For the second day in a row, drones have killed civilians in a tribal region of South Waziristan, raising questions once again about the role that the remotely controlled aircraft are playing in the region.
Supporters of the drone war have touted the accuracy of the attacks: “You want to hit this table,” a recently retired government official who worked closely with the military in Pakistan told me as we sat in a restaurant, “and you'll hit this table.” And he tapped his finger on the wooden surface to show me how precise the drones are. Other experts say that the benefits of drones outweigh the costs: The drones are useful because they mean, for example, that the military does not have to send a whole bunch of troops into South Waziristan in order to kill one of the “bad guys.” When troops move in, the people who live there move out, and this creates waves of refugees, and that means “old people and babies die.”
The problem, however, is that the drones may not be all that accurate. “How do we know we're getting the right guys, and as we keep killing them off, how will we be sure that we've got tabs on all the most dangerous up-and-comers?” asked blogger Ibn Muqawama recently. The drone campaign started in a focused way in July 2008, and of the 17 attacks this year, only one has killed “a serious member of al-Qaeda,” explained one counterterrorism expert. Meanwhile, David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerilla, provided even more disappointing numbers in a New York Times op-ed. “Over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders,” he wrote. “But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent — hardly ‘precision.’”
The figures are disputed, but it seems clear that one of the most touted aspects of the drone – its laser-like precision – should be examined more closely. The problem is that governmental advisers will not talk about the drones with any degree of candor, aside from reassuring journalists that they are accurate, and so the real numbers remain elusive.
–Tara McKelvey
