More than 3,000 people in Pakistan have been killed by drone strikes. Were they enemies? That's where it gets tricky.
Posted 03.26.2013 at 5:00 pm
17 Comments
Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind
Pitch Interactive
The United States has killed more than 3,000 people in Pakistan with drone strikes. Breaking down who died and when into a clear and useful way can be tricky. Pitch Interactive, which has worked with Popular Science in the past, and its latest on drone casualties provides a straightforward look at a relatively murky war. At least, as clear a portrait as one can get from a contested area with biased witnesses, reporters, and governments all trying to shape the debate.
By email, I asked Wesley Grubbs of Pitch Interactive about the data.
Popular Science: Victims are categorized as children, civilians, "high-profile," and "other." Did you consider breaking up the "other," and if so, was that a problem of unclear information? Or was it something else, like wanting to avoid assuming a clear answer when the data isn't so much unclear as politically contested?
Grubbs:The "Other" category is really a very grey zone. The Obama administration would call these people "military combatants" because they are of-age males. However, many people in this category are actually civilians. It's just that many of the bodies are beyond recognition or there are conflicting reports on the ground about who they are. It's never clear exactly who they are or what threat they pose. The high-profile targets, however, are the people who [we] know have direct affiliations with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. However, say a military combatant's house was hit and his neighbor's house was also hit in the strike, the neighbor would be automatically termed as a military combatant if he was male. Because of this, we did not want to call these people military combatant and there is not enough data to break these men out further.
Popular Science:More than 75 percent of the victims fall into the "other" category. That means you're working with a data set three-fourths of which is unclear. Is it challenging to make a visualization for something so unknown?
Grubbs: It's not necessarily unclear. People simply call them something different. ...Our goal was to help bring light to this uncertainty. These are people who are accused of being something without any representation before they are eliminated. Is this something we want to support? And if they are military combatants, are they even a threat to America? The CIA is not disclosing any information to support their decisions in who to target and this is something people should understand.
The visualization does an excellent job conveying the sheer scale of collateral damage from strikes used to kill only a few high-value targets, and uses information on those high-value targets from the reputable New America Foundation. The real challenge of covering and analyzing the United States' drone war over Pakistan is getting the sourcing right, and disentangling fact from a series of disparate interests trying to manipulate truth, as Christine Fair, a Georgetown professor who has long questioned Pakistan's official account of the drone war, suggests.
Some skepticism over any answer claiming to be conclusive about drone strikes is warranted. That healthy skepticism of sources shouldn't detract from the simple utility of Pitch Interactive's visualization. Instead, for me at least, it prompted another late night at home checking facts.
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What happens in late 2006, did we strike a preschool to hit one high value target? Homeland is not fiction after all? OK which senator is a terrorist.
So then we are averaging what? How many humans per drone strike might be a worthwhile number to know, right off the bat. Cmon! If we are going to generalize and marginalize this, lets get to it!
CERTAIN drone strikes have killed FAR MORE CIVILIANS than others. Lacking in due diligence from those responsible for these lethal RC toys. The chart is meaningless. It helps those who are responsible act like they've done something correctly through analysis of their own actions, instead of what's really happening where their instances of lack of professionalism and dedication is melded in, factored, and forgotten.
So we are getting 47 bonafides and '3000' dead. Wow. 80-1 and worse.
We could just carpetbomb every city in the world and average those numbers. Let's get crackin!
Sorry. 70-1 and worse. Slip of the middle finger. Understandable, yes?
It just makes me want to compare it to the troops/contractors civilian kill ratio as well as how many U.S. lives these drones have saved.
I. Shelton2
More troop/contractors lives would have been saved if the drones had been aimed at "high profile" people in this country. As a Viet Nam veteran of the Army and the Navy it's very disheartening to realize that we're still far more willing to kill for a cause that we're not willing to die for. That's one reason that we haven't won a war since the Air Force was created. Killing people by remote control insulates the killer for the terror of war.
We create enemies when we need them. We need wars to keep hundred of thousands of people employed as well as keep our weapon manufacturers in business. Why is it that we're bordered by Mexico and Canada and they don't have an enemy in the world?
Amerikill just created 30,000 new terrorists. Congrats.
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"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours"
- Stephen Roberts
@adaptation apparently yes something like that... www.tribune.com.pk/story/229844/the-day-69-children-died/
0bamakill just created 30,000 new terrorists. Now let's NOT protest in front of the whitehouse gate because he's a democrat, just like us. Congrats.
@macros820; So then, just how many U.S. lives have been saved by the killing of 3105 people to kill 47? In ten years, you wouldn't still be mad enough to kill if it was your dead family who had done nothing wrong to anyone? So who has been saved here? What's the name? And how many dedicated enemies have we created to save that person? When your neighbor gets angry because a few of your apples ended up rotting behind his hedge, does he turn his dogs loose to kill you? And yet, here we are, bombing people because of someone standing behind their hedge. Many of whom have ZERO EVIDENCE actually attributed to them get BOMBED FROM AFAR-along with the hundred people standing around that probably don't even know the person they are all going to die for.
There is NO SHORTAGE of willing troops and specialists that will be good with going in and killing some target-anywhere. While an assassin is definitely looked hard upon, it's better than this coward shitt.
"O-Bomb-a"
(Peers closely at chart) According to this data... drone pilots were really terrible at aiming in 2006. In 2012, many people classified as "other" (a.k.a "possible" terrorists) were killed. Overall, civilian and child deaths have dropped, so at least we know that the drone pilots are getting a little better at handling the remote.
Almost makes you wish Bush were back in office.
@Mukuro Holmes
Piloting is not the issue. The pilots are hitting their intended targets. It is all about bad intelligence and collateral damage. These high priority guys live and work in villages and compounds surrounded by civilians and children. It is impossible to get at them with a drone strike without the collateral damage. It is like trying to cut cake with a chainsaw. It's going to be messy no matter how careful you are.
These decisions go all the way up to the chief executive. They determine if the risk of civilian casualties is acceptable given the priority of the target. Obama got pretty emotional talking about the Sandy Hook victims. I wonder if he has shed a tear for the children that are continuously killed as a direct result of his command.
I shouldn't have even clicked on this link...I'm pretty sure a couple of you guys are just here to hate on America with no proof to back you're reasoning. Until then, I'm out...
Being a regular visitor to this site and a Pakistani myself. It was a very balanced article in black & white. With my friends in Drone Zone areas in Pakistan life is very dangerous with both the Taliban and US attacking them. A few of my friends died while praying in a mosque(prayer house) in that area and none of them were related to militants.
Actually I think this "infographic" does a really poor job of turning the data into information. What are those weird curved lines at the top. What is the scale? Is each box a person a dozen or what? It would not hurt to provide the number of strikes represented by each column. You need to hire a company that can do first semester data analysis.
Other sources claim Since 2006, there have been 2,498 leaders and operatives from Taliban, Al Qaeda, and allied extremist groups killed and 153 civilians killed.You can at least make sense of the charts here: www.longwarjournal.org/pakistan-strikes.php
Most of the drone strike information is either classified, slanted for political reasons or just a SWAG.
The Bureau of investigative journalism has data as well. They don't differentiate between civilians and militants very well but the data is presented well:
www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/03/15/pakistan-government-says-at-least-400-civilians-killed-in-drone-strikes/
When you are reporting on thousands of people being killed at least make an effort to do a half decent job of getting the information across.