HERE’S some folk wisdom from Kentucky that is good advice for sensible people: there’s no education to be had from the second kick of a mule.

Judging from their words and actions, politicians like Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif don’t agree. In fact, they seem eager to draw lessons from the 956th terrorist attack. OK, I plucked that figure out of thin air, but you get the idea.

The entire debate over the drone campaign has now been reduced to a numbers game. When Chaudhry Nisar, the interior minister, gave figures of casualties caused by drones in the Senate recently, all hell broke loose with the opposition accusing him of providing doctored data.

According to them, the defence ministry’s and the KP government’s estimates of a total of 2,160 terrorists and 67 civilians killed in the drone campaign were far too low. You would have thought that less civilians killed than earlier believed would be a good thing.

But for the opposition led by Imran Khan, the higher the collateral damage, the bigger the stick they have to beat the Pakistan and US governments with.

Even the Foreign Office entered the controversy, claiming the death toll among civilians was far greater. I was unaware that we have diplomats doing body counts in the wake of drone attacks.

In fact, given the ban on journalists and independent observers travelling to the tribal areas, the army and local officials are the only ones who can give us any reliable numbers at all.

Add to this difficulty the practice of the militants of cordoning off the site of drone attacks, and carrying their dead and wounded away, and you get an idea of how tough it is to get any precise casualty figures. So we should hardly be surprised at the wide divergence between estimates of the numbers of militants and civilians killed and wounded.

Perhaps the most accurate data available comes from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism which uses a variety of intelligence and journalistic sources to derive its figures.

According to the BIJ website, so far there have been 378 drone strikes in which the total killed ranges from 2,525 to 3,613; this number includes between 407 and 926 civilians.

While even one civilian life needlessly lost is one too many, the grim reality is that in wars, the innocent often suffer more than the military. The Soviet Union alone lost over 20 million in the Second World War. Millions were killed in indiscriminate carpet and atom bombing in cities from Hiroshima to Hamburg.

And make no mistake, whatever Imran Khan and his ilk might say, we are at war. Whether this is because Musharraf made his famous post-9/11 U-turn or not, the fact is that we are fighting for survival. While Jesus Christ urged his followers to turn the other cheek, this is not an option available to Pakistan.

Nevertheless, the government and the opposition appear determined to somehow, anyhow, appease the Taliban.

Despite the fact that they have slaughtered reportedly over 35,000 innocent Pakistanis, including more than 5,000 law enforcement personnel, the appeasement lobby insists that the TTP should be treated as ‘stakeholders’, and not as violent, psychopathic killers.

One argument the anti-drone lobby trots out is that the campaign is counterproductive because it radicalises people whose relatives have been killed. By this logic, many more should be seeking vengeance against the jihadis as they have killed at least 30 times more innocent civilians than the drones have.

The reason for this confusion is the incessant anti-drone propaganda, and the refusal to openly condemn terrorism, that has misled millions of Pakistanis.

This disconnect between reality and self-delusion was captured by Ejaz Haider in the Express Tribune recently.

In a well-argued column, he pointed out the absurdity of making victims of the armed insurgents who had occupied Lal Masjid and terrorised Islamabad in 2007, while trying Musharraf and the security forces for an operation they should have carried out much earlier.

An eyewitness account of the Lal Masjid occupation came from Prof Alya Alvi in a letter to this newspaper in which she detailed the horrors inflicted on the neighbourhood and the city by the clerics who ran the mosque, and the heavily armed militants they had invited to move in.

The incident happened live on TV only six years ago, but already many have forgotten the truth, and believe what they are fed by the right-wing media and politicians.

While we hide our heads in the sand, news of an increasing number of polio cases in Khyber Pakthunkhwa and the tribal areas appals the rest of the world. Jihadis have been targeting immunisation teams, killing many and terrorising more. Perhaps Imran Khan could use his good offices with the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to save the children of the province his party governs from this dreaded but easily preventable disease.

The reaction in Pakistan to Hakeemullah Mehsud’s death is further confirmation of our state of denial. Here’s a terrorist with more innocent blood on his hands than perhaps even Osama bin Laden. When his life was finally extinguished recently, one would have expected universal relief and joy. But immediately, cries of rage echoed across the country’s TV chat shows.

Many saw a conspiracy to sabotage the hoped-for talks with the TTP. ‘Why now?’ they asked. But they forget that Mehsud had been targeted by drones on several occasions, but each time, the glad tidings of his death proved premature.

Although we are unsure of whether to celebrate or mourn his death, here is an irony to savour: while Malala Yousafzai is honoured around the world, the man who commanded the killers responsible for the attack on her is, presumably, being tormented in hellfire. This will be a change from dodging Hellfire missiles. Maybe there is some justice in the world after all.

irfan.husain@gmail.com