Brian Williams - Predators

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. 148To 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.” 149The 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.” 150This 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.” 151The previously mentioned New America Foundation study similarly found that in 2010 approximately 6 percent of those killed in drone strikes were identified as “civilians.” 152Research 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.” 154The 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.” 155Another 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.” 156A 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

Even though some Pakistanis had challenged the inflated, sourceless Pakistani media “statistics” on civilian deaths, the false numbers were subsequently used to galvanize opinion against the drones in America as well. In May 2009 David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum published an opinion piece in the New York Times that legitimized the sourceless, exaggerated Pakistani media claims: “Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent—hardly ‘precision.’” 158Kilcullen, who was an influential adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, then went before the House Armed Services Committee and further legitimized the sourceless statistics: “I realize that [the drones] do damage to the Al Qaeda leadership. Since 2006, we’ve killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we’ve killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they’ve given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism.” 159

As the wildly inflated, sourceless claims of the drones’ civilian-to-militant kill ratio traveled from the Pakistani media to U.S. politicians, it became an article of faith in many circles that the CIA drones hunted not Taliban and al Qaeda, but innocent Pakistani civilians. Typical of this viewpoint was Maulvana Sami Ulhaq of the Pakistani Jamiat e Ulema e Islam (the Community of Islamic Scholars, an extremist Pakistani Islamist party), who announced at a conference in Lahore that the U.S. drone attacks kill “dozens of innocent people daily.” 160Muhammad Ahmed of the popular Buzz Pakistan website similarly wrote, “USA did more than 100 drone attacks in Pakistan in the past 3 years, if you read news about these drone attack you will see that in these drone attack only 1% terrorists was killed and other 99% people who died in these attack was innocent civilians of Pakistan. 75% of them were 10 to 15 year old teenagers.” 161The Pakistan Observer similarly reported, “The US drones or the predator planes which have been on the killing spree in Pakistan’s northern belt since August 2008 and have so far killed over fourteen hundreds people with the big majority as the innocent civilians (as admitted by the international watch dogs).” 162A similar finding was made by Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, a Pakistani who runs a website called Pakistani Body Count. 163His site, the only Pakistani site with sourcing, found that twelve hundred Pakistani civilians had been killed for forty terrorists. Usmani, however, came to this stunning conclusion by labeling all Taliban killed by drones as “civilians.” 164This even though the Pakistani government itself has recognized the members of Pakistani Taliban groups, who have killed thousands of Pakistani civilians, as terrorists. One Pakistani organization went even further than Usmani and claimed that 957 civilians had been killed in drone strikes in the year 2010 alone. 165