The Second Cold War pp 135-144 | Cite as
Drones and Kill/Capture Campaign in Pakistan
Abstract
From July 2008 to June 2011, the CIA carried out 220 attacks inside Pakistan. It justified them by informing they had killed 1400 “suspects”, along with 30 civilians. The private entity Conflict Monitoring Center (CMC) in Islamabad, however, calculated that in the 5 years until June 2011, the “kill/capture” campaign in Pakistan claimed 2052 lives, most of them civilians, and that in 2010 alone, 132 drone strikes caused 938 deaths. According to estimates from the New America Foundation, US drones killed close to 3000 people in Pakistan between 2004 and July 2012, of which 2447 during the first 3½ years of Obama’s administration.
Although these attacks eliminated many militants, they also increased the ranks of the Tehrik-e-Taliban of Pakistan (TTP), the group Quetta Shura led by the Pashtun warlord Sirajuddin Haqqani and the radical Sunni organization Lashkar-e-Jhangvi Al-Almi. They also boosted al-Qa’ida’s prestige, which could now rely on countless local safehouses to circumvent the drone attacks and organize operations against the United States.
As a consequence of the attacks, the Pashtuns in both Afghanistan and Pakistan took it upon themselves to avenge their dead, whether these were civilians or militants, fulfilling their traditional Pashtunwali code of honor. Around 2011, the Taliban in Pakistan were more dangerous than the Taliban in Afghanistan, informed the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. Camps in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) were training young Swedes, Brits and Germans, among others, to return to their countries and become terrorists. Approximately 3 million people lived in tribes in this region, in addition to the 15 million Pashtuns of Afghanistan, all of them adhering to the tribal Pashtunwali code of honor and conduct, which included melmastia (hospitality), nanawati (the notion that hospitality could not be denied to a fugitive), and badal (the right to vengeance).
Keywords
York Time Geneva Convention Covert Action Enemy Combatant Supply RouteBibliography
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