a
Pakistani teacher and his nine-year-old son. According to media
accounts citing unnamed US intelligence officials, the teacher’s home
had been targeted for a Predator drone attack because of reports that
militants had frequented the house.

Who provided these reports? How were they verified? Was there any
evidence that the teacher—not to mention his child—were in any way
implicated in the activities of the alleged “militants?”

No answers are forthcoming from the US government or the CIA, which
conducts the majority of these attacks, reaffirming the intelligence
agency’s reputation as Murder, Inc.

Washington, the CIA and the Pentagon have arrogated to themselves the
unlimited right to carry out extra-judicial executions wherever they
please, with no need for explanation, much less probative evidence.
Initiated under the Bush administration in the name of a global war on
terror, this criminal practice has been only intensified under Obama.

Over the course of the past year, US drones have fired missiles into
the tribal areas of western Pakistan 44 times—more than twice the
number of strikes carried out during the last year of the Bush
administration. Citing statistics compiled by Pakistani government
officials, Dawn reports that these missile strikes succeeded in
killing only “five key Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders,” while their
so-called collateral damage included the lives of 708 innocent civilians.

“For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140
innocent Pakistanis also had to die,” the newspaper reports. “Over 90
per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians,
claim authorities.”

The newspaper listed as one of the drone campaign’s few successes the
missile strike that killed the leader of the Pakistan Taliban,
Baitullah Mehsud, and his wife on August 5 of last year. As
investigative reporter Jane Mayer pointed out in the New Yorker last
October, however, it took “sixteen missile strikes, and fourteen
months, before the CIA succeeded in killing him.” The earlier, failed
attacks are believed to have killed as many as 321 innocent civilians,
while terrorizing an entire region.

There is no information from the US government to contradict Dawn’s
story. The CIA classifies its drone program as “covert” and provides
no information as to the number or identity of the people it kills.
Citing unnamed intelligence sources (as well as military spokesmen in
Afghanistan), the media routinely report that all those killed in
drone attacks are “militants.” Only when eyewitness accounts of the
torn bodies of women and children make it out of the remote tribal
areas is there any suggestion that the truth might be otherwise.

“Most of the attacks were carried out on the basis of human
intelligence, reportedly provided by the Pakistani and Afghan
tribesmen who are spying for the US-led allied forces in Afghanistan,”
the Dawn article added.

Last week’s suicide bombing that killed seven CIA agents and a top
Jordanian intelligence agent at Forward Operating Base Chapman in
eastern Afghanistan provided one indication of the reliability of such
intelligence. The operatives at FOB Chapman were directly involved in
choosing targets for the Predator drones. The bomber, considered one
of their key “assets,” fed them false information for over a year
before calling the operatives—including the CIA chief of the
operation—to a meeting in order to kill them.

The drone campaign in Pakistan is a protracted exercise in “targeted
assassinations” and mass murder carried out against the people of a
country with which the US is supposedly not even at war. It
exemplifies everything that is criminal and reactionary in US
imperialism’s campaign of military aggression in Central Asia and the
Persian Gulf.

CIA functionaries and military contractors (i.e., well-paid
mercenaries) sit in front of video screens in Langley, Virginia, using
joy sticks to send missiles crashing into the homes of Pakistani
villagers. After a day spent murdering men, women and children 7,000
miles away, they get in their cars and drive home to their families
and dinner.

Between the CIA’s secrecy and the Pakistani regime’s barring of media
from the targeted tribal areas, the carnage from these attacks is
largely hidden from the American people. To the extent that it is
justified to the public, it is in the name of combating terrorism.

Considering the grim equation provided by the report in Dawn—140 dead
civilians for every supposed “terrorist” killed by a Predator
missile—this is clearly a pretext. The 44 strikes of the last year
have done nothing to suppress terrorism. Rather, they have created
thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people with a reason to strike
back at the United States for the deaths of their families, friends
and neighbors.

The drone strikes are part of an explosion of American militarism that
has very different aims than combating terrorism or assuring the
security of the US population. It is driven by the crisis of US
capitalism and the attempt by the American ruling elite to overcome it
by military means—first and foremost by imposing US hegemony over the
energy-rich and strategically vital regions of the Persian Gulf and
Central Asia.

The more than 700 killed on Obama’s orders in the drone attacks over
the last year is only the beginning. As part of his administration’s
military “surge,” US officials have demanded that the Pakistani
government launch an offensive to crush support for Afghans fighting
against the US-led occupation. Washington has threatened that unless
Islamabad takes decisive action, the US will act unilaterally,
including with possible missile strikes against Quetta, a city of more
than one million, where Taliban leaders have allegedly taken refuge.

Every escalation of US operations in Pakistan is further undermining
the government, which is complicit in Washington’s crimes, threatening
to unleash a civil war in a nuclear-armed country and to destabilize
the entire region.

The military-intelligence apparatus has embraced the drone missile
attacks as a technological answer to the problem of waging a war that
is opposed by the majority of the American people. They do not involve
immediate US casualties, and the human toll they inflict remains
largely concealed.

Nonetheless, they are sowing the seeds of a far wider military
conflagration, which, if it is not stopped, will exact a terrible
price on working people in the US and around the world.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/pers-j05.shtml

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