Last month,
a “senior administration official” said the number of civilians killed in drone
strikes in Pakistan under President Obama is in the “single digits.” But last
year “U.S. officials” said drones in Pakistan killed about 30 civilians in just
a yearlong stretch under Obama.
Both claims
can’t be true.
A
centerpiece of President Obama’s national security strategy,
drones strikes in Pakistan are credited by the administration with crippling Al
Qaeda but criticized by human rights groups and others for being conducted in secret
and killing civilians. The
underlying facts are often in dispute and claims about how many people died and
who they were vary widely.
So we
decided to narrow it down to just one issue: have the administration’s own
claims been consistent?
We collected
claims by the administration about deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan and
compared each one not to local reports but rather to other administration
claims. The numbers sometimes do not add up. (Check out our interactive graphic to explore the claims.)
Even setting
aside the discrepancy between official and outside estimates of civilian
deaths, our analysis shows that the administration’s
own figures quoted over the years raise questions about their credibility.
There have
been 307 American drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, according to a New
America Foundation count. Just 44 occurred during the Bush administration. President
Obama has greatly expanded the use of drones to attack suspected members of Al
Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban, and other groups in Pakistan’s remote northwest
region.
Obama
officials generally do not comment by name on the drone strikes in Pakistan,
but they frequently talk about it to reporters (including us) on condition of anonymity. Often
those anonymously sourced comments have come in response to outside tallies of
civilian deaths from drone attacks, which are generally much higher than the administration’s own figures.
The outright
contradiction we noted above comes from two claims made about a year apart:
* April 22, 2011 McClatchy
reports that U.S. officials claim “about 30” civilians died in the year between
August 2009 and August 2010.
* May 29, 2012 The
New York Times reports that, according to a senior Obama administration
official, the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under
president Obama is in the “single digits.”
As we also
show in our interactive graphic, other anonymous administration
claims about civilian deaths are possible but imply conclusions that seem
improbable.
Consider:
* April 26, 2010 The Washington Post quotes an “internal CIA accounting” saying that “just over 20 civilians” have been killed by drones in
Pakistan since January 2009.
* Aug. 11, 2011 The New York Times reports that CIA
officers claim zero civilians were killed since May 2010
* Aug. 12, 2011 CNN
quoted a U.S. official saying there were 50 civilians killed over the years in drone
strikes in Pakistan.
If this set
of claims is assumed to be accurate, it suggests that the majority of the 50 total
civilian deaths occurred during the Bush administration — when the drone program
was still in its infancy. As we’ve noted, in the entire Bush administration,
there were 44 strikes. In the Obama administration through Aug. 12, 2011, there
were 222. So according to this set of claims more civilians died in just 44
strikes under Bush than did in 222 strikes under Obama. (Again, the graphic is helpful to assess the
administration assertions.)
Consider
also these three claims, which imply two lengthy periods
when zero or almost zero civilians were killed in drone strikes:
* September 10, 2010 Newsweek quotes a government estimate that “about 30” civilians
were killed since the beginning of 2008.
* April 22, 2011 McClatchy reports that U.S.
officials claim “about 30” civilians died in the year between
August 2009 and August 2010.
* July 15, 2011 Reuters quotes a source familiar
with the drone program as saying “about 30” civilians
were killed since July 2008.
It’s
possible that all these claims are true. But if they are, it implies that the
government believes there were zero or almost zero
civilian deaths between the beginning of 2008 and August 2009, and then again
zero deaths between August 2010 and July 2011. Those periods comprise a total
of 182 strikes.
The
administration has rejected in the strongest terms outside claims of a high
civilian toll from the drone attacks.
Those
outside estimates also vary widely. A count by Bill Roggio, editor of the website the Long War
Journal, which bases its estimates on news reports, puts the number of civilian killed in
Pakistan at 138. The New America Foundation estimates that, based on press reports, between 293 and 471 civilians
have been killed in the attacks. The London-based Bureau of Investigative
Journalism, which draws on a wider array of sources including researchers
and lawyers in Pakistan, puts the number of civilians killed at between 482 and
832. The authors of the various estimates all emphasize that their counts are
imperfect.
There are
likely multiple reasons for the varying counts of civilian deaths from drone
strikes in Pakistan. The attacks are executed remotely in often
inaccessible regions. And there’s the question of who
U.S. officials are counting as civilians. A story last month in the New York Times reported that President Obama adopted a policy
that “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.”
There are
also ongoing debates in the humanitarian law community
about who the U.S. may legitimately target with drone strikes and how the CIA
is applying the principle of proportionality — which holds that attacks
that might cause civilian deaths must be proportional to the level of military
advantage anticipated.
In a rare
public comment on drone strikes, President Obama told an online town hall in January that
the drones had not caused “a huge number of civilian casualties.”
When giving
their own figures on civilian deaths, administration officials are often
countering local reports. In March 2011, for example, Pakistanisincluding the country’s army chief accused a
U.S. drone strike of hitting a peaceful meeting of tribal elders, killing
around 40 people. An unnamed U.S. official rejected the accusations, telling
the AP: “There’s every indication that this was a group of terrorists, not
a charity car wash in the Pakistani hinterlands.”
Unnamed U.S.
officials told the Los Angeles Times last year that
“they are confident they know who has been killed because they watch each
strike on video and gather intelligence in the aftermath, observing funerals
for the dead and eavesdropping on conversations about the strikes.”
U.N. High
Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said during a visit to Pakistan this
month that there should be investigation of killings of civilians by drones and
that victims should be compensated. The U.S. has given compensation to victims of airstrikes in
Afghanistan but there are no reports of victims of drone strikes in Pakistan
being compensated.
Since the
various administration statements over the years were almost all quoted
anonymously, it’s impossible to go back to the officials in question to ask
them about contradictions.
Asked about
the apparent contradictions, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told ProPublica: “[W]e
simply do not comment on alleged drone strikes.”
Additional reporting by Cora Currier.
