See No Rigging

With another showdown between the government and Imran Khan on the horizon, it is important to revisit the root of the current strife; rigging in the general elections of 2013. While much has been said about this subject, we still appear to have people who are not correctly informed as to what happened, or is alleged to have happened, and what are the evidences to support such allegations.

The crux of the arguments from the disinterested, misinformed commentators boils to what I came across in an op-ed around two months ago. Basically that neither the agitators have

“(1) a theory of how the (election) process could have been hijacked; and (2) evidence that the process was indeed hijacked in the manner suggested.”

This contention is just very, very wrong. Since the main battleground is Punjab, let’s focus on the theory and evidence of rigging there.

The basic allegation or theory is that the ROs or returning officers, that were from the judiciary, were not under the ECPs control and influenced the results in favour of one political party; the PMLN. The Election Commission itself has since admitted, and FAFEN has pointed out, that the ROs were not under its control. The ECP has further admitted that the ROs changed polling schemes in various constituencies and cleared many candidates without verification of eligibility to contest polls in light of the constitution.

For example, the constitution states that a person is disqualified from becoming a member of the National Assembly if he has not repaid a loan “for more than one year from the due date, or has got such loan written off”. Thus, according to the constitution, Nawaz Sharif (loan default) and Fehmida Mirza (load write-off) were not eligible to contest polls and are currently members of the National Assembly in violation of the Constitution of Pakistan, which is otherwise supreme.

However, the main transgression the ROs are alleged to have undertaken is changing the results in certain constituencies in favour of the PMLN. That is to say, that the votes cast for one party might be more than the PMLN, but the ROs, who were in charge of tabulating and announcing results, disregarded facts and ballots cast. Instead, they misused their authority to grant the PMLN votes that never existed, or docked votes cast to other parties, to produce a fake or forged result card in favour of the PMLN candidate/s.

In this endeavour they were often assisted by the POs or presiding officers, who delayed/refused announcing results in individual polling stations in order to give ROs time to change results, and/or refused to give polling agents of rival parties a signed Form XIV or statement of count as proof of polling record at individual polling stations.

A further allegation is that the Punjab Police favoured the PMLN candidates and facilitated them instead of trying to stop the party’s high handedness.

It is argued that the ROs, who were from the judiciary, supported the PMLN on account of Former CJP Iftikhar Chaudhary. Iftikhar Chaudhary’s conduct during his time as CJ Vis a Vis the PMLN is open to interpretation. However it is worth noting that his son, the flamboyant Mr. Arsalan Ifthikar took residence at the Punjab CM House Annexe to better conduct his well-documented “business” dealings. This was revealed in a leaked video of then Punjab Law minister Rana Mashood, which though PMLN sympathizers were quick to call forged, the minister himself confirmed as genuine.

The connivance of Presiding Officers and other polling staff, as well as the police, is blamed on the then Punjab Caretaker CM and journalist Najam Sethi. Sethi has since been personally appointed chief of the Pakistan Cricket Board by Nawaz Sharif, in violation of the PCB constitution. After courts removed Sethi, Mr. Nawaz appointed him again. More recently, Nawaz Sharif again personally nominated Mr. Sethi for the post of ICC Chairman.

Mr Sethi has never played cricket at the international or first class level, never commentated, nor does he have renowned administrative experience.

As caretaker CM of Punjab, Sethi was tasked with providing a neutral environment for elections, specifically with purging the influence of Shahbaz Sharif in the Punjab administration. Najam Sethi did not change the home secretary of the province, retaining the secretary that was an appointee of the PMLN government. The Punjab Police is ultimately answerable to the home secretary.

The bulk of the polling staff and POs are teachers and staff of government schools & colleges. Najam Sethi appointed Mubasher Raza as secretary higher education. He was serving as a secretary under the previous regime as well, described as a “favourite son” of Shahbaz, even by the Jang Group. Najam also did not change the Secretary Schools, Aslam Kamboh.

Basically, the Police and most, if not all, POs and polling staff, remained in the hands of Shahbaz Sharif appointees during election. It is not completely unreasonable then that they are blamed for manipulation of the process.

Aslam Kamboh’s role was particularly worrisome, as even before election candidates accused him of being tasked by Shahbaz to rig elections using polling staff.

