Drone killings do not help war on terrorism

Jan. 4, 2011. It was a typical winter afternoon in my hometown, the city of Islamabad—nestled amongst the low, lush foothills of the Himalayas, a neatly planned criss-cross of avenues named after retired generals and Persian poets, divided by painstakingly manicured medians. That day, I had decided it was time to stray away from my routinely banal vacation schedule of eating and sleeping and embark on something noticeably different—a field trip. As a schoolgirl, I had boarded numerous buses, almost annually, to Taxila, a vestige of the Gandharan civilization that was proudly within Pakistani borders. This year, 40 minutes later, I was back to my childhood haunt after a seven-year hiatus.

We started up on the cobbled stairs that seemed more and more difficult to climb with each visit, noting that somebody had taken the time to repaint the sign where somebody had scratched the entry fees out. No lines awaited us at the very top. To the right, I could see Dharmarajika, built by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE. To the left, the ruins of the Jaulian monastery, burnt and destroyed by the White Huns in the fifth century CE. The museum was the same as I remembered, dimly lit but impeccably organized. Handwritten captions on yellowed index cards told me that the square coins were Indo-Greek, inscribed with fuzzy outlines of emperors and that the necklaces were Indo-Scythian from the first century BCE. An aging tour guide with a magnificent henna-stained mustache walked behind us, having committed all of this to memory. The lights went off as per schedule at home. "You don't have a generator?" I asked. "No, madam. It's too expensive." It was then, in the shadows of that musty museum, next to a silver Buddhist reliquary, that I got the phone call from my father. "There's been a shooting. The governor is dead and your mother was at the same café. She can't get out. Come home now."

My aim isn't to evoke pity. My mother is fine, and the governor of Punjab is dead. My purpose lies elsewhere. Pakistan is in trouble and a room of suited men in Langley, Va. isn't going to fix our problems, or yours, by pressing a button that fires a missile and eliminates one, single high-value target, polluting headlines with victorious exclamations of "We Killed Al-Qaeda Number Two" and three and four. Job done, they'll return to their suburban homes and repeat the routine the next day, indubitably wary of another day of poring through videos captured by drones circling lazily over the Afghan-Pak border, tracking the movements of what could be a militant but occasionally, a civilian—trying to learn the pattern of their day. Since 2004, the United States military has fired about 270 missiles into Pakistan, killing thousands of militants with what the C.I.A. proudly exclaims as a "minimal" amount of collateral damage. While drone warfare and the resulting casualties remain largely uncovered in U.S. media, they are central to the coverage in Pakistan. Headlines noting civilian casualties dominate our newspapers, and often result in an outbreak of retaliatory suicide bombs around the country, followed by the claim to destruction by some domestic offspring of the Taliban.

Of course, the relatively "marginal" amount of collateral damage goes unmourned abroad. The process of killing is embedded in and authorized by an American obsession with overused and deductive "terrorist" jargon, reducing the messy on-the-ground act of elimination to one that is decidedly sterile and technical. The anonymity of operators, along with the tracking and hunting of militants via camera, seems relatively clean; however, to overlook the implications of this warfare is to be actively steeped in naïveté. Victims, unacknowledged by the C.I.A. but known to their mourners, transform into the fostering of a new strain of anti-Americanism, materialized in a migration to urban centers, removed from the threat of the deathly buzz of an unknown predator. What the United States refuses to realize is that the repercussions of their alleged aerial efficiency trickles over into an expansionist demographic shift that is very real. Surely urban centers provide for better hiding places than the tribal north, camouflaged within and changing the city landscape, where outrage at what is viewed as a blow to Pakistani sovereignty is subject to the creation of a newly fashioned and stronger hatred. This hatred uproots and reappropriates local grievances with poverty, unemployment and domestic politics to name a few. These grievances accumulate and meld to fashion a newer, greater, overarching label of a foreign, Western threat that allows citizens to rally around a fiery, singular rhetoric of the external threat. This raises an important question: Is terrorism really homegrown, or is it the result of a causal chain, that is rooted in the negligence on the part of the men in the Pentagon?

There is no denial that there is some truth in Admiral Mullen's recent statement that the Pakistani intelligence is inextricably involved in terrorism on the ground. There is also no denial that the United States has eliminated key al-Qaeda operatives via drone warfare. What I do deny, however, is the belief that this will help. The capture of Osama bin Laden, albeit symbolic, has achieved nothing. Terrorism is bred not by the all-encompassing power of one chief—it is currently being cradled in the arms of a population of 187 million very fragile egos, nursed by a divisive class structure; a shaky, nuclear-armed relationship with India; unresolved border conflicts in Kashmir; a plummeting economy; and a mass exodus of the educated elite. My fear doesn't lie in the plotting of tribal chiefs, and my joy doesn't lie in their deaths. What I am scared of is the very real threat of the bodyguard of the governor of Punjab shooting the man at the back of the head because his decidedly liberal and therefore "Western" policies necessitated such a change. What scares me is that there are more rallies to demand his release than there are rallies to demand a death sentence. What I am terrified of is that my mother was a few feet away from a lethal bullet. A man may strap a bomb to his chest or shoot somebody in the brain in the name of Allah, but it is time that we step away from routine ideological assumptions and look carefully at the implications of collateral damage for the sake of a handful of key symbolic assassinations. Killing civilians breeds hatred and cyclically results in a new pattern of internal, domestic assassination and terrorism.

As I drove home on the Grand Trunk Road that afternoon, we stopped at a red light at the Tarnol pass on the way back to Islamabad. It was next to a granite obelisk, 40 feet tall, with a plaque that read, "Erected in the Honor of Brigadier-General John Nicholson, 1863." I forgot about it and a few days later, turned to the Internet to search for what he did that deserved a tribute of this degree. The most famous story recounted a night during the Indian Mutiny when Nicholson strode into the British mess tent and said, "I am sorry, gentlemen, to have kept you waiting for your dinner, but I have been hanging your cooks." He had been tipped off that the chefs had poisoned the soup. Upon their refusal to taste it, he fed it to a monkey. With the monkey's death, he hung the cooks from a tree in the compound without a trial. It appalls me that my country is still tainted with relics of British bragging rights—but more importantly, perhaps the obelisks of Western triumph are created today for the very same reason, for symbolic victory, for headlines, for Time Magazine covers and trophy corpses. Pakistan too, demands a trial.

—Noor Mir '12 is a political science major.