THE NEED FOR A NEW STORY
THERE are
competing narratives about the US’s drone war in the Waziristan area, a bastion
of militants. These narratives have so far failed to gain traction in the
public, inside Pakistan and elsewhere.
The
Pakistani narrative goes like this: the drone attacks are a violation of our
national sovereignty. They kill innocent people, including women and children,
as collateral damage and hence incite suicide attacks across the country in a
cycle of reprisal and retaliation, thus killing more Pakistanis, which again
includes women and children.
In short,
suicide attacks on public places like markets — and even mosques and shrines —
are provoked by drone attacks. If there are no drone attacks, there will be no
suicide attacks in cities and towns.
The US has
yet to publicly acknowledge that the CIA is remotely conducting, with
joysticks, a deadly war in North Waziristan, Afghanistan and Yemen. But still,
the dominant narrative in the US is that drones are a ‘surgically precise and
effective tool’ that ‘take out’ only terrorists with ‘minimal collateral
impact’, and thus make the US safer.
The diction
of this narrative is tempting: deadly weapons are sanitised by clothing them in
non-lethal, curative medical terms. As if all this happens in a hospital’s
operation theatre while treating a patient to save his life.
The drone
war itself and the narrative of the US are challenged by another narrative,
which is spearheaded by international organisations like Reprieve, a UK-based
advocacy group, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent
journalist organisation in England, and a recent study conducted jointly by
Stanford Law School and NYU School of Law.
They argue
that the US does not acknowledge civilian deaths and injuries caused by drone
strikes; they harm the daily lives of ordinary people beyond death and physical
injury and that this secret war may set dangerous precedents for others to
flout the rule of law and international legal protections.
However, the
reality of this war, like any other war, lies somewhere beyond these
narratives. Missiles and bombs are not surgical tools and humans — terrorists
included — are not tumours that are taken out. Terrorists cannot be
dehumanised.
Militants
terrorise both the ‘enemy’ and those they seek to win over; those who seek to
win the hearts and minds of people need to occupy the moral high ground.
The US and
its allies can gain that by adhering to the Geneva Conventions and other
international laws that govern the rules of war. No war is different from any
other. Terrorists are criminals who need to be brought to justice, which is
delivered in courts of law, not through deadly missile strikes.
By showing a
blithe defiance of the Geneva Conventions, the US and its allies are fighting
this war on the terms of the terrorists, which is their (the terrorists’)
victory.
Similarly,
sovereignty comes with responsibility and only the state, and not any non-state
actor, has a monopoly on violence, that is, the use of force to defend its
borders and maintain order. Pakistan has outsourced, if not lost, its
sovereignty in the Waziristan region to extremists like the Taliban who have
repeatedly avowed their allegiance to Al Qaeda.
Pakistan’s
‘running with the hare and hunting with the hounds’ policy has brought the
country face to face with an existential threat. There are no good and bad
Taliban, just like there is no good and bad terrorist. This is the reason why
civil society in Pakistan seems confused about this war, while political
parties desist from owning it. This confusion has provided a breeding ground
for conspiracy theories, which get a new layer with every new terrorist attack
or bomb blast in the country.
Influential
Lebanese scholar Fawaz Gerges emphasises that jihadists are conspiratorial by
nature and ascribe all actions that are at odds with their conventional wisdom
to Zionist and American plots (include India in the case of Pakistan). The
deliberate confusion at the institutional level has percolated through society
as a whole.
As a result
of this double game the writ of the state is now non-existent in North
Waziristan, which has become an information black hole. Therefore, it is
difficult to ascertain the exact identity and number of those who are targeted
by drones. It is equally difficult to know the opinion of the people, if it
ever counts in the legality or otherwise of a war, especially the so-called war
on terror.
Be that as
it may, the fact is that the drone war is an illegal war because it is being
fought in secret; it is being fought secretly, because it cannot be justified
or defended on legal grounds. Public approval cannot justify an illegal war,
just like public support for Al Qaeda cannot justify terrorism.
However, the
existing narratives have confounded the situation so much that the people who
are caught in the crosshairs of the war have lost their voice and their story
to tell. Therefore, we need to have a new story that is legitimate and can
create solutions for the tough problems that we face.
Who will
create this new story and how? Strategic communication expert Amy Zalman posits
that since political power intervenes, inevitably, in making the narratives we
share by suppressing some voices and elevating others, it is important that we
have a responsible political leadership.
We need it
to help us forge a new narrative that has exactly three things: it rings true,
it has a sense of reality, and it is participatory. Unfortunately, the
narratives of the US and its allies and of the Taliban-Al Qaeda combine do not
ring true, have no sense of reality, and are not participatory.
