The people of Waziristan are suffering a brutal kind of occupation under the Taliban and al Qaeda. Therefore, they welcome the drone attacksRead the rest of her column here, and the AIRRA-Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy here.
There is a deep abyss between the perceptions of the people of Waziristan, the most drone-hit area and the wider Pakistani society on the other side of the River Indus. For the latter, the US drone attacks on Waziristan are a violation of Pakistani’s sovereignty. Politicians, religious leaders, media analysts and anchorpersons express sensational clamour over the supposed ‘civilian casualties’ in the drone attacks. I have been discussing the issue of drone attacks with hundreds of people of Waziristan. They see the US drone attacks as their liberators from the clutches of the terrorists into which, they say, their state has wilfully thrown them. The purpose of today’s column is, one, to challenge the Pakistani and US media reports about the civilian casualties in the drone attacks and, two, to express the view of the people of Waziristan, who are equally terrified by the Taliban and the intelligence agencies of Pakistan. I personally met these people in the Pakhtunkhwa province, where they live as internally displaced persons (IDPs), and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
I would challenge both the US and Pakistani media to provide verifiable evidence of civilian ‘casualties’ because of drone attacks on Waziristan, i.e. names of the people killed, names of their villages, dates and locations of the strikes and, above all, the methodology of the information that they collected. If they can’t meet the challenge, 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.
Update: via the BBC Mapping US drone and Islamic militant attacks in Pakistan
3 comments:
What would be an acceptable source? The Congressional Report doesn't list names of those killed, but it compiles the numbers based on information from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and the Human Rights Unit of the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R41084.pdf
Also you might try the Human Security Report Project (from Simon Fraser University in Canada). It seems to strive to do unbiased research on what it calls "organized violence" around the world, and has a section on Afghanistan, which heaven knows, deserves its own permanent entry in the Guinness Book of Beleaguered Countries.
http://www.hsrgroup.org/
I follow Bill Roggio over at Long War Journal http://www.longwarjournal.org/pakistan-strikes.php
I sent him the post to see if he knows these folks over in NWFP.
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