For his part Najam Sethi explained that he had retained Aslam Kamboh at the request of UK High Commissioner, so as not to disrupt the UK Education Aid Program for Punjab. The UK’s Punjab School Education Programme-I ran from Dec 2009 to June 2014. The UK’s Punjab Education Support Programme-II runs from Feb 2013 to Mar 2019. Aslam Kamboh left the post of Secretary Schools for a choice posting as soon as Shahbaz Sharif assumed Punjab CM-ship, i.e. June 2013. It is unlikely that either of the Aid programs, or another program we might be unaware of, came to an undocumented end in June 2013. It is also unlikely that the month of May 2013 was pivotal in the outcome of said programs.

Still, what is the hard evidence of rigging? Before looking at the evidence though, we must acknowledge that the evidence collection & analysis process itself has been rigged in favour of the PMLN.

This is because the evidence in our case is the votes. And analysis of the votes is to be done by NADRA, which makes them, let’s say, forensic experts in the matter. Would you say this case was fair, if the accused illegally removed the forensic expert? And when the expert was reinstated by the courts, the accused threatened his school going daughter and forced him to flee the country?

For this is what is happened here, in front of everyone. The Prime Minister of our country had the school going daughter of NADRA chairman threatened, after failing in his illegal attempt to dislodge said chairman. After the chairman fled, Nawaz Sharif appointed one of his own in his place, who will now head examining of evidence against the premier.

It is unfortunate that many commentators, even those belonging to the legal profession, just ignore this fact, fact, like it didn’t happen, let alone admit it has bearing on the matter at hand.

Of course counter arguments and difference of opinion can never be ruled out. One can hold the opinion that threatening the life of a school going girl was in the best interests of democracy. One can contend that putting the police and polling staff in the hands of Sharif loyalists ensured a neutral administration. One can even argue that Mr Sethi has cricketing pedigree beyond mortal comprehension. But to disregard or feign ignorance of these events altogether is troublesome when assessing the 2013 elections.

Coming back to the election process, it has often only been explained until counting of the votes. The most important part however comes after; the sealing of all election material in a polling station including ballots, counterfoils (which record thumb impressions against each ballot and serve as countercheck for each vote cast) and statements of counts (number of votes cast against candidates votes have been cast for) of that station in a polling bag.

Sealing all the material in polling bags preserves the record, meaning it cannot be tampered with/changed afterwards. This is the guarantee that records cannot be changed after the counting process is completed.

Now let’s visit Lahore’s constituency NA 124.

The constituency had 264 polling stations, translating, ideally, to 264 sealed bags with polling materials, most importantly ballots & counterfoils as they were on election day. The PMLN candidate was declared winner by the RO and opposing parties cried foul. When inspection was finally carried out, 152 polling bags out of 264 were found not sealed or with their seals broken. 152 or 57% of the polling bags were tampered with, meaning the amount of ballots and counterfoils in them were illegally changed, in all probability. Because self-unsealing bags are not yet in production. Another 80 polling bags, or 30%, upon inspection revealed proven destruction of record and absence of counterfoils. Meaning evidence of actual number of votes cast in those polling stations had been conveniently removed, opening the door for mass ballot stuffing.

In NA 125, Lahore, there were complaints of rigging even when polling was going on against Khuwaja Saad Rafique of the PMLN. After the polling came to an end and the votes were counted, the presiding officers delayed issuing statements of count, and later flat out refused. The constituency’s results were announced the next day. When the “results” were finally put out, Khuwaja Saad Rafique appeared to have polled around 20K more votes than his provincial assembly counterparts in the constituency. This, to my knowledge, is the only constituency in Pakistan that witnessed such a phenomenon.

The discrepancy occurred not because of Saad Rafique’s considerable charm, but because statements of count were forged in the ROs office in his favour. Over a dozen forgeries for polling station statements were made with 100% voter turnout, ALL of them with Saad Rafique getting maximum votes. Many other forgeries of statements of count, hastily compiled, did not even contain a fake POs signature. ALL of these too have Saad Rafique receiving maximum number of votes. These have been brought to the attention of the tribunal, and even shared online, to no avail.

Upon inspection, 1 ½ years after the election, the record was found desecrated. Trash instead of polling material in polling bags, and in polling bags that did contain some polling material, voters lists were often missing. Where voter lists were available, the number of votes RO had forged on statement of count did not tally with the number of ballots present.

In NA 122, Lahore, Ayaz Sadiq is alleged to have rigged his way to victory. His “victory” too came after an inexplicable delay in the announcement of results. The tribunal in this case has not been able to inspect the record despite its best efforts for 1 ½ years. However, a glimpse into the constituency is provided by vote verification in six polling stations of its provincial counterpart, PP 147. According to the result manufactured by the RO 4,700 votes were polled here. However, only over 3,700 could be recovered from the polling bags. 700 of these were cast using fake CNICs. This is to say 1000 votes only existed in the ROs imagination, and a further 700 were fraudulent. That’s 36%.  

In NA 128, the RO decided that PMLN candidate Malik Afzal Khokar shall be declared the winner, for reasons best known to him. Upon inspection of the record it has been revealed that 175, 175, POs did not submit any record of ballot papers used in their polling stations. Meaning ballot stuffing was, for all intents and purposes, untraceable. Even with a free hand in 175 polling stations, 30 thousand votes that the RO had counted did not actually exist. A further 21K ballots were missing when the polling bags were brought forward.

NA 118, Lahore. Malik Riaz, the PMLN candidate had “won” the election there, but an audit of the votes was proving troublesome, which led to the Tariq Malik episode. In the end, it was revealed that no record was found of over 80 thousand votes in the constituency’s polling bags. That is to say; the RO had added over 80 thousand votes to the final result of the election no evidence of whom was present upon physical inspection of the record.

Now, for anyone keeping count, that’s 5 out of the 12 Lahore constituencies that the PMLN “won”. 41% of the constituencies where the PMLN were declared winners by ROs on May 13/14 in Lahore have revealed evidence of mass scale result manipulation. I have deliberately not mentioned thumb print verifications because PMLN and their sympathizers are campaigning hard to undermine credibility of thumb print verifications.

Even without counting the unverified votes, mass manipulation is evident in 5 of the 12 Lahore constituencies the PMLN won. Manipulation, not irregularities. Use of bad ink is an irregularity, late opening of a polling station is an irregularity, lesser than subscribed amount of polling booths is an irregularity. Forged statements of count, missing counterfoils or missing ballots, unsealed and tampered with polling bags, and absence of votes counted by the RO towards final results, from the physical plane of existence, is evidence of manipulation.

In fact, short of Nawaz Sharif confessing in an address to the nation, there cannot possibly be any other evidence to substantiate the mass fraud that took place on May 13^th.

5 of 12, in Lahore, the provincial capital with all the media’s eyes fixed upon it. 41%. How is that for “industrial scale”?

And it is not all. It can easily be 6 of 12, because NA 127 Lahore also has similar issues with statements of counts, it even has cases where the RO awarded more votes than were registered in a polling station, but the tribunal decided not to inspect the record. For reasons best known to everyone. 50%.

This phenomena is not restricted to Lahore either, this is a theme. According to what has been reported in the media so far, in almost every Punjab constituency where the tribunal was kind enough to grant a vote audit, similar mass fraud was unearthed.

In NA 139 Kasur PMLN had won. Upon PPP candidate’s request for audit of the result, it was revealed that of the 272 polling bags representing each polling station in the constituency, 12 contained litter instead of votes of the corresponding polling station. 32 polling bags did not contained counterfoils that did not have thumb impressions on them, 5 did not contain counterfoils to begin with. 27 polling stations had votes present far exceeding the number of counterfoils.

In all, 103, 400 votes were bogus. PPP are set to begin criminal proceedings against the RO.

In Hafizabad, 54 K counterfoils were recovered while the RO had stated that 72K votes were cast. A total of 21K were declared bogus.

In Lodrhan NA 154, inspection revealed that seals had been broken on polling bags from 80% of polling stations. 9,900 votes were rejected to in a winning margin of 10K votes, and a further 20,000 were proved to be bogus.

Again, except for a Nawaz Sharif confession on TV, the evidence is in the polling bags. What’s preventing the rest of it to come forward is the abysmal, non-transparent and illegal conduct of election tribunals. The election tribunals were legally mandated to decide these petitions within 4 months, which they did not. Even with the illegal delays, the tribunals have been incredibly reluctant to order inspection of records, let alone vote verification by NADRA. An extremely vast majority of petitions have been dismissed without any inspection of votes whatsoever. Even in instances where inspection is ordered and massive manipulation uncovered, like NA 124 with 87 % of polling bags were tampered or containing destroyed, missing record, the tribunals have ruled in favour of returning candidate. Who invariably tend to be from the PMLN.

