Partially lifting the secrecy that has cloaked one of the United States’ most contentious tactics for fighting terrorists, the Obama administration on Friday said that it believed that air strikes it has conducted outside conventional war zones such as Afghanistan have killed 64 to 116 civilian bystanders and about 2,500 members of terrorist groups.
The official civilian death count is hundreds lower than most estimates compiled by independent organisations that try to track what the government calls targeted killings in chaotic places like tribal Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya.
Most of the strikes have been carried out by drones, though a small number have involved traditional aircraft or cruise missiles. At the same time, President Barack Obama issued an executive order making civilian protection a priority and requiring the government in the future to disclose the number of civilian deaths each year.
The order, which could be cancelled or altered by a future president, tries to commit his successors to greater openness than he achieved in the first seven years of his presidency.
In a seeming acknowledgment that the long-anticipated disclosure would be greeted with scepticism by drone critics, the administration released the numbers on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend.
The use of a range of estimated civilian deaths underscored the fact the government often does not know for sure the affiliations of those killed. "They're guessing, too," said Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who has tracked civilian deaths for more than a decade. "Theirs may be a little more educated than my guesses. But they cannot be completely accurate."
The decision to make public the numbers, the subject of months of bureaucratic deliberations, carried broader significance. The order, issued six months before Mr Obama leaves office, further institutionalised and normalised air strikes outside conventional war zones as a routine part of 21st-century national security policy.
The executive order declares that “civilian casualties are a tragic and at times unavoidable consequence of the use of force in situations of armed conflict or in the exercise of a state’s inherent right of self-defence” and lays out the “best practices” necessary to reduce their likelihood and “take appropriate steps” when they occur.
The civilian death numbers between Obama’s inauguration in 2009 and the end of 2015 were contained in a report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It said the numbers came from 473 strikes, which also killed 2,372 to 2,581 “combatants”. The report named Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria as “areas of active hostilities” excluded from the policy.
– New York Times