Drone Strikes in Pakistan need to end: Clive Stafford Smith

Drone Strikes in Pakistan need to end: Clive Stafford Smith

Prominent international human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith intends to initiate a campaign aiming to draw attention towards the innocent civilians who are killed by drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.

Stafford Smith, who was impressed by 16-year-old boy Tariq Aziz with whom he was working to take pictures of people killed by the remotely piloted aircraft to help Stafford Smith highlight what he calls illegal killings.

On October 31, Aziz and his 12-year-old cousin were themselves killed by a drone missile strike in the North Waziristan region on the Afghan border, Stafford Smith said.

For the veteran lawyer, the deaths highlighted major flaws in the CIA-run drone campaign, which US officials say is invaluable in the war on militants.

“What they did to Tariq was absolutely disgusting,” he said.

Stafford Smith made his name defending death row inmates in the United States and prisoners at the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

He considers the drones as “scandalous” as the secret US bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

80 Pakistani tribesmen, including Aziz, recently met Stafford Smith and other Western lawyers for the first time, in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, to complain about the drones.

The United States has sharply stepped up the number of drone attacks in Pakistan’s unruly ethnic Pashtun areas in the northwest, along the border with Afghanistan.

In 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, there were 53 strikes, compared with 42 over the previous four years. In 2010, that number jumped to 118, followed by 68 this year, according to the New America Foundation.

The think tank’s statistics raise doubts about the success of the drones. It estimates as many as 471 civilians were killed by drone strikes in Pakistan between 2004-2011, a 20 percent non-militant fatality rate.

US officials point to the deaths of senior al Qaeda and Taliban figures as proof the drones are highly effective, and no American troops are needed on the ground.

Missile-armed drones are playing a greater role than ever in US counterterrorism operations, as Obama winds down land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Washington’s focus expands to militant havens in countries such as Pakistan.

Stafford Smith says the strategy will cause more civilian deaths and create additional enemies for the United States.

“When you have warfare with no political costs at all, it becomes much too easy to resort to violence,” he said, adding his goal was to raise international awareness about the suffering caused by drone strikes. 

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=3154

Posted by Ammar Ahmad on Nov 10 2011. Filed under Latest News, Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry