After 15 minutes, the guards took me back to our house and explained what had happened. Missiles from American drones had struck two cars, they said, killing seven Arab militants and local Taliban fighters. Later, I learned that one of our guards suggested I be taken to the site of the attack and ritually beheaded. The chief guard overruled him.
The strikes fueled a vicious paranoia among the Taliban. For months, our guards told us of civilians being rounded up, accused of working as American spies and hung in local markets. Immediately after that attack in South Waziristan, a feverish hunt began for a local spy who the Taliban were convinced had somehow secretly guided the Americans to the two cars.
Several days after the strike, our guards told us foreign militants had arrested a local man and accused him of guiding the drones. After the jihadists disemboweled the villager and chopped off his leg, he “confessed” to being an American spy, they said. Then the militants decapitated the man and hung his corpse in the local bazaar as a warning.124
Clearly these cruel actions reveal that the furious Taliban and al Qaeda fighters understood that the CIA was targeting them exclusively—not random civilians.
The pathrais were not the final piece of the puzzle of the drones’ uncanny precision. The missiles the drones fired had also become smaller and less likely to kill innocents via large explosions or shrapnel. In April 2010 the Washington Post published a groundbreaking article that reported,
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. …
Last month, a small CIA missile, probably no bigger than a violin case and weighing about 35 pounds, tore through the second floor of a house in Miran Shah, a town in the tribal province of South Waziristan. The projectile exploded, killing a top al-Qaeda official and about nine other suspected terrorists. The mud-brick house collapsed and the roof of a neighboring house was damaged, but no one else in the town of 5,000 was hurt, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed after-action reports. …
The clamor over the strikes has died down considerably over the past year and Pakistani officials acknowledge that improved accuracy is one of the reasons. Pakistani security officials say that better targeting technology, a deeper pool of spies in the tribal areas, and greater cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services have all led to strikes that cause fewer civilian deaths.125
The violin case–sized missile described in this article appears to be the thirty-five-pound Lockheed Martin Scorpion. On its website Lockheed described the Scorpion as the “war fighter’s answer to precision attack using a small, lethal warhead against targets in areas requiring low collateral damage.” The site further declared, “The precision provided by these seeker types ensures accuracy to less than one meter and dramatically reduces the possibility of collateral damage.”126 Whereas the Hellfire missile previously fired by drones was sixty-four inches long and weighed 108 pounds, the Scorpion was twenty-one inches in length and weighed thirty-five pounds. Although the drones could easily shoot a salvo of Hellfires or safely drop heavier Paveway laser-guided bombs on training camps, the more surgical approach required in “civilian-rich” environments, where innocent bystanders could be accidentally killed, meant the Scorpion. The new smaller missiles allowed the United States to proudly proclaim that although in Vietnam the collateral damage radius for an aerial bomb explosion was four hundred feet, with a drone it had been diminished to forty feet.127
The Economist pointed to yet a sixth reason for the plummeting number of civilian deaths from drone strikes, namely, the tendency for the CIA to hit targets that were in vehicles, “where militants can be more easily hit without killing civilians.”128 In essence, the drones could see who got into the vehicles and then target them when they were driving in areas with few civilians nearby. An extensive report by the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) found that
As many as 39 precision strikes targeting Al Qaeda and its Pakistani affiliates in North Waziristan took place over the past three months, an [American] official said, adding the strikes killed 605 people. The dead comprised 507 Pakistanis, majority of them militants, and 98 foreigners.
Security officials have been taken by surprise by the CIA’s increasing ability to take out moving targets. Predator drones Monday fired missiles at two vehicles in North Waziristan, killing 18 people.
“One of the vehicles was loaded with explosives to the hilt and had it been targeted in a compound the devastation would have been huge,” the official was quoted as saying. “So a moving target is ideal in the sense that it minimizes chances of collateral damage.”
Officials said there has been mounting evidence of the CIA tracking moving targets in Pakistan’s tribal regions from inside Afghanistan and then attacking them. “The evidence we have is circumstantial but that the CIA is able to hit mobile target demonstrates enhanced humint on the ground,” the official said on the condition of anonymity.
A source said: “The Americans seem to have made considerable ingress in our tribal regions and I doubt this could have happened without our knowledge and approval.” The security official pointed out that “real-time [human] intelligence” in North Waziristan had helped the CIA to hit moving targets.
“They have improved their intelligence collection to deliver punishment in real time,” said another official while referring to the drone attacks in the tribal areas. “Moving targets tend to vanish quickly. So you have to have human intelligence on the ground to identify and engage the target in real time in a matter of minutes. This requires credible intelligence and communication system to direct the strike and this means that CIA’s human intelligence has improved considerably,” the official said.129
At this time there were many reports in the Pakistani press about Taliban and al Qaeda vehicles being destroyed by drones, presumably based on a combination of on-the-ground humint and drone surveillance. A typical account read,
In another attack by the US spy planes, a double-cabin pickup truck was targeted in Mezar village of Dattakhel Tehsil not far from the Urgoon area of Afghanistan’s Paktika province. Official sources said six militants, suspected to be foreigners, were killed in the attