Eye on the Story — Movie on Drone wars
Once there were intense drone strikes targeting high value terrorist leaders. Main aim of these strikes is to decapitate the head of terrorist organizations. For Tape worm, if its body parts were cut(even) infinite times, parts will regrow again and again. But tapeworm’s brain lies in head, if it is decapacitated once, Tapeworm will cease to exist once for all. This Tapeworm theory applies to terrorist organizations too. US used combat drones for taking down various dreaded terrorist high value targets. The high value targets include Nek Mohammad, Mullah Mansour, Baitullah Mehsud and many others. Though this drone strikes brought down many senior leaders among various terrorist/militant groups, biggest tragedy & potential cost of these strikes were innocent civilians. Until now thousands of civilians who lived alongside this drone kill zones, caught accidently in this crossfire & perished haplessly. Damage caused by these, slowly moving, pilotless, camera fitted, killer machines were exceedingly high. It robbed lives of street vendor, vegetable seller, innocent kids who played in roads.
Film depicts how a young destitute girl (who was passionate on becoming Hula hoop dancer), wanders into this drone kill zone and gets a fatal injury . There were so many young boys/girls, underwent similar fate due to these various drone strikes happened in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia.
Film also shows how army commanders and politicians under deep stress while authorizing these strikes. For Army commanders, if they fail to convince their political masters for strike, they will face collateral damage by suicide bombers (groomed by these high value leaders) some day. For politicians if they authorize these strikes, they need to answer volatile questions from human rights activists. Their political constituencies(votes) may get further damaged if the decision went really bad
Last week, an autobiography of Obama was released (A Promised Land). In that book he regretted that there were so many drone strikes happened during his time, primarily to hunt down leaders of many Alqueda & its affiliated groups. His words were this
“At the very least, I wanted to save them, send them to school, give them a chance to do business, and get the hatred out of their minds. And yet they were part of the world and the machinery (drones) I ordered often killed them
I never felt happy or strong”
But still former president defended that these surgical strikes caused less collateral damages than other non-precision ways like usage of surface missiles.
Though the film centers on one military drone strike targeted against terrorists (who are on mission to carry out imminent suicide bombing),It also glimpses us more soft side of Computer operators and engineers who control these drone strikes. These operators & engineers were thousands of miles away, get depressed on knowing human civilian fatalities associated with strikes.
Film ends in more memorable note when general who issued orders for this strike got questioned by teary politician who sits in AC room
“Never tell a soldier he doesn’t know the cost of war”