It really is sad that people still prefer to indulge in partisan bickering rather than wake up to how comprehensively the elections, their elections, were manipulated. 

On Rigging

First, a few observations on the new narrative being constructed about rigging; specifically the ‘electiontribunals’ argument made famous by who appears to be Fakhruddin Ibrahim’s son. While many went gaga over it yesterday, this 'view' has been here for a month now. I first read it in a Dawn column at the start of last month, and in a Five Rupees blog the next day. Since then it has been furiously parroted by at least one PMLN guy on TV; the new Punjab law minister. 

The argument basically is that the election tribunals are working fine, with 78% (latest FAFEN report) of the petitions disposed of already. ‘Already’ and ‘fine’ here are obviously relative to which side of the political divide you are.

The tribunals are supposed to conduct hearings day-to-day and under no circumstances grant an adjournment of more than 7 days. They broke the law and granted adjournments of more than 7 days on 2,393 occassions. And 'already' it is almost a year after the stipulated time period for settling the petitions, with the new assemblies having served 25% of their term, and the process isn’t done. Next will come appeals in the Supreme Court.

More importantly, the disposal of these petitions doesn’t have as much bearing on settling the rigging issue as you would think. That has to do more with the manner of their disposal.

Consider that 26 petitions never made it to tribunals, 28 were withdrawn and 22 dismissed due to non-prosecution. By far the largest number, 126, were dismissed on technical grounds, these include some of MQM’s wonders in Karachi, and 30 were dismissed due to ‘unknown reasons’ (FAFEN tried and failed to obtain copy of orders).

Petitions which went to full trial and couldn’t be proved stand at 62. Petitions accepted stands at 24, with the most number of de-seated MPs belonging to the PMLN at 10.

62-to-24 is a pretty serious ratio. Make that 62-to-25 after another MP, again from the PMLN, was de-seated on allegations of rigging in PP-97 Gujranwala.

Additionally, even the petitions that went to full trial and couldn’t be proved include many where influential government figures held sway and recounts or vote verifications were never carried out.

Which brings us to NA 110. Khuwaja Asif’s victory here was challenged by the PTI as one of four constituencies where they demanded recount and vote verification. Video evidenceof PMLN polling agents stuffing ballots was also available.

Vote verification was never carried out. Instead, as Mr Ibrahim pointed, the tribunal found that the petitioner was non-serious. This example was also quoted in the initial five rupees blog, which sourced the two pages of the verdict from a defence.pk forum. Also available on the forum was the version of the petitioner, which has been ignored by both the initial blog and the recent article.

The petitioner claimed that he had in fact attended all hearings but the court did not grant the request for vote verification. Later when he travelled abroad with the consent of the tribunal, a hearing was set in his absence and he was declared absent and disinterested in said hearing.

So while vote verification, or even a recount, never took place, the official record for this petition will read “not proved in trial”.

The order in NA 110 by election tribunal apparently annoyed with adjournments from petitioner is dated May 12. On May 16, Speaker of the national assembly Ayaz Sadiq got his stay order extended against recount in NA 122. He clearly hasn’t annoyed any judge. NA 122 is the second NA constituency where the initial demand for recounting and verification was made.

A glimpse into this constituency is provided by vote verification in six polling stations of its provincial counterpart, PP 147. The record for the 6 polling stations showed that around 4,700 votes were polled here. However, only over 3,700 could be recovered from the bags. Around 700 of them were cast using fake CNIC numbers on the counterfoils.

The third NA is 125 with Khwaja Saad Rafique. The petition filed against him states that at the very least 15 polling stations in the constituency that polled at 100 percent should be opened up for verification. 15 different polling stations had a voter turnout of 100 percent. No verification has been ordered.

Voters in the area filmed and photographed Khuwaja Saad barging into one women’s polling station after the other, an upright police SP in tow. The current minister later claimed that he went to the polling stations because all of them, and these are his words, “were taken over by PTI women”.

