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Listening to them, I recall an earlier conversation I had with a Pakistani social worker and with Safdar Dawar, a journalist, both of whom had survived drone attacks in the area of Miran Shah, in Pakistan\u2019s Waziristan province. Exasperated at the increasingly common experience which they had survived and which too many others have not, they began firing questions at us.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho has given the license to kill and in what court? Who has declared that they can hit anyone they like?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHow many \u2018high level targets\u2019 could there possibly be?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat kind of democracy is America,\u201d Safdar asks, \u201cwhere people do not ask these questions?\u201d<\/p>\n
One question Fazillah cannot answer for her son is whether anyone asked the question at all of whether to kill his father. Forbes Magazine reports that the Air Force has sixty-five to seventy thousand analysts processing drone video surveillance. A Rand review states they actually need half again that number to properly handle the data. Asked to point to the human who actually made the decision to kill her husband, she can only point to another machine.<\/p>\n
In June 2010, Philip G. Alston, then the UN\u2019s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, appeared before the UN Human Rights Council and testified that \u201ctargeted killings pose a rapidly growing challenge to the international rule of law \u2026 In a situation in which there is no disclosure of who has been killed, for what reason, and whether innocent civilians have died, the legal principle of international accountability is, by definition, comprehensively violated.<\/p>\n
\u201cSuch an expanded and open-ended interpretation of the right to self defense comes close to destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the United Nations Charter. If invoked by other states in pursuit of those they deemed to be terrorists and to have attacked them, it would cause chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n
This past week, on February 23, the legal action charity \u201cReprieve\u201d spoke up on behalf of more than a dozen Pakistani families who had lost loved ones in drone strikes, and asked the UN Human Rights Council to condemn the attacks as illegal human rights violations.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Pakistan, the CIA is creating desolation and calling it peace,\u201d said Reprieve\u2019s Director Clive Stafford Smith. \u201cThe illegal programme of drone strikes has murdered hundreds of civilians in Pakistan. The UN must put a stop to it before any more children are killed. Not only is it causing untold suffering to the people of North West Pakistan \u2013 it is also the most effective recruiting sergeant yet for the very \u2018militants\u2019 the US claims to be targeting.\u201d<\/p>\n
The lawyer representing the families, Shahzad Akbar of Pakistan\u2019s \u201cFoundation for Fundamental Rights\u201d said:<\/p>\n
\u201cIf President Obama really believes the drone strikes have \u2018pinpoint\u2019 accuracy, it has to be asked where the deaths of kids like Maezol Khan\u2019s eight-year-old son fit into the CIA\u2019s plan. <\/b>If the US is not prepared to face up to the reality of the suffering the strikes are causing, then the UN must step in. The international community can no longer afford to ignore the human rights catastrophe which is taking place in North West Pakistan in the name of the \u2018War on Terror.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Drone warfare has seen very little meaningful public debate. An expanding network of devastatingly lethal covert actions spreading throughout the developing world passes with minimal concern or comment.<\/p>\n
So who does Fazillah blame? Who does one blame when confronted with the actions of a machine? Our Pakistani friend asks, \u201cWhat kind of a democracy is America where people do not ask these questions?\u201d Becoming an actual democracy, with an actual choice at election-time between war and peace rather than between political machines vying for the chance to bring us war, seems to many Americans a near-unachievable goal. The US has become a process that churns out war \u2013 today Afghanistan and (in any real sense) Iraq; tomorrow Iran and Pakistan, with China securely, however distantly, on the horizon \u2013 and for those of us with any concern for peace, a principled opposition to war ultimately requires a determination to make the US at long last into a democracy, striving as Dr. King enjoined us, in \u201cmolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.\u201d<\/p>\n
It must begin with compassion \u2013 powerless compassion perhaps, perhaps only the ghost of dissent, but compassion for people like Fazillah and Aymal \u2013 and with deciding to be human, maybe only the ghost of a human, but alive in some way and alive to what our assent, and perhaps especially our silence are accomplishing in the world. Humanity is the first thing to be won back \u2013 and then, if we have the strength, relentlessly defended \u2013 against indifference, complacency, and, above all, inaction. If enough of us refuse to be machines, if enough of us refuse enough, can democracy, and even peace, not be at last achieved? But first comes the refusal.<\/p>\n
Fazillah wants a peaceful life. She doesn\u2019t want to see any more people killed, any more ghosts like that of her husband. Any more bodies, burned (as she recalls) so charred that they are almost unrecognizable one from another.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want this to happen to anyone,\u201d says Fazillah. I don\u2019t want any children to be left without parents.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd,\u201d she adds, \u201cI want the US troops to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Fazillah, age 25, lives in Maidan Shar, the central city of Afghanistan\u2019s Wardak province. She married about six years ago, and gave birth to a son, Aymal, who just turned five without a father. Fazillah tells her son, Aymal, that his father was killed by an American bomber plane, remote-controlled…<\/p>\n