Civilian Casualties From Us Drone Strikes Are Fewer Than Reported

American drone strikes inside Pakistan are killing far fewer civilians than many

in the country are led to believe, according to a rare on-the-ground investigation by The Associated Press.

An AP reporter who spoke to about 80 villagers at the sites of the 10 attacks in North Waziristan was told that a significant majority of the dead were combatants.

Indeed, the AP was told by the villagers that of at least 194 people killed in the attacks, about 70 percent - at least 138 - were militants. The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police. Thirty eight of the civilians were killed in an attack on March 17, 2011.

When we exclude this one disastrous strike the figures show that more than ninety per cent of the casualties were enemy combatants.

Any civilian deaths at all are unfortunate but this information proves that the Pakistanis have been giving inflated casualty reports. The effect of this type of reporting has been to fuel anti American sentiment and has also caused many people to join the ranks of the Taliban.

U.S. officials who were shown the AP's findings rejected the accounts of any civilian casualties but declined to be quoted by name or make their own information public.

The U.S. has carried out at least 280 attacks since 2004 in Pakistan's tribal region. The area is dangerous and off-limits to most reporters, and death tolls from the strikes usually rely on reports from Pakistani intelligence agents speaking on condition of anonymity.

The numbers gathered by the AP turned out to be very close to those given by Pakistani intelligence on the day of each strike, the main difference being that the officials often did not distinguish between militants and civilians. This is obviously a ploy to invoke anti US sentiment and to discredit the US war effort.

Drone attacks began during the Bush administration but President Barack Obama has increased them significantly during his administration with devastating effects on enemy combatants. I believe that a major part of the reason that the Pakistanis want them stopped is because it has to be embarrassing to them that the US has killed so many top terrorist leaders on their soil.

Some analysts have been skeptical about carrying out on-the-ground investigations, assuming villagers would follow the militants' narrative of high civilian death tolls to avoid reprisals. But the AP study showed otherwise. While some villagers spoke on condition of anonymity saying they feared for their safety, others let their names be published.

Many knew the dead civilians personally. They also said one way to distinguish civilians from militants was by counting funerals, because the bodies of dead militants would usually be whisked away for burial elsewhere.

One tactic that the Taliban has been using is to use innocent civilians as shields. They will force innocent civilians to remain on sites that they know that the US will target and make a big scene about US attacks after innocents are caught in the crossfire. Despite this tactic the civilian death count is not very significant. Military Ring Express

by: tishbite

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