Truth: The real casualty

Given paucity of detailed post-strike investigation, its unlikely we will ever know precisely how many civilians died.

After a hiatus of a month, the drones have struck again. A drone fired missiles at a target close to Miranshah Bazaar on October 30, hitting a house and a vehicle and reportedly killing three people. On the same day, there was a rumpus in the Senate leading to a suspension of the session when Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar and Senator Raza Rabbani of the PPP exchanged disputatious words regarding the numbers of civilians killed in drone strikes. There is no dispute by any party that civilians are killed in the strikes; but detailed data collection by the government, present or past, has never been undertaken in order to determine precisely who died and their status as combatants or otherwise. A recent report by Amnesty International determined that civilians had died in several of the strikes it investigated, but there is no definitive statistical source that is universally recognised accounting for all strikes since 2004.



That said, the figures presented by the interior minister are widely at variance with most open-source information. Figures provided by the defence ministry state that in the last five years, 67 civilians and 2,160 terrorists had been killed in 317 drone attacks. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) aggregates open-source casualty reports from drone strikes, principally newspapers and the electronic media. The BIJ reports that from 2009 to July 2013, there have been 318 drone attacks, 1,991 terrorists killed and 157 civilians. There is a considerable difference between the two sources particularly in respect of civilian deaths. There appears to be agreement that civilian deaths have declined in the last two years, possibly because of a change of targeting options by the Americans seeking to minimise civilian casualties. Given the paucity of detailed post-strike investigation, it is unlikely that we are ever going to know precisely how many innocent civilians have died in this war thus far. If the government expects to be taken seriously in its statistical presentations to the Senate and the Lower House, then it needs to do the legwork to back them up, because seemingly plucking figures from the air convinces nobody.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 1^st, 2013.

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