Drones: What are we doing to ourselves?
Posted by Ethan Casey on February 23, 2013 · 10 Comments
Aiken, South Carolina, February 23 - We’re hearing more in the media these days about drones, which I suppose is an improvement on 2009, when an audience member at a church in Seattle asked me, “What’s a drone attack?” I don’t have much to say about drones that isn’t being said, except that – as my late grandmother, may she rest in peace, would have put it – they’re just plain wrong.
I’ve been wanting to say that for a while, but it’s hard to get a word in edgewise, what with all the other people who have things to say about drones lately. I happen to be writing this in South Carolina, home state of Senator Lindsey Graham, who just the other day caused a ripple in the national and international media by telling a small-town Rotary Club, “We’ve killed 4,700 [with drones]. Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al-Qaeda.”
The British newspaper The Daily Telegraph described Senator Graham’s comments as “the first time a politician or any government representative had referred to a total number of fatalities in the drone strikes, which have been condemned by rights groups as extrajudicial assassinations.” Graham may or may not regret having spoken unguardedly, and I don’t doubt that he does hate the fact that drones kill innocent people. I do too, and so do you, whatever your views on the issues drones are supposed to be helping address. Drone pilots do too, which is why, as the New York Times tells us, they “get mental health problems much like those of pilots deployed to combat.” One or more of the big pharmaceutical companies might well be working on something to help drone pilots deal with their “stress disorders” (I quote the quasi-medical cant phrase from the Times‘s headline), but no pill can fix their – or our – real problem, which is not medical or instrumental or even political, but moral. Drones and drone strikes are just plain wrong.
The other New York Times headline that has me up writing this at four in the morning is “U.S. Opens Niger Drone Base, Building Africa Presence.” It’s necessary to live in the world as it is, and I know that whatever I say or write will have no effect on the deployment or use or effects of drones; they will now be used in Africa, and the Times is doing what the Times does as the house organ of the American establishment: just letting us know. As a friend of mine said in a different (but not so different) context years ago, “‘You are powerless, you have no power.’ That’s what they’re saying.”
The message is that drones are here to stay and that, by definition, if you’re not prepared to get with the program, you’re on your own. It can be dispiriting to be reminded of this, but it’s also a simple statement of the obvious. Evil deeds, such as terrorism and drone attacks, arise out of the dark depths of human nature, and each of us is intangibly but inevitably implicated in them. And They – whoever They are – are not asking for our approval or advice, but requiring our acquiescence.
So why not simply acquiesce? Because, as the American writer Wendell Berry said in a different (but not so different) context years ago, “Protest that endures … is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.” In other words, the requirements of self-respect should trump those of Them. My late mentor Clyde Edwin Pettit told me Vietnam had taught him that “all governments are bad.” Or, as he put it in the foreword to his 1975 masterpiece The Experts: 100 Years of Blunder in Indo-China, “The Vietnam War is a textbook example of history’s lessons: that there is a tendency in all political systems for public servants to metamorphose into public masters, surfeited with unchecked power and privilege and increasingly overpaid to misgovern.”
I included both of the quotes above in my book Alive and Well in Pakistan, which was published nearly ten years ago now. My point in both quoting them then and wheeling them out again now is that, amid all the sound and fury of this or any other time, some questions and truths are in fact unchanging, and if we don’t hold onto these, we risk destroying not only each other but ourselves. Such truths are universal, and they also have particular national and local applications. As someone who has been blessed for nearly two decades by the friendship of many Pakistanis and of Pakistan as a society, the word “sickened” is far too mild to describe how I feel about the damage drone attacks are doing in and to Pakistan. And as an American who loves my own country, I’m concerned with the question of whether America is a free country – which I was raised to believe was the point of America – or some sort of consensual military dictatorship.
Which is why I find myself left utterly cold – chilled, even – when, as happens routinely these days, airlines invite active-duty military personnel to board planes ahead of the rest of us, along with pregnant women and people rich enough to buy first-class tickets. Or when, as I did last Thursday night, I pass beneath a huge banner reading:
The State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta
Welcome Our Troops Home
I have at least one relative and several friends and acquaintances who are serving or have served in the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You probably do too. I don’t condemn them for being there, and whatever they think, in the privacy of their own thoughts, about what they’re doing is their own business. I look forward to welcoming them home safely. But I have enough hard-earned, ground-level authority in that part of the world and elsewhere to know how tragically unhelpful their continuing presence there is, and I don’t like being bullied into expressions of pious jingoism by craven politicians and commercial airlines.
But at least the soldiers are there in person. The rest of American society is using them to keep our dirty work at arm’s length, exactly the way a young man with a joystick in Nevada uses a drone flying over Pakistan. No wonder we’re all suffering from stress disorders.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), called “magnificent” by Ahmed Rashid and “wonderful” by Edwidge Danticat. He is also the author of Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010) and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012) and co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). His next book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip, will be published in fall 2013 and is available for pre-purchase. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Join his email list here.
