General Officer Commanding 7-Division Maj-Gen Ghayur Mehmood said in a briefing here: “Myths and rumors about predator strikes and the casualty figures are many, but it’s a reality that many of those being killed in these strikes are hardcore elements, a sizeable number of them foreigners. Yes there are a few civilian casualties in such precision strikes, but a majority of those eliminated are terrorists, including foreign terrorist elements.”
The Military’s 7-Division’s official paper on the attacks till Monday said that between 2007 and 2011 about 164 predator strikes had been carried out and over 964 terrorists had been killed. Of those killed, 793 were locals and 171 foreigners, including Arabs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Chechens, Filipinos and Moroccans.
In 2007, one missile strike left one militant dead while the year 2010 was the deadliest when the attacks had left more than 423 terrorists dead. In 2008, 23 drone strikes killed 152 militants, 12 of them were foreigners or affiliated with Al Qaeda.
In 2009, around 20 predator strikes were carried out, killing 179 militants, including 20 foreigners, and in the following year 423 militants, including 133 foreigners, were killed in 103 strikes. In attacks till March 7 this year, 39 militants, including five foreigners, were killed.
Maj-Gen Ghayur, who is in-charge of troops in North Waziristan, admitted that the drone attacks had negative fallout, scaring the local population and causing their migration to other places. Gen Ghayur said the drone attacks also had social and political repercussions and law-enforcement agencies often felt the heat.146
A subsequent article in Dawn also applauded the frank tone set by General Mehmood: “Is the army hinting that the strikes are a useful and precise tactic in neutralizing identified militants and terrorists? If that is the case, then the military and political leaders should publicly change their stated position and matters should move on—the battle against local and foreign terrorists hiding in the country’s north-western regions is far from over.”147
But such opinions were clearly the minority in Pakistan, and the general’s surprising frankness has done little to sway his compatriots’ ill will toward the drone strikes. A 2009 Gallup poll found that 67 percent of Pakistanis were opposed to the drone strikes, while 24 percent had neutral feelings toward them and just 9 percent favored them.148 To a large extent, even those who opposed the Taliban were against the drone strikes for the simple reason that they believed that they were uniquely targeting innocent civilians, not militants. Such contrafactual perceptions have been driven by the Pakistani media, which, as stated earlier, is dominated by journalists who equate drone attacks with random acts of Taliban terrorism.
Several journalists in the Pakistani media have written articles on the drone strikes that have inflated the number of dead civilians and, in so doing, inflamed public opinion against the drones. In April 2009 the Pakistani newspaper the News, for example, published an article that completely inverted the low-civilian-casualty trend identified in the preceding case-by-case study of media reports as well as in the New America Foundation report. According to this article, which referenced “cross-border raids” (as previously noted, the drones were actually based in Pakistan), the drones proved to be, in the history of bombing campaigns, uniquely incapable of killing their designated targets. The News report stated, without citing any study to back up its claim, “Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing [sic] 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent.”149 The newspaper reported that this translated to more than fifty civilians killed for every slain al Qaeda member.
Another Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, raised the ante and claimed that “of the 44 predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians…. For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by the American drones, 140 civilian Pakistanis also had to die.”150 This stunning report of course led Pakistanis to believe that the high-tech drones were the most uniquely inaccurate “bombers” in history. The remarkable statistics of fifty or 140 civilians per al Qaeda and Taliban death reported by Dawn and the News were not, however, backed by any published databases and were actually contradicted by the day-to-day reports of Taliban and al Qaeda deaths found in both newspapers. In fact, a casual perusal of articles on drone strikes in both these newspapers reveals a striking contradiction. In the vast majority of specific articles about drone strikes, reporters described the majority of victims as “militants” or “terrorists,” not as “civilians.”
A case-by-case analysis of Pakistani and Western reports of drone strikes by me and two of my colleagues at the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth, Avery Plaw and Matthew Fricker, for the Washington, D.C.–based Jamestown Foundation found that a mere 5 percent of drone-strike victims were described in the media as “civilians.”151 The previously mentioned New America Foundation study similarly found that in 2010 approximately 6 percent of those killed in drone strikes were identified as “civilians.”152 Research conducted by the Long War Journal on drone strikes from 2004 to 2011 indicates that approximately 108 civilians were killed in drone strikes that successfully targeted 1,816 Taliban and al Qaeda extremists (i.e., a civilian death rate of less than 6 percent).153
These three independent research–based studies, however, failed to have the same impact in Pakistan as the more alarmist, nonsourced findings of the two Pakistani journalists who wrote the aforementioned articles. Afghanistan-Pakistan–based journalist Dexter Filkins of the New York Times reported, “The overall perception is that America is massacring people.”154 The exaggerated statistic of fourteen dead al Qaeda for seven hundred civilians was picked up by Pakistani politicians on the right who used these numbers to galvanize popular support against the United States and the drones. One Pakistani writer complained of this trend: “From Imran Khan to Munawar Hasan, right-wing political parties and religious groups have used drone strikes to forward their agenda by misguiding people through erroneous, fabricated and fictional data. As a result, thousands of people have been mobilised across the country to oppose these strikes.”155 Another Pakistani from the FATA similarly complained of this trend among right-wing Pakistanis: “I would request them to stop throwing around fabricated figures of ‘civilian casualties’ that confuse people around the world and provide propaganda material to the pro-Taliban and al Qaeda forces in the politics and media of Pakistan.”156 A third Pakistani wrote,
Civilian deaths are not as high as Pakistani media, religious leaders, politicians, and other analysts have been claiming. The analysts question the claims of high civilian casualties because no media outlet or organization has ever published the names of those killed, their villages, dates, and the locations of the drone attacks. According to analysts, in a bid to minimize their losses, the insurgents try to conceal the identities of their associates killed in the attacks. They collect their comrades’ bodies and, after burying them, issue statements that all of the victims were innocent residents.157