On this Veterans Day…

Some thoughts on lives lost

Jananne Al-Ani, Shadow Sites; © Jananne Al-Ani

This morning I woke up early, sat at my desk and opened my inbox. Nestled in the many emails from students with questions about assignments due soon and requests for extensions, I found an email from a company called Tribute.co. Intrigued, I clicked on it. It’s an encouragement to send a tribute -- a group video gift to honor military servicemen. For Veterans day (today) and till the end of the month, the company is waiving all charges and urging us to send tributes to veterans, “not only for their important service but also for the incredible human beings they are.” A reflection of Tribute.co’s heartfelt appreciation.

The taglines peppered through the the email continue in the same vein, pulling on the heart strings to honor vets:

They’ve Been There for Us. Let’s Be There for Them

Far From Home. Close to the Heart

Don't let them feel forgotten, even when they're miles away

I admire the sense of patriotism and the call to pay respect to those men and women who put their lives on the line to protect their fellow Americans’ freedoms. It is the ultimate sacrifice and one that merits recognition.

But reading this email reminds me of my odd predicament. Even as a US citizen now, I cannot find it in me to feel gratitude for US military servicemen. Don’t get me wrong, I am not in any way diminishing the sacrifices these brave souls make for the country. Nor do I think that they shouldn’t be recognized. Far from it. Rather, I am saying that unlike my US-born friends who break conversation immediately to say “Thank you for your service” upon learning that the person they are conversing with is a veteran, I cannot bring myself to utter words of gratitude. Let me explain:

Unlike some of my fellow Americans who take pride in the proclaimed moral virtues of US military interventions abroad, as a Pakistani raised in Pakistan, I am constitutionally skeptical of official narratives because I grew up knowing the reality on the ground. Contrary to the rhetoric about the surgical precision of US counter-terrorism operations, the reality is vastly different. In 2004, under the Bush regime, the US military began drone warfare in Waziristan — the tribal belt on the Pak-Afghan border — to target insurgents. Hailed as the“the most targeted and effective application of firepower in the history of armed conflict,” the Predator and the Reaper drones were presented as the solution to rout the ever illusive al-Qaeda and Taliban.

The Obama regime redoubled the drone counter-terrorism operation. The total number of strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen increased nearly tenfold, from 57 under Bush to 563. During an online forum in 2012, Obama insisted that drones did not cause many civilian casualties. “For the most part,” he claimed, “they have been very precise precision strikes against Al Qaeda and their affiliates.” In his address at the National Defense University the following year, Obama emphasized that before any strike “there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured -- the highest standard we can set.”

Yet far from being surgical incision scalpels for meticulously excising the cancerous tumor of terrorism that drones were cracked up to be, in reality, these automated killing machines decimated scores of innocent people. As early as 2012, a three month investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that since Obama had taken office, the number of civilian drone deaths was estimated to be between 282 and 535, including more than 60 children. To add insult to injury, the Bureau reported that at least 20 civilians had been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners and 50 were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims of prior strikes.

In December 2013, a US aerial drone launched four Hellfire missiles on a convoy of about a dozen vehicles in Yemen. Twelve men were killed and 15 others injured. According to Human Rights Watch, the convoy was a wedding procession escorting a bride and family members to the groom’s hometown. A 2015 report by the Open Society Justice Initiative detailed nine case studies in Yemen that provide credible evidence that US airstrikes killed and injured civilians including one incident which resulted in the death of a pregnant woman and three children and another in which 19 occupants of a house were struck also including women and children. In September 2019, a US drone strike killed 16 civilians in eastern Afghanistan. And then, there was the drone strike on August 29, 2021 in Afghanistan. Initially, Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley declared it a success, “a righteous strike” undertaken only after “procedures were correctly followed.” But shortly thereafter reports from The New York Times and The Washington Post revealed that the 10 drone casualties were all civilian, including 7 children. The Pentagon was forced to reverse its earlier statement; the “righteous strike” was now a "tragic mistake."

The secrecy surrounding drone strikes makes it difficult to get precise figures. And of course, statistics alone do not even begin to capture the human cost of drones. As anthropologist Hugh Gutterson reminds us,

There is…something deeply problematic in technocratic discourses that fetishize body counts, assuming that the suffering of the Pashtun people and the justice of the American bombing campaign can be measured and settled by numbers of bodies, especially civilian bodies. This is to marginalize kinds of suffering that turn people into a kind of living dead.

To say nothing of the suffering of the living dead, estimates of civilian drone deaths in Pakistan alone since 2004 range between 424 and 967; and of these, 172 to 207 were children.

It bears mentioning that drone deaths are a mere fraction of the total number of civilian casualties in the Afghanistan/Pakistan war zone. Since September 2001, more than 70,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians have died as a direct result of the US war on terror.

As I sit here considering the email from Tribute.Co, my mind wanders to the thousands no longer among us – the Pakistani and Afghan civilians killed by US military interventions. I recall what President Bush said to Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri shortly after announcing his war on terror. “The war against terrorism,” he said, “is not a war against Muslims, nor is it a war against Arabs. It's a war against evil people who conduct crimes against innocent people."

There are no innocent people in my part of the world.