Drones are not “just plain wrong” their use is extra-judicial, unconstitutional and (in the case of killing US citizens) their murderous use constitutes war crimes…but who dares to tell that to Rome?
Drones are being used largely by permission from the host country that allows the US to use them over the country and to kill with impunity. In Pakistan for example, the political and military leadership is amoral, corrupt and is only interested in how much money they can skim off US largesse (blood-money…”Aid”) and sock away in US and other Western countries…and how fast.
The Pakistani elite lives in a world of its own and see the lower economic classes as lesser, disposable beings in the furtherance of their own selfish goals. I imagine this is just as true for the political leadership in every country hosting America’s deadly flying machines.
The arrogance of Rome and the greed of Pakistan’s political and military leadership are together, destroying Pakistani society and its people.
I see no evidence that drone strikes are any more wrong than say dropping GPS bombs, laser guided ones etc. If we admit that we are at “war” with terrorists then we have rights to do whatever is OK in war.
I note that we killed many in WWII, burning down cities, using nuclear weapons etc. So I see nothing “wrong” with using drones.
What I see some evidence of is that whatever means we might use that kills folks other than the terrorists (which any method will) is not as effective as the alternative. I assume the alternative is to arrest only the guilty and give them a trial. This is very difficult and dangerous for our troops and perhaps civilians in the area.
@ Vulcan Alex: America is not at war with Pakistan therefore it has no right to use drones in Pakistani territory. Which is why it has had to bribe and bully Pakistan to allow drone attacks within Pakistan.
“War”, by the way, suggests that the enemy has the ability to retaliate. Otherwise, its only an invasion/occupation/slaughter.
So how exaclty have the terrorists retaliated in the “War” they are having with America? How many bomb/drone attacks have Pakistani terrorists carried out on American territory? And how many Americans are locked away in Pakistani equivalents of Guantanamo?
From where I’m sitting (Islamabad, Pakistan) your country looks a lot like ours: a country governed by people who will cheat, lie and kill for profit. The good thing about this is that it suggests Pakistan may also reach super-power status since we obviously share the same qualities.
Then again, if the Pakistani analysis is correct and these qualities are the reason Pakistan is a third world country, America might well end up where we are … I guess we can only wait and see.
@ Jeff Siddiqui: Of course, yes, drones are extra-judicial and unconstitutional, and both of those are bad things to be. But before they’re either of those things or anything else, they’re just plain wrong – morally wrong, first and foremost. Secondarily, but also very importantly, as you point out, they’re legally and constitutionally wrong.
Absolutely understood, and I’m hardly unsympathetic to the tragedy of even a single dead innocent. Yet there is some empirical and anecdotal evidence that countervails your claims about the perpectives of those who live under the drones (eg, well before accuracy increased last year, one survey found about 29% of FATA residents expressing full or qualified support for drone strikes — less than 60% firmly opposed them, see http://www.understandingfata.org/uf-volume-iv/index.html ). I’ve talked to many — Pak law enforcement officials among them — who approve of the strikes as accurately targeting the very people they believe deserve to be targeted. The Haqqanis and TTP et al are a scourge for the citizens of Waziristan and arguably are more responsible for “violating Pakistani sovereignty” than is the USG. In any case, I see persuasive arguments on both sides of this very difficult issue, and I appreciate your contribution.
Well, Ethan, all war is wrong, of course. That’s for starters. I would say, though, that there’s more than a danger (the word you use) in the antiseptic quality, there’s an inherent immorality and cowardliness of killing from afar, with no danger to oneself. And it’s also about the immorality not just of killing, but of surveillance. So, no, I don’t have data as in numbers – but I don’t need data. Drones are just plain wrong. So is war in general, of course, but that’s another matter. In addition to the just plain wrongness, as well as the fact that the sinister surveillance of our lives by drones is on the verge of coming back to bite us in the butt right here at home, we Americans also need to swallow the hard and indisputable fact that drones are deeply, deeply unpopular in Pakistan and everywhere else we’re deploying them. Do we really want to be known as the nation that bombs other nations from unmanned aircraft?
The drones are already a subject of lively debate inside the American system, the WikiLeaks cables showed. Last year ambassador Anne Patterson argued that increased “unilateral operations” risked “destabilizing the Pakistani state” and ultimately hindering the US goal of expelling al-Qaida from the region.
Regardless, our Gov’t./CIA can call Anyone al-Qaida as long as they even Think they are suspected of being a terrorist, they are Dead! We use drones to Kill in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and surely other places we don’t know about. On top of Cyber Attacks inflicting virus’s into other countries computers. IF any Male of Military Age is Killed, that is counted as Killing a terrorist, regardless if they really civilian.
After the air strikes, Pakistan shut its Afghan border to NATO supplies and ordered US staff out of an air base reportedly used as a hub for drones.