Boots on the Throat

Naeema Saeed

I am against the use of drones.

This one sen­tence is enough to invite the wrath of many lib­er­al friends of mine who would see me as a right­ist. Few would think that I am one of the young PTI enthu­si­asts. Though I like to think I am not a right­ist but I insist that the lat­ter con­clu­sion, if drawn, is def­i­nite­ly incor­rect. I am nei­ther of these yet I am against drones.
I do not hap­pen to have any issues with drone iden­ti­ty. I do not see drones as an essen­tial evil force which may raise any ter­ror­ist to the sta­tus of mar­tyr. Though some senior politi­cian may claim that even if a dog dies in a strug­gle with Amer­i­ca, the dog would be a mar­tyr, I dare to dis­agree. Actu­al­ly it is not the nature of drone which offends them; it is the ori­gin of drone. Like­wise many may also believe that some­thing as grave as Pak­istani nuclear bomb is inher­ent­ly a force of good­ness, but on the con­trary drones are actu­al­ly inher­ent­ly bad just because they are Amer­i­can. I will beg to dif­fer just like I do not think that by nam­ing a mis­sile Ghau­ri we can bap­tize it in some Mus­lim way. So who is using these drones is of lit­tle sig­nif­i­cance.

I do not have illu­sions about the ques­tion of ter­ri­to­r­i­al integri­ty too. Our gen­er­a­tion crammed the con­cepts of sov­er­eign­ty in the schools but we are grown up enough to sense that they have no prac­ti­cal usage in Pak­istan. How can a drone put a ques­tion mark on our ter­ri­to­r­i­al integri­ty when we have already lost half of our coun­try in 71? More­over, the way ter­ror­ists infil­trate in our coun­try, bomb the places, mur­der the peo­ple and hide in the safe havens with­in our bor­ders, they mock our sov­er­eign­ty well enough. So the argu­ment that some unqual­i­fied sov­er­eign­ty of the state is vio­lat­ed by these drones is a shal­low one. It is too book­ish to be even pre­sent­ed. Besides if such sacro­sanct author­i­ty is vio­lat­ed and all the state can do is con­demn and protest against the vio­la­tion then state actu­al­ly does not have sov­er­eign­ty.

The actu­al issue I see with drone usage is that they place the civil­ian lives in jeop­ardy. It does not mat­ter how many ter­ror­ists it can poten­tial­ly kill, the point is that it has killed civil­ians too. Many would say that the civil­ians killed are less than 10 per cent. That just would put a ques­tion mark on our sen­si­tiv­i­ty as humans. May be we have lost the abil­i­ty to empathize. Every life counts! Every life counts but insen­si­tiv­i­ty is com­pre­hen­si­ble too. For how long we can keep the count when we lose many in Karachi and Balochis­tan on dai­ly basis? We have dug too many graves to be shocked by the sight of blood. Yet the state sov­er­eign­ty is still an endeared sub­ject. The illu­sions about integri­ty, inde­pen­dence and writ of the state per­sist.

While argu­ing about state’s author­i­ty we often for­get that the first and fore­most pur­pose of every state is the secu­ri­ty of indi­vid­ual life. From wel­fare to free­dom of thought, every­thing is of sec­ondary impor­tance. I can quote a dozen promi­nent polit­i­cal thinkers and philoso­phers who point­ed out that the state evolved as a result of the indi­vid­u­als’ need to sur­vive and coex­ist; instead I would keep it sim­ple and appeal to com­mon sense. The most impor­tant human need is sur­vival and from this need emanates all oth­er needs; be they the need for food or of free­dom of expres­sion. Noth­ing fails a state more than its fail­ure to pre­vent the loss of human lives. The state con­fess­es that it has failed at least forty thou­sand times in the last decade. This is a shock­ing num­ber.

So my oppo­si­tion to drone usage is based on the fol­low­ing two points. First, it puts the civil­ian lives at risk. Sec­ond, the peo­ple of Pak­istan have not even been con­sult­ed on the issue at all. The things could have been eas­i­er if instead of issu­ing con­demn­ing state­ments, mourn­ing the deaths of the ter­ror­ists, the gov­ern­ment could come up with a solu­tion. The solu­tion could be bilat­er­al. By bilat­er­al I do not mean involv­ing the gov­ern­ment and the ter­ror­ists as many of our right wing polit­i­cal par­ties would like it to be. It should have been between Amer­i­ca and Pak­istan. By prop­er dialogs we could have come up with ways to min­i­mize the risk of civil­ian deaths. If any covert under­stand­ing already exists between the two gov­ern­ments, as it has been claimed by var­i­ous news agen­cies, then it should be made pub­lic to ensure trans­paren­cy and account­abil­i­ty. Killings of inno­cent civil­ians by bul­lets of secu­ri­ty forces, bombs of ter­ror­ist, and drones of Amer­i­cans are equal­ly cul­pa­ble. As some­one right­ly said, “When the gov­ern­men­t’s boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot, is of no con­se­quence.” So I am against drones, bombs and bul­lets or any such thing which jeop­ar­dize human life. More so I am against incom­pe­ten­cy of the state.

Twen­ty six sol­diers were killed by the US and we were at dag­gers drawn with Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment. So many civil­ians die dai­ly yet noth­ing is done except wail­ing these atroc­i­ties. At most the ter­ror­ists are invit­ed to talks. It seems like the ‘bloody civil­ians’ have the cheap­er blood. Yet the blood of our sol­diers too is far less revered than that of the ter­ror­ists. After all noth­ing incit­ed the response as harsh as the death of Hakeemul­lah Mehsud.

Though noth­ing made me hap­pi­er in days than demise of Hakeemul­lah Mehsud yet I am against the use of drones. I guess it is under­stand­able. While won­der­ing about on whose side our polit­i­cal elites are, all we can do is utter a sigh of relief when the drones hit the right tar­gets. As the state does not kill its ene­mies so we see those being killed by the oth­er agen­cies while we rejoice by say­ing one more down.

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The writer is a free­lance jour­nal­ist based in Lahore.