Farhat Taj:
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 willfully thrown them.
Are drones sloppy or is our own media?
The Pakistani government and media take the figure appearing in the American media as an admission by the American government.
US media does not have the access to produce numbers.
Moreover, the area is simply not accessible for any kind of independent journalistic or scholarly work on drone attacks. The Taliban simply kill anyone doing so.
The reason why these estimates about civilian ‘casualties’ in the US and Pakistani media are wrong is that after every attack the terrorists cordon off the area and no one, including the local villagers, is allowed to come even near the targeted place.
The militants themselves collect the bodies, bury the dead and then issue the statement that all of them were innocent civilians. This has been part of their propaganda to provide excuses to the pro-Taliban and al Qaeda media persons and political forces in Pakistan to generate public sympathies for the terrorists.