Back to the Future Onyekachi Wambu
Lethal force, law and morality
One of the US drones causing mayhem in Pakistan
people being killed as a result of “collateral damage”. Normally intelligence is gathered to pinpoint the target – then the remote operator (sometimes as far away as the US) fires missiles from the unmanned drone. No matter how careful the Americans try to be, it is obvious this approach is full of risks. The intelligence is based on local people, who are known to sometimes use the Americans to eliminate their own enemies, unrelated to any terrorism issues. Also, high-level targets have been taken out sometimes while family and other “civilians” are present. When innocents die, a standard message of regret is issued
by the Americans and NATO about how they try to minimise civil- ian casualties. However, it is like leaving a bomb in a crowded marketplace, which you know is fully bound to kill people, and then apologising afterwards for those deaths. People are unlikely to take the sincerity of the apology seriously. Beyond that, these statements of regret do not answer the really important ques- tions about the use of drones. First, in terms of international law, the Geneva Convention
If you drop a bomb on a high-level target, surrounded by family members, and you ignore these civilians in your pursuit of the target – what really is the difference between your tactics and those of the “terrorists” who use suicide bombers to attack what they perceive as significant targets but care not who they blow up?
T
he uprisings in the Arab Spring, the assassination of Bin Laden, and the NATO intervention in Libya have once again raised important questions about the morality of using lethal force, its impact on civilians, the legal position, and
the eventual price paid by those who wrongly deploy such force. Non-Western leaders tend to suffer serious consequences if
the calibration is wrong, while Western countries using similar lethal force tend to suffer few consequences. Beyond Fallujah and other instances in the recent past, we
need only take the ongoing American drones war in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. Even though America declared war against Afghanistan following the September 11 attack, they appear to be operating the drone war there in a legal and moral vacuum. However, no such war excuse exists with Pakistan or Yemen. In the US, the attacks would presumably be “legally” covered
by the Presidential Order issued by George W. Bush, to pursue Al Qaeda and the Taliban for attacking the US, or more loosely under the “Bush Doctrine” of pre-emptive self-defence. However, those justifications are tenuous under interna- tional law, especially given the increasing numbers of innocent
98 | June 2011 New African
does not allow the killing of civilians as part of a deliberate policy. If you are dropping a bomb on a high-level target, surrounded by family members, and you ignore those civilians in your pursuit of the target – what really is the difference between your tactics and the tactics of the “terrorists” who use suicide bombers to attack what they perceive as significant targets but care not who they blow up? Second, in terms of US domestic law, there is a grey area over whether these “drone killings” are only reserved for the “foreign” brown people of the South. Given all the protection that the US constitution provides for American citizens, what would the legal position be if an American president gave the order for an Al Queda-supporting American citizen to be taken out in Yemen, as Obama has recently given for Anwar al-Awlaki? And if the legal grounds exist for the president to take out
an American citizen in Yemen, what prevents him one day act- ing pre-emptively to take out a “threat” on American soil on the basis of “intelligence”? If this sort of targeted assassination happened in the US, it
would be stopped instantly by an army of human rights lawyers launching lawsuits. But where are these same human rights activists in defending the rights of innocent Pakistanis, Afghans, Yemenis, and Palestinians from such drone attacks? But then this attitude repeats an old pattern and is the reason
people from the South see Western human rights activists as hypocrites. The US has operated in this sort of moral vacuum often in the past, where it is able to consolidate a material advantage which it has secured through committing great evil before the law or morality caught up and put certain behaviour beyond the pale. Take the genocide committed against the native Americans, the enslavement of Africans (slavery was supposed to be legal – though one has yet to come across a legal system anywhere in the world that legally recognises kidnap and hostage-taking) and finally, the dropping of the Atomic bomb on Japan.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100