Despite the fact that former president Barack Obama imposed rules on drone strikes and commando raids by the military or the CIA outside war zones, the result was thousands of civilian casualties. Now Trump’s administration is preparing to loosen these rules and the outcome could be catastrophic.
According to Trump’s top national security proposal, targeted killings, which were limited to high-level militants posing imminent threat to Americans, would expand to include foot-soldier jihadists with no special skills or leadership roles. What is even more dangerous is that the proposed changes would allow drone attacks and raids without high-level vetting. The aim of these changes is to expand counterterrorism missions in countries such as Yemen, Somalia and Libya and could pave the way for expanding drone strikes to other places in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
However, it is ironic how Trump’s administration agreed on keeping one constraint for targeting attacks; which is a requirement of “near certainty” that no civilian bystanders will be killed, because with the existence of such requirement under Obama’s administration many innocent civilians lost their lives. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism 753-1,487 civilians lost their lives as a result of US drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen and Afghanistan, among them 262-331 children.
Obama’s administration defended its decision to rely more on drones in America’s war against terrorism by saying that drones would be only used amid a "continuing, imminent threat" to the US and that it preferred to capture terrorist suspects. Obama also insisted that drones decrease collateral damage in the war on terror. “What I can say with great certainty is that the rate of civilian casualties in any drone operation are far lower than the rate of civilian casualties that occur in conventional war,” Obama said on the 8th of April 2016, at the University of Chicago Law School.
But over the past years, drone strikes proved to be ineffective and lacking the claimed precision. Reprieve human-rights group calculated that it takes about 28 innocent lives to take out a single terrorist leader. “Drone strikes have been sold to the American public on the claim that they’re ‘precise’. But they are only as precise as the intelligence that feeds them. There is nothing precise about intelligence that results in the deaths of 28 unknown people, including women and children, for every ‘bad guy’ the US goes after,” said Reprieve’s Jennifer Gibson, who headed the group’s study.
The need to save American troops from risk of death is legitimate and understood but there is also a need to save innocent civilians from other nationalities as well. Furthermore, to think that this extensive and blind use of drones is saving American lives is very short-sighted, because the children who lose their families because of American drones will grow up with sentiments of hate, perhaps even revenge which might make them easy recruits in radical groups. American airstrikes are already causing a huge damage in Syria and Iraq. Data compiled by Airways showed that least 3,100 civilians were killed in US-led airstrikes from August 2014 to March 2017. What is further alarming is that more civilians in Syria were killed by US-led coalitions than by Isis or Russian-led forces in March.
Dropping limits on drone strikes is a grave mistake and would prove costly in the long run.