The Washington Post, holding a veritable fiesta of anonymous government officials defending the use of drone strikes, reports that the U.S. has started using smaller missiles so as to minimize civilian casualties:
The CIA is using new, smaller missiles and advanced surveillance techniques to minimize civilian casualties in its targeted killings of suspected insurgents in Pakistan's tribal areas, according to current and former officials in the United States and Pakistan.
The technological improvements have resulted in more accurate operations that have provoked relatively little public outrage, the officials said. Pakistan's government has tolerated the airstrikes, which have killed hundreds of suspected insurgents since early 2009, but that support has always been fragile and could quickly evaporate, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.
When State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh defended the use of drone strikes (and potentially targeted killings of American citizens) as legal before the American Society of International Law, he gave particular attention to the question of "proportionality," saying that "the principles of distinction and proportionality that the United States applies are not just recited at meetings. They are implemented rigorously throughout the planning and execution of lethal operations to ensure that such operations are conducted in accordance with all applicable law." Perhaps the deliberate use of smaller missiles to reduce civilian casualties is evidence of "proportionality"?
In an op-ed for The New York Times, Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation, (who have produced the most widely cited independent studies of the civilian casualties caused by drone strikes) argue that the U.S. and Pakistan should go public about their cooperation on drone warfare. The two believe there would be more public support for use of drones in Pakistan because of recent shifts in Pakistani public opinion against the Taliban. The cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistan on these matters remains the world's worst kept secret.
They also point out that the families of those innocents who are killed deserve financial compensation as surely as the relatives of the civilian dead killed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
-- A. Serwer
