Why We Know More About Drone Strikes in Pakistan Than in Afghanistan

Afghanistan might be the most drone-struck place on Earth, but when it comes to understanding much of anything about the scope of deadly Predator and Reaper strikes there, our heads might as well be in the sand. Indeed, there is no "comprehensive record of drone use in Afghanistan," according to a new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

That's one of the greater ironies of drone warfare today: We know far more about the hunter-killer drone activity of the CIA's "covert" counterterror campaign over Pakistan, Yemen, and parts of the Horn of Africa, than the Pentagon's drone program in an official theater of war, such as Afghanistan.

We know, for example, that as of October 2013 up to 900 civilians had been killed by drones in Pakistan; that after going a half-year without logging a single strike in Pakistan, the US resumed covert strikes there in early June; that Obama's covert drone war, in Pakistan and Yeman and Somalia, have killed an estimated 2,400 people, including something like 270 civilians.

That's just off the top of my head.

And while we do know that Afghanistan has been the site of 1,000 strikes since both US and UK drone programs began operating there in earnest in the early 2000s, according to the BIJ, which has kept scrupulous track of the shadow drone wars. But that's pretty much it. For all we know, drone strikes in Afghanistan might as well take place in an information vacuum.

That's primarily because, as of yet, neither the US nor the UK is willing to publish information regarding who their drone programs have killed, are killing, or may kill in the future. But it also doesn't help that there is currently no outside group systematically publishing "insurgent and civilian deaths from drones on a strike-by-strike basis," something the BIJ says would be a good start. As it stands, "little is known about where the drones strike, or who they kill."

To that end, the research team behind the BIJ's report spoke with other researchers and journalists who cover the drone wars for context regarding strike occurrences, the challenges inherent in covering them, and any advice they might have for investigating the specifics of the drone program in Afghanistan. Those interviewed were also asked about "likely future scenarios." Many, according to the BIJ, said drones would play an even bigger role in years to come. (They've got a point: As the ground war in Afghanistan finally draws to a close, you'd have a tough time arguing that the use of drones and other remotely-piloted hunter-killer technology won't continue to rise.)

The BIJ also ran a "sample month" exercise, as a way to look at the overall comprehensiveness of drone strike reporting. They collected media reports and various open-source data on every known drone strike that happened in September 2013. What they found is that, similar to theaters like Yemen, reliably distinguishing a drone strike from another type of air strike based purely on open-source reporting "is hard."

And so they gathered reports for both sorts of strikes, despite stating that media reports of strikes aren't sufficient as primary source material in any thorough accounting of drone strikes in Afghanistan. To wit: Nearly 60 percent of reported air strikes "are effectively reported by a single source." And those are the ones that are actually reported—most strikes go seemingly unreported, the BIJ finds. You can read the full report here.

So, about that drone war in Afghanistan. Maybe the strikes are, in fact, offering the sort of precision kill capabilities the Obama administration likes to play up. Maybe it's working. Maybe the whole thing is failing miserably. The point is, we have no way of knowing. At least not yet.