Like so many trade union activists in Pakistan’s lawless north west frontier region, Muhammad is caught in the cross-fire between militant Taliban Islamists and the undeclared “War on Terror” that has seen his homeland hit by hundreds of drone strikes.
Muhammad is not his real name. As a senior leader of a teachers’ trade union affiliated to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), he has genuine cause to fear the Pakistan Taliban, who have murdered scores of his colleagues for the “crime” of trying to bring western-style education to the Pashtun tribal areas.
He agreed to speak to me anonymously at a secret location in Peshawar, the capital city of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, abutting the war-ravaged Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) and close to the border with Afghanistan.
In the FATA and Swat Valley, around 100 miles (160kms) north-east of Peshawar, the Taliban have destroyed hundreds of schools and assassinated female teachers.
They have also attacked and intimidated young schoolgirls; among them Malala Yousafzai, who has now become a heroine of the international “Education For All” movement.
The Taliban’s crimes against education and progress have rightly been condemned.
But Muhammad – and many other local people I talked to – also adamantly opposes the “indiscriminate” US and NATO response to Taliban terror – especially the use of drones or armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), as they are technically known.
“A drone attack can’t differentiate between the innocent and the terrorist. I have seen so many innocent families who have been victimised by these attacks,” he said.
“This is not the real humanity. This should not have been done. There is no question that we are going to support it. We are trade union members. We are totally against them.
“If a man is a terrorist he should be tried in court. This would save the lives of innocent women and children. If it awakes a revenge in the people, it provokes more terrorist attacks. The policy of drones is counter-productive.
“If one person is responsible, you cannot hit the whole family. You cannot hit the children, the brothers and the sisters. This is not lawful. Kids who are two or three years old, they are not guilty. [They] bombard the whole village just looking for one person or a small group of people.”
And then, perhaps contentiously, he added: “I have studied in America myself. I will never forget an anti-war on terror demonstration on Madison Avenue saying that 9/11 was an ‘inside job’.
“Here in Pakhtunkhwa many, many people believe that it was the Americans themselves who were responsible for the 9/11 attack.”
Given the nefarious nature of the “War of the Drones”, it’s almost impossible to verify the number of deaths in the drone killing zones of Pakistan and other theatres, principally, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Perhaps the most credible statistics are those supplied by the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which closely monitors US drone attacks.
The bureau estimates that in the period 2004-2011 between 2,372 and 2,997 people were killed by UAVs. Some 391 to 780 of these victims were civilians, claims the bureau, among them 175 children.
One usually reliable media source in Peshawar, who tabulates drone attacks in his country, told Equal Times that in the last six years (until May 2013) there had been a total of 219 drone attacks on sovereign Pakistan territory that had killed 426 Taliban fighters and 1,063 civilians.
Equal Times will be publishing David Browne’s special in-depth on drones on Friday, 2 August.
