1 The Durand Frontline
From the beginning of the “war on terror,” the U.S. treated Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single theater of war. After toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the Bush administration soon started providing aid to the Pakistani government in return for conducting military operations against insurgent groups, including Al Qaeda, that used Pakistan’s tribal areas as a safe haven (Wright 2003). In the same period of time, the Bush administration also green-lighted covert U.S. military operations against insurgents hiding on Pakistani soil. The first U.S. drone strike in Pakistan, for example, was carried out in South Waziristan in June 2004, when a Hellfire missile killed Nek Mohammed, a local Taliban commander, and several unidentified individuals (Plaw et al. 2016, 45).
During the Obama administration , the “war on terror” continued to be fought on both sides of the Durand Line, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Based on the assessment that the same “cancer”—that is, the insurgency—had taken root in both countries, Obama argued that a common military strategy was needed to defeat insurgents on both sides of the Durand Line (Transcript 2009). The new strategy devised by Obama government officials led to a significant escalation of fighting. In Afghanistan, tens of thousands of U.S. troops, who poured into the country during the military “surge,” tried to break the momentum of the Afghan Taliban insurgency, while in Pakistan, the Pakistani armed forces, supported with U.S. drone strikes, conducted extensive military operations against insurgents holed up in the areas along the border with Afghanistan (Badalič 2013).
The Trump administration also adopted the view that Afghanistan and Pakistan constituted a single theater of the “war on terror.” While promising additional military support for the Afghan regime, the Trump administration made it clear it expected Pakistan to step up its military operations against insurgents. Although Trump government officials reduced the number of drone attacks against targets in Pakistan and slashed the military aid provided to Pakistan, they continued to demand from the Pakistani authorities to do more to defeat insurgent groups operating on Pakistani soil (Barker 2018; Pence Tells Abbasi 2018).
A key element of the U.S. common strategy for defeating insurgent groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan was to rely, to a large extent, on local proxy armies and paramilitary groups. In Afghanistan, the U.S. and its allies equipped, trained and many times led in battle members of the new Afghan security forces. From 2002 to mid-2018, the U.S. appropriated about $126.30 billion to fund the new Afghan state, and most of those funds—about $72.8 billion—were spent to finance the Afghan security forces (SIGAR 2018, 47). In Pakistan, the U.S. chose a similar approach. From 2002 to 2018, the U.S. provided roughly $34 billion in military and humanitarian aid to Pakistan (CRS 2019). Most of those funds—about $23 billion—were spent on security, which included reimbursements for counterterrorism operations carried out by Pakistan’s security forces (ibid.). In addition to dismantling insurgent networks operating in the tribal areas, Pakistan had to provide safe passage through its territory for trucks and tankers supplying the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan.
Although the Bush administration unleashed the “war on terror” to kill or capture those responsible for nearly 3000 civilian deaths in the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, the vast majority of people, both civilians and combatants, who were killed or injured in the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan never represented a threat for the U.S. and its allies. As the fighting and chaos spread through most of Afghanistan and the north-western part of Pakistan, all belligerent parties—the U.S. and its allies, the Afghan government, Afghan paramilitary groups, the Pakistani government, Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban and many other insurgent groups—conducted military operations that continuously caused civilian fatalities. From 2001 to 2018, about 212,000 people in total, both civilians and combatants, died in the war on both sides of the Durand Line—about 147,000 people were killed in Afghanistan, while nearly 65,000 people lost their lives in Pakistan (Crawford 2018). The large number of civilians killed or injured in operations carried out by all belligerent parties indicated that the “war on terror” became, to a significant extent, a war against civilians. In Afghanistan, roughly 38,400 civilians were killed between 2001 and 2018, while in Pakistan about 23,300 civilians lost their lives in the same period of time (Crawford 2018).
In addition to the tens of thousands of civilians killed or injured in the war, hundreds of thousands of civilians were displaced from their villages due to the fighting, with many of them left with no choice but to flee their country (Badalič 2013).