In the storied history of Pakistani elections, this is the first instance an MNA and a police SP had to rush to different polling stations in order to liberate them from women.

There is another instance of a polling incident involving women & PMLN. In the by-elections after the 2008 election, PMLN workers and police barged into a women’s polling station. They grabbed the ballots from PML-Q women supporters. Before running away with the ballots, they beat the women, molested and “de-shalwared” them, as witnessed and reported here by Marvi Memon, current PMLN MNA.

The last NA constituency is NA 154. It saw Siddique Khan Baloch gain 40,000 or so votes overnight to beat Jehangir Tareen by around 10,000 votes, with rejected votes over 9,000. 2 days later his historic turnaround victory made sense when it was announced he would be joining the PMLN.

After a year of stays when recounting commenced the ballots were found infested with termites. Polling bags are supposed to be sealed after counting so no votes can be added or taken out. 80% were unsealed.

Overall, the three most common complaints in the election process have been:-

1)     ROs, who were judges, helping one party or another & fudging the vote counts provided by Presiding Officers, a la “typo”.

2)      Collusion of POs & polling staff with one party or another to stuff ballots, slow down women’s voting etc.

3)      Refusal to sign and hand over Form XIVs, polling details and vote count, by POs to polling agents. This can later to be used to tally with ROs counts. But only if you get it, get it?

In fact, according to FAFEN, 212 of the petitions that made it election tribunals levelled allegations of corrupt or illegal practices by the administration, election officials and/or polling staff.

This has different connotations for different areas. In Balochistan of course the military didn’t want Akhtar Mengal to win and large scale voter suppression, PMLN’s Abdul Qadir Baloch won by polling a whopping 7,000 votes, helped achieve that end. In Karachi the votes were going to the MQM or the polling staff were going to boris. Etc.

So who did it in Punjab, & how? Nobody talks about this for obvious reasons, but I am sure everyone in the know, knows. In the first week after the election bureaucrats in Lahore were telling anyone who would listen that Aslam Kamboh & Justice Ramday were the king’s men who did what was necessary.

The Election Commission admitted, and FAFEN pointed out, that they did not have complete authority over the ROs. The ROs are answerable to the courts and the POs to their relevant government departments, which for a large part happen to be the education department.

In subsequent reports FAFEN has recommended that the ECP should be empowered to suspend and take action against these public functionaries.

However, the damage in this election has been done. Perhaps stung after finding ‘radi’ filled in polling bags of Kasur, Aitezaz Ahsan is the first and only person I can think of who spoke about Justice Ramday & Justice Khwaja Sharif coordinating the activities of ROs on May 11, to the benefit of the winners in Punjab.

Some police officers were transferred from Punjab to Balochistan before Najam Sethi took office as caretaker CM, not when he was there. While Muneeb & Khwaja Saad will have you believe he shuffled around the Punjab government as much as humanly possible, he did forget to remove one guy.

Aslam Kamboh, who had been serving as Shahbaz Sharif’s secretary for schools since 2009, was accidentally & totally unintentionally allowed to remain in that position by future chairman PCB Najam Sethi during elections. No wonder POs, Gov school teachers, were so reluctant to sign Form XIVs. 

Nobody has publically taken his name so far, but the PTI have hinted at it lately, so he might come up before 14^th August.

Will it make a difference? Not likely. In a country where the caretaker CM of a province said on air that rigging took place & he wasn’t “allowed” to go outside on election day, in the same show where the anchor had ballots in his hand, people are still looking for evidence of rigging.

Evidence that can satisfy these people, and the Pakistani courts, is hard to come by. It is even harder to come by against the Sharif family. Affidavits against them by colluders in riggings past are not it, nor are admissions of money laundering, videos of their goons beating people or even audio tapes of Shahbaz Sharif influencing a judge.

There’s never any ‘evidence’ against the Sharifs.

While it's hard to match the resolve shown in not finding evidence against the Sharifs, people on the other side now have somewhat comparable views on rigging. With the ECP & judiciary already viewed as controversial, to say the least, vote verification by NADRA seemed the only alternative that could satisfy them. The whole episode with NADRA chief Tariq Malik, from his illegal removal by Nawaz Sharif to the current arrest plans, has put an end to that option. And while the court noted that Tariq Malik was threatened & put under pressure to resign, evidence against the Sharifs again eluded them.

