Counting Civilian Casualties from Drone Strikes

Christine Fair’s article raised two important issues with the record and number of civilian death attributed to drone strikes: the reliability of the sources upon which news organizations rely and determining who can be considered a civilian or innocent.  Fair points out that the sources are biased, manipulated, and often dishonest.  Fair also raises the issue of the role of women and children in the war on terror and questions whether they all can be absolutely considered civilians.

            Because of the remoteness, danger, and inaccessibility of the Pakistani tribal region, Western news organizations are unable to conduct their own reporting and investigations on the ground to follow up on drone strikes.  Because of this Western news organizations get their casualty estimates from Pakistani news sources.  This raises major issues of reliability of the reports because as Fair states, “Pakistani media reports are not likely to be accurate in any measure and subject to manipulation and outright planting of accounts by the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence agency) and the Pakistani Taliban and affiliated militant outfits”.   Fair goes on to explain that the ISI has a “Media Management Wing which manages domestic media and monitors foreign media coverage of Pakistan”.  Fair reports that Pakistani journalists have confided to her that “as many as one in three journalists are on the payroll of the ISI”.  Both the ISI and Pakistani based terror groups have a strong incentive to exaggerate the level of civilian casualties because of the expected backlash that it will have in the West, undermining a program which has killed scores of their members.  Given this evidence of bias in Pakistani new sources and manipulation by the ISI, who are hostile to drone strikes and supportive of targeted groups, there is reason to doubt the casualty reports of Pakistani news sources and in turn the casualty  reports of Western news organizations who rely on these Pakistani sources. 

            Fair goes on to point out that even if independent outsiders were to go to the tribal areas to interview people on the ground about the strikes and the strikes death toll, the residents of the tribal areas have a strong incentive to lie and inflate the number of civilians killed.  Residents interviewed may be complicit in the activities of the terror groups, be suspicious of outsiders of being CIA, ISI, Indian intelligence, or terrorist groups supporters who would report back what they said and fear reprisals.  Additionally it may have been their family members who were killed and they would have an incentive to call them civilians rather than terrorists.  Further, reporting the true number of militants or terrorists killed would potentially encourage further drone strikes because the U.S. would know that there are enemy combatants in the area. 

It is also difficult to determine what damage is caused solely by drone strikes.  The Pakistani army has carried out several (unsuccessful) military operations in the tribal areas to root out militants.  These operations have involved artillery and air strikes which caused widespread destruction and civilian casualties.  For a journalist or outsider being shown the destruction it is difficult to tell which can be attributed to a U.S. drone strike or a previous Pakistani army offensive and if the locals want the drone attacks stopped, they again have a strong incentive to blame the drone strikes for the deaths and destruction.  Anti American sentiment is extremely high in this region, so if not for any of the reasons outlined above, locals could have an incentive to blame drones for inflated civilian casualties because of their strong anti American feelings. 

In terms of women and children all being considered civilian casualties, Fair points out that females have acted as suicide bombers so they all cannot be treated as non combatants absolutely.  Along the same lines, I would pointed out the two child suicide bombers in Nigeria this week as evidence that children cannot be unconditionally treated or seen as non combatants.  Finally there is the issue that Fair raises that if a family is sheltering a terrorist, are they not aiding and abetting the enemy?  Fair cites the example of the drone strike on Baitullah Mehsud and his family as an example of the family aiding and abetting a “mass murderer” and concluding that they could hardly be considered innocents because of this.