In November last year, American lawyer Clive Stafford Smith met Tariq Aziz in Islamabad. Smith was at a traditional jirga, a meeting with Pashtun elders, as part of his work with Reprieve, an international human rights organisation. He was there in order to understand from a local perspective the clandestine drone war being conducted by the United States in Pakistan.
Toward the end of the meeting, 16-year-old Tariq volunteered to help collect physical evidence linking American drone strikes to civilian casualties. He never got the chance. Three days after he met Smith, he and a 12-year old cousin were killed by such a strike on their way to pick up an aunt.
Yet President Barack Obama recently stated that the use of drones in Pakistan 'is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists'.
He also claimed that 'drones have not caused a huge number of casualties'. But there is no magic number that somehow makes civilian casualties acceptable. For Tariq's aunt, and many others like her, there is only desolation.
The civilian numbers killed by drone strikes can be difficult to extract. Journalists are barred from investigating targeted areas, and both sides inflate figures according to their agenda.
But a study by the New America Foundation found that the 114 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 to the beginning of 2010 killed between 830 and 1210 individuals. Around 550 to 850 were described as militants. This means a third of those who were killed were civilians.
Despite the supposed sophistication of drones, innocent people die.
Drones, otherwise known as UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) or RPAs (remotely piloted aircraft), had been mainly used for surveillance during the Clinton years. However, advances in technology, as well as heightened dismay over American fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq, have driven the development of drones for deploying missiles in Pakistan and Yemen.
The argument is that they can more accurately conduct lethal action, either by the military or the CIA, without any risk to personnel. American pilots may now safely engage in combat by remote, literally from the other side of the world. But the risks for ordinary people on the ground have not changed.
These civilian deaths are drawing attention to Washington's 'awkward, open secret'. Drone strikes have quadrupled since Obama took office. The number of drones themselves has also increased, with the US surging ahead in a drone arms race. Defence analysts say others are not far behind, with over 50 countries having built or bought UAVs.
Australia is phasing in UAVs as part of its Defence Capability Plan. The initial fleet will be mainly for maritime surveillance, with a LOT (life of type) of only ten years. This is 'to ensure that the ADF is positioned to take advantage of technological advancements'.
The fact is that our special forces are already being trained to use drones in combat. Last year, senior officers used American drones in strikes against Taliban insurgents.
We are already at the next stage of global conflict. Yet legal restraints or even public debate about the use of drones have so far been alarmingly muted.
Signature strikes, aimed at clusters of unidentified men perceived to be militants (as opposed to 'personality strikes' which target specific high-profile terrorist leaders), form the bulk of CIA operations. They highly endanger civilians. This is a clear contravention of international humanitarian law, which upholds the principle of distinction between civilians and combatants.
That a civilian agency is pursuing military objectives is also disturbing. Some CIA strikes last year actually drew complaints from the Pentagon and the State Department, as civilian casualties only sharpened diplomatic tensions between the US and Pakistan.
The US is driving a drone industry in the same way it drove the nuclear arms race. The technology has surged ahead of philosophical, moral or legal inquiry about its use. It is normalising pre-emptive strikes, with no clear accountability for future prosecution. It has removed a significant impediment to bellicose foreign policy: the prospect of loss of life and injury to young men and women in uniform.
These conditions do not bode well for us, even as it is too late to wind back the technology. Even so, it must be met with the same resistance that continues to meet nuclear weapons and landmines. International scrutiny is urgently needed. The world community must move quickly to highlight the legal implications and moral turpitude of negligently killing innocent people by remote.
Fatima Measham is a Melbourne-based writer, and tweeter.