Well, buckle up then.

Death & Discourse

The recent strikes in North Waziristan have prompted some to conclude that the "time for talk is over", and this could indeed be the case if a long standing peace deal with Hafiz Gul Bahadur in NWA is revoked. However, the PMLN government’s penchant for saying one thing and doing nothing means that the confused lull will prevail for a while longer.

What struck me the most is the attention the strikes received and the questions raised, again, over the identity of those killed. Perhaps it is because of government ownership and high profile nature of talks, but strikes in NWA seem to come under the spotlight ever since Nawaz Sharif took power. This has given yours truly renewed hope that some truth about our war on terror might be on its way to a screen/newspaper near you, and that blatant lying about the dead may end in the distant future.

The partisan nature of our media and media men is such that for the truth to ever come out; their interests/agendas must be aligned with it. With 4 separate agendas coming to the fore this time around, we have a tiny window of opportunity.

The first group comprises of earnest supporters of democracy who can be seen cheering on the army to bomb without political approval.  They are pretty much set in their ways, and will not bring about desirable effects. Expect newfound patriotism and alignment with Pak army lover for life crowd.

The second are the mostly right-wing guys. Always uneasy with the ops, it has however been difficult to choose between the mullah and the military. If the NS government falls out with the army, they could spin into action and start pointing out transgressions of the army.

Third - the drone-mongers. An unhealthy obsession with robots killing people, to ultimately save mankind (Hello Hollywood), means they will continue to preach the lesser evil. Pointing out heavy collateral from strikes is imperative.

Finally we have the “can’t deal with being out of power” ANP, PPP types. Hard-core fans of military operations, they are looking to somehow use casualties from bombings as a stick to beat anti-ops people with.

The media, its incompetence and its agendas are one of the most important factors in this war, and certainly the most powerful in shaping public perception. It’s for that reason that the bullshit about 50,000 people killed by TTP persists in our discourse. It persists regardless of what the interior ministry says, regardless of what independent research says, and regardless of how many people you irritate by pointing it out.

To what extent do the intellectulas in media mutilate the facts? Dawn, a newspaper that has emerged as consensus “sane voice” these days owing to media infighting, should serve as a reliable enough barometer.

On the pages of Dawn one among many seasoned, former PPP and current, columnist, professed in February of this year that 40 K innocents had been killed by our enemies in the tribal badlands. By March, that number had climbed to 50 thousand innocents killed. And in April it had come to the attention of said author and paper that at least 55 thousand fatalities had been incurred.

The paper and the author have a strictly anti-talks approach on the matter, and if 15 thousand killed extra over two months reinforces their argument, why not? You could see their desperation, and the number of dead, growing as the talks moved forward.

Fact is, media people couldn’t care less how many lives have been lost, or how. Meanwhile, “reporting” is an alien concept. What happens here is they reach a conclusion among their little cliques, and then invent facts & arrange events to help everyone else reach the same conclusion. After-party sees them tell each other how objective and balanced they are.

This is why the new agendas emerging are an exciting prospect. If they can go to such lengths with their own faeces, imagine what these “news” organizations could do with facts.

The most dangerous lot is the right-wing, pro gov one. Granted they will only go into overdrive if PMLN takes on the army, but the potential is enormous. They are the only group, because conservative and Nawaz, that will touch the heavy “collateral damage” accumulated in the last decade, and the façade of the 50 thousand killed.

The drone-mongers, ANP-PPP dudes are only going to do little teasers. Their “liberal” orientation dictates that collateral damage happens and lying for a good cause is not really lying, so 50 K stays. The best outcome they can achieve is pique the interest of people in collateral damage with their jibes.

Hopefully then some idiots with “journalist” in their bios can look into it. Well, stranger things have happened.

Say for arguments sake that enough idiots start looking into the whole thing. By the law of averages, one of them could reach the logical conclusion that if suicide bombings, the most lethal weapon in our enemy’s arsenal, have claimed 6 thousand lives, it is unlikely that IEDs and hit and runs etc. would have killed another 44 thousand. From there it could follow that perhaps the numbers put out by organizations like PIPS are more credible than the numbers pulled out of their own assess by senior columnists?

And what about collateral damage? Is there any collateral damage at all? Is that picture photoshopped? I bet everyone who’s dead because of our bombardment deserves it. Twitter has become a court where credibility is judged by witty one-liners rather than by facts & patterns.

