Education, Not Drones, in Pakistan

Brianna Jordan
12/18/2009

The CIA’s recently expanded drone program in Pakistan is highlighting the atrocities of war. Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, can pinpoint and kill their targets from halfway around the world with the controller in the comfort of his own office. While this does keep American troops out of combat zones, it is also the very reason that drones should disturb us.

Being able to send an unmanned machine to anywhere in the world and choose to destroy whatever we want seems like the plot to a bad sci-fi movie. The ugly truth of war is that it allows us to dehumanize people and the act of killing. Drones capitalize on this and take the devaluing of human life to a new level. Fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters turn into insurgents, or targets. Innocent civilian casualties become just a small side note to a “successful strike,” and are often just swept into the broad category of the enemy.

It becomes infinitely easier to kill when you have no connection to the killed and can just press a button to have your target eliminated on the other side of the world.

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The New American Foundation estimates that since 2006, there have been at least 500 militants, and 250 civilian deaths from drone strikes. Another group, The Long War Journal, estimates 885 militant deaths, and 94 civilian deaths. In the end, any number of innocent lives lost is too many, especially in a country that the US is not officially at war with.

Instead of investing in these dehumanizing killing machines, I say we invest in a personal way of helping the people of Pakistan – education. Education is just as powerful of a weapon as anything that Boeing or Northrop Grumman could build. It is easy for terrorists, or anyone, to exploit the lack of education found in Pakistan. The literacy rate in Pakistan is worse than that in even the poorest and most war-ravaged countries like Congo.

It’s a sad fact that uneducated people are easy to exploit. As a recent article by the UK Telegraph that looked into the education system in Pakistan explains, “People who cannot read or write are easier to control ... the illiterate are also more vulnerable to the beguiling simplicities of Islamic radicalism.”

In some areas of Pakistan, there simply are no schools. In other areas, BBC News states that corrupt officials are the main problem. The only schools that exist are “phantom schools” – schools where the teacher has either quit or never existed at all, and yet officials still collect the government paid teacher salary. In other areas, madrassas (traditional Islamic schools) are the only option. According to the UK Telegraph, madrassas earned a bad reputation as they were once the birth of the Pakistani Taliban movement, but even now while most are completely innocent and not run for the purpose of promoting Islamic radicalism, most madrassas do little more than teach kids to memorize the Koran. In many cases parents would rather their kids receive any education at all, as skewed or insufficient as it may be, than for their children to remain completely uneducated.

It is clear to me that the lack of positive education facilities gives power to the violent extremists. So instead of using our UAVs to target terrorist groups with questionable regard for innocent lives and human life in general, we should educate the youth of Pakistan and therefore take away the weapon that enables the Taliban to control the country.

The drone program in Pakistan is run by the CIA because it is not within a formal war-zone. This program, unlike the military’s drone program in Iraq and Afghanistan, is secretive, and so the exact budget and other resources put into the program are hidden. According to the UAV forum, an information website about all unmanned aerial vehicles, modern drones can cost up to $26 million, but the Military’s fleet cost an average of about $4.5 million a piece. This does not include the price of the ground controls and systems or the operating cost. To compare, the pentagon plans on spending about $2.5 billion on drones per year. It is safe to say that the CIA budget for drones is at least on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.

Schools in Pakistan can be built anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 each. For the average cost of just one drone, we could build 90 schools. Education and interpersonal contact give hope and a voice to the people of Pakistan, especially the youth, who are so often dehumanized and forgotten. Investing in education for the youth of Pakistan will get us much closer to a just and peaceful future than drones ever could.