On Sunday, addressing a gathering of students at the University of Addis Ababa, the U.S. Secretary of State called this country's drone program one of the strictest, most accountable and fairest programs never targeting any civilians, or even avoiding firing "when we know there are children or collateral". Lying about the drone program or other aspects of the U.S. policy has become habitual for U.S. officials, but this time the outright lie was so evident that The Washington Post, which first reported of Mr. Kerry's statement late on Sunday, by Monday afternoon removed the story from its website, with the internet link referring the reader to another, completely different story.
“Let me very clear… first of all there have been very few drone strikes in this last year. Why? Because we have been so successful in rooting out al Qaeda in Pakistan,” John Kerry is quoted by Agence France-Presse as telling young Ethiopian students. Unlike The Washington Post story, this report has been distributed by global media and therefore is still accessible. “Secondly the only people that we fire on are confirmed terrorist targets at the highest levels after a great deal of vetting,” the story goes on.
“I am convinced that we have one of the strictest, most accountable and fairest programs,” further said the U.S. Secretary of State. “We do not fire when we know there are children or collateral, we just don’t. We have absolutely not shot at high-level targets when we have seen that there are people there.”
In fact, Mr. Secretary simply reiterated what had been said three days prior to that by the U.S. President Barack Obama in his speech at the National Defense University in Washington DC. President Obama had used almost the same wording in defense of the drone program calling it a "just war" of self-defense.
Well, as Mr. Kerry said, "let us very clear". Another story in The Washington Post (until presently, undeleted) presents bare statistics of the drone strikes conducted since 2002 in Pakistan and Yemen.
In 2002, there was one strike killing 10 people in Yemen. In 2003, there were none. After a few years of 1 to 4 strikes from 204 through 2007, there was a sharp upturn in 2008 (37 strikes killing 301 people), and the numbers reached the peak in 2010, with up to 855 killed in 123 strikes in Pakistan and Yemen.
True, since then, there has been a certain decline, but the numbers for 2011 and 2012 (81 and 87 strikes killing respectively 647 and 621 people) still exceed those for 2009 (up to 634 killed in 56 strikes). As for the year 2013, so far there have been 22 strikes in Pakistan and Yemen killing 118 people.
The total number of casualties is estimated at 3,364, including militants and civilians. In fact, there are numerous difficulties in determining how many of the victims were real militants, since the U.S. authorities tend to label all those killed as terrorists and militants.
Judging from what Mr. Kerry said in Addis Ababa, the administration, despite obvious facts, is not going to revisit its drone policy and re-estimate the "collateral" damage inflicted by the drone war.
In fact, another example your humble author witnessed just a few days ago simply demonstrates that this has become habitual for all U.S. officials irrespective of their level. Last week, a mid-ranking official from the Department of Defense had a round-table discussion in Moscow with a number of experts on Afghanistan and Central Asia. Since the discussion was held under the Chatham House rules, we should not name the person. But the lady said it outright that the U.S. does not want to preserve permanent military bases in post-2014 Afghanistan, and more so, "the U.S. does not have a vital national security interest in Central Asia," – as if anyone present there would believe her.
But really, this gives a clue to how the U.S. topmost officials' statements should be perceived.
Boris Volkhonsky, senior research fellow, Russian Institute for Strategic Studies
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