There’s this report at the Costs of War website that talks about Pakistani civilians killed by Pakistani military operations. The figures it quotes for civilians we have killed are pretty impressive, which it has sourced from PIPS.

Interestingly, the PIPS annual security reports, available for download at its website, do not label these deaths as civilian deaths. They are defined just as deaths in “operational attacks”.

Operational attacks are further defined as “Pre-emptive attacks launched by military and paramilitary troops to purge an area of militants.” Hmm, what could that mean...

A report by CIVIC titled “Civilian Harm & Conflict in Northwest Pakistan” came out in 2010 and it sheds some light onto the purging pre-emptive assaults we have used.

Artillery fire and mortars used by our military, according to those interviewed by CIVIC, “were the most common causes of harm suffered by civilians during military operations”.

The report cites some chilling interviews, from a boy who saw scattered organs of his mother, a man whose grand-daughter was blown to pieces and one who lost 5 members of his family in a single strike.

Military jets and gunships are not very forgiving either. One resident cited in the report recalls, “They were shelling just in the bazaar... it was indiscriminate fire, not discriminating between people and militants...the shrapnel struck me in the leg and the head.”

Another incident cited goes like this “On April 10, 2010, Pakistani jet fighters bombed targets in Sra Vela, a village in Khyber Agency, believing they were hitting a meeting attended by a high-level militant commander.

Instead, they hit the home of a pro-government family with three brothers serving with government forces. A second bomb hit crowds of neighbors as they tried to help those injured in the first strike. At least 60 civilians were killed and 30 injured.”

This, totally guessing, has to create resentment against us. The kid who lost his mother had this to say,

“If my mother was killed by the Taliban, one can expect it from them because they are crooks. But one can’t expect it from a trained army…they are to protect us not to kill us like rats.”

These pre-emptive, purging attacks claimed a staggering 14,148 lives from 2008 to 2012. The PIPS reports break them down as:

3,182 deaths in 2008

6,329 deaths in 2009

2,631 deaths in 2010

1046 deaths in 2011

960 deaths in 2012

It should be noted that these numbers do not include any terrorists engaged and killed by security forces. These are only the people we have bombed to death. The terrorist fatalities in confrontations with security forces, initiated either way, are separate and much lower than fatalities in these purging attacks.

A total of 6198 deaths were reported when terrorists have been engaged by security forces in the same period, according to PIPS, with the breakdown as follows:

655 deaths in 2008

1,163 deaths in 2009

2,007 deaths in 2010

1668 deaths in 2011

705 deaths in 2012

Another hushed up aspect of the war are the rights violations. While Balochistan has made enforced disappearances famous, the practice was probably first used by the Musharraf government against those suspected of supporting the jihadist cause. More importantly it has not stopped since Musharraf’s departure.

Amnesty International’s 2012 report titled Hands of Cruelty speaks of many violations committed by both the Taliban and the army. Ours include deaths in custody, torture and enforced disappearances. The report noted that 2000 cases pertaining to missing persons are registered in the Peshawar High Court, but the actual number could be much higher.

Tough break.

Now we do not hear about all this in the media because it does not fit with the picture they want to paint. The “liberal” voices, usually no fans of the military and usually big fans of human rights, are especially keen to look away because “the Taliban deserve it”. Additionally, and more importantly, highlighting killings, torture and other abuses taking place in military operations weakens their case for use of force, and could raise sympathy for the TTP.

The greater good coming into play again here.

Problem? By rigorously lying about how much damage the enemy has done, and resolutely ignoring any that we are doing, a fabricated identity of the war has been created.

That the national discourse about the war is carried out in the same fictional environment does the rest of us a great disservice. The thousands that have lost loved ones in the theatre of war, and the millions that have been forced to flee it, end up with a very different perception of the war than we do.

Theirs is based on what has happened on the ground; the number of dead, the number of missing, the loss of property is all real to them, not made up to suit one narrative or the other. And they don’t have the luxury of looking away when it isn’t pretty anymore.

War is dirty business, and perhaps we have no choice other than to do what we have been doing. But disregarding half of what's happening will bring us no closer to understanding how to deal with it, and is likely to keep us clogged in this circle of violence.