A couple of weeks ago, Christina Fair, who is one of the smartest and most interesting voices on Af/Pak issues, made a rather incendiary claim on MSNBC -
that US drones operating in Pakistan don't kill civilians. Scahill and
Spencer were up in arms and on the surface their anger seemed fairly legitimate. How could anyone argue that drones were not killing civilians, what with the repeated media references in Pakistan to such deaths?
Christina insisted to me that her assertion was correct and today in Foreign Policy she makes the public claim:
The only publicly available civilian casualty figures for drone strikes in Pakistan come from their targets: the Pakistani Taliban, which report the alleged numbers to the Pakistani press, which dutifully publishes the fiction. No one has independently verified the Taliban's reports -- journalists cannot travel to FATA to confirm the deaths, and the CIA will not even acknowledge the drone program exists, much less discuss its results. But high-level Pakistani officials have conceded to me that very few civilians have been killed by drones and their innocence is often debatable. U.S. officials who are knowledgeable of the program report similar findings. In fact, since January 1 there has not been oneconfirmed civilian casualty from drone strikes in FATA.
Fair's argument dovetails with another recent report by Brian Glyn Williams that draws similar conclusions:
According to our database, as of 1 April 2010, there have been a total of 127 confirmed CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, killing a total of 1,247 people. Of those killed only 44 (or 3.53%) could be confirmed as civilians, while 963 (or 77.23%) were reported to be “militants” or “suspected militants.”
This is some pretty interesting research and Fair draws some important additional conclusions: that we really don't know how the drone strikes are perceived in Pakistan and in some cases locals may prefer the US's stealthy approach to the Pakistani military's overly aggressive use of artillery and scorched earth polices against Pakistan Taliban in Waziristan.
Indeed this seems to undercut the most pervasive anti-drone argument - that the perception of civilian casualties in Pakistan is creating a host of so-called "accidental guerrillas" and a more radicalized local population. In fact, as Fair notes the reality is far more complicated.
The bottom line here is that there is no silver bullet to dealing with jihadist terror groups that operate in the wilds of Pakistan. If you think about the various policy courses that the US has adopted - encouraging the Pakistanis to deal with the issue militarily, escalate in Afghanistan to prevent an AQ safe haven from emerging . . . the drone war looks a lot better.
Ideally we would live in a world where the Pakistanis don't aid, abet and tolerate terror groups on their soil, but of course we don't. In the meantime, the drone war seems the most logical course for not only fighting terrorism, but also providing a possible path to de-escalation in Afghanistan.