2 From Fighting a “War on Terror” to Creating a Reign of Terror
From 2008 to 2017, I frequently visited Afghanistan and Pakistan to conduct research on how the “war on terror” affected the local civilian population. A fragmented picture of the consequences of the conflict slowly emerged as I carried out interviews with civilians injured during military operations, civilians arbitrarily detained and tortured in detention centers, civilians whose family members “disappeared” while being held in detention, civilians kidnapped by insurgent groups, and civilians who had to flee their homes to escape from the violence.
By using the data gathered during fieldwork, combined with the data available in the relevant literature, this book aims to provide an analysis of the impact of the “war on terror” on civilians living on both sides of the Durand Line. Firstly, the book focuses on specific methods of combat—for example, drone strikes, kill-or-capture operations, assassinations—in order to show which were the factors that led to civilians getting killed or injured in such operations. Secondly, the book examines detention practices used by the belligerent parties—for example, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance—in order to provide an analysis of the factors that led to civilians being unlawfully detained. And thirdly, the book focuses on other unlawful practices—for example, torture in detention centers, forced repatriation of refugees—in order to show how they affected the civilian population in both countries.
One of the main themes running throughout the book is how all belligerent parties deliberately ignored key norms of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in order to establish their own rules about what was lawful and what was unlawful in the armed conflict. The belligerent parties used a number of approaches that revealed their contempt for international law. One of the approaches—used by the U.S. military, Afghan paramilitary groups, and the Afghan Taliban—was to introduce too-broad criteria for determining military targets. The new criteria ignored the definitions of legitimate military targets in international humanitarian law, and, consequently, led to violations of the principle of distinction between combatants and civilians, a fundamental principle of international humanitarian law. The second approach, used by Pakistan, was to suspend some of the fundamental human rights by creating a parallel legal framework devoid of those rights, for example, the right to life and the right to a fair trial. The third approach—used by the U.S. military, Pakistani security forces and Afghan security forces—was to continuously rely on practices that violated some of the key rights of international human rights law. The U.S. and Pakistan , for example, used practices that led to violations of the prohibition of arbitrary detention, while the Afghan security forces used practices that violated the norm prohibiting torture and ill-treatment. All those approaches blurred the line between civilians and combatants, and thus led to military operations resulting in thousands of civilians being killed, injured or unlawfully detained.
The book is divided into three major parts. Each part focuses on one of the belligerent parties. The first part examines the unlawful practices used by the U.S. military and their local allies, that is, the Afghan security forces and Afghan paramilitary groups. The second part examines the unlawful practices used by Pakistan’s security forces, while the third part focuses on the Afghan Taliban.
The first part of the book starts with an examination—in Chapter 2—of the factors that led to imprecise U.S. drone strikes that killed and maimed civilians in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The chapter shows that the key factor behind imprecise drone strikes was the use of three too-broad criteria for determining what the U.S. military believed were legitimate military targets. The first criterion, which was used to find targets for “crowd kills,” was that all adult males standing in the vicinity of a known insurgent were legitimate military targets. The second criterion, which was used to find targets for “double tap” strikes, was that first responders who rushed to the site of a drone strike to help the victims of the strike were legitimate targets in follow-up strikes. The third criterion presupposed that surveilled individuals were legitimate targets if they regularly communicated, via mobile phones, with known insurgents. By introducing those target selection criteria, the U.S. military abandoned the two definitions of legitimate military targets in international humanitarian law. Under international humanitarian law, a state party at war with a non-state armed group can lawfully target only individuals actively participating in hostilities, that is, members of non-state armed groups who continuously participate in hostilities and civilians who temporarily participate in hostilities. The above-mentioned target selection criteria were, therefore, inconsistent with international humanitarian law because they ignored the concept of “directly participating in hostilities” and instead targeted individuals based on their location, gender, age and communication patterns.
In addition to an unlawful target selection process, there were other factors that sporadically influenced the precision of the strikes, for example, faulty intelligence provided by local informers, low quality of video footage that prevented drone operators from clearly seeing their targets, limited field of view that prevented drone operators from seeing what was going on in the vicinity of their targets, and tendentious interpretations of unclear images.
The chapter argues that the too-broad target selection criteria constan...
