Pakistan Claims Only 3 Percent of US Drone Casualties Were Civilians

Yesterday, Pakistani victims of US drone strikes testified before Congress for the first time. Today, Pakistan has for the first time publicly stated what it believes to be the total number of people, civilians included, killed in US drones strikes over the past five years.

According to Pakistan's Ministry of Defense, 2,160 Islamic militants and 67 civilians have died in a total 317 US drones strikes in the country since 2008, the Associated Press reports.

The numbers fly right in the face of virtually ever other drone death-toll estimate put out by governments and independent organizations to date, all of which have strung together projections almost exclusively from local media reports and sometimes unfounded second-hand accounts. And that second figure? Sixty-seven? For all we know, that's shockingly low.

Compare it to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which puts the 2008-2013 Pakistani civilian drone toll at 300. Or the Washington-based New America Foundation, by whose count 185 civilians have been killed in the last half decade. Or Amnesty International, who recently reported that at least 900 Pakistani civilians have been incinerated in what the US calls "precision stikes" between just January 2012 and August 2013 in North Waziristan alone.

In short, the figure Pakistan's government just put on civilian drone casualities is particularly low compared to everything else we've been given in terms "hard" numbers. But they're contradictory, too.

Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur whose been investigating drone strikes, says that earlier this month he was told by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry that at least 400 civilians have been killed by US drones since 2004, when strikes in Pakistan began in earnest.

"If the true figures for civilian deaths are significantly lower," Emmerson told the AP, "then it is important that this should now be made clear, and the apparent discrepancy explained."

For now, however, there remains "no indication" as to why Pakistan's civilian count doesn't line up even slightly with other estiamtes, the AP reports. To be sure, Pakistan's total death figure, 2,227, sits below other total estimates: The NAF puts that figure at 2,651; by the Long War Journal's count, it's 2,493.

Most likely, what we're getting here is a bit of damage control. In a place like Pakistan, where the buzz and "bugsplat" of American drones are hated by civilians at such a visceral level, and where the government has simultaneously pooh-poohed and greenlit the US's shadow wars over Pakistan, well, of course the government is going to lowball how many of its innocent civilians has gone up in Hellfire.

But whether or not 67 civilian deaths is accurate is beside the point. The reality now lies hidden in fog above however many lives have been lost. We will likely never know.

@thebanderson