Deadly strikes

The drone strikes which the US has conducted with relentless regularity in Pakistani areas bordering Afghanistan, despite vociferous protests by Islamabad, represent the zenith of aerial warfare in precision bombing, though the human element involved in it at times seems to make it a genocidal war. While these raids have indeed helped destroy some of militants' hideouts, these have also caused countless deaths of innocent civilians caught in the conflict zone.
A Washington-based NGO which works for civilians caught in crossfire, has asked the Obama Administration to ensure that the drone strikes conform to the principles of international law that distinguishes between combatants and non-combatants while hitting the targets. The group has urged the US to make "public the official definition of "civilian," "combatant" and "non-combatant," that is applied in the drone programme as well as the legal justification for these strikes. Above all, it asks Obama Administration as to what measures it has taken to make the drone strikes conform to international law. It urges the US to "work in partnership with Pakistani government to provide compensation and other types of assistance to all civilians harmed by drone strikes." The group has asked the US to support existing Pakistani mechanisms, including provision of financial and technical support, of which there has apparently been none so far. And lastly, the group has stressed the need for the US to identify additional programmes and initiatives that can specifically help the conflict victims recover, as the US Congress has done in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is for the first time that a humanitarian NGO has urged the US government to develop a legal framework that regulates US drone attacks in Pakistan's territorial jurisdiction. The degree of unquestioning compliance by Pakistan with US wishes has astonished many an independent observer.
What had started as a US-led military campaign to punish perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocity, has apparently become a war of occupation and oil grab. A critical strand of the devious strategy tailored by Bush Administration Neocons was to prevent Saddam from developing nuclear weapons. Secondly, cave-dwelling Taliban were projected as ingenious and resourceful planners bent upon destroying a nuclear superpower like the US. Stories of attempts to carry out Anthrax attacks in the US, viewed in the hindsight, read like acts of a tragi-comedy. And in all of this we did our best to play our assigned role, some of which WikiLeaks has since disclosed, to our abiding discomfort. The tragic destruction of Iraq with its exquisite monuments, and timeless culture, has been likened by some to its destruction earlier in history by successive invaders. The next in line now seems to be Iran. It will be recalled that even Hamid Karzai, at the height of war on terror, had once dared ask Washington for details of how many of his citizens it had taken to Guatanamo. Abu Gharib was yet another black chapter in this genocidal war. Looking in the hindsight, a bipolar world, despite the overhang of a nerve-wrecking Cold War was a much better place to live. Now yet another superpower seems to be hopelessly caught in Afghan quagmire, which has rightly been termed the "graveyard of empires". The exit strategy drawn up by the US, when implemented, may destabilise the whole region. And Pakistan will have to bear the brunt of the fallout, yet again, as it had done in the wake of the Soviet pullout. The conduct of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan has not been without reproach. Drone attacks, the most brutal and inhuman face of this war, need a humanitarian framework, to ensure the UN mandated right to security.
The US human rights group's call to Obama Administration to develop a foolproof legal framework to regulate drone attacks is quite timely. It is about time such a framework was evolved and implemented. International community needs to bring pressure to bear on the US to ensure adequate compensation to innocent victims of this war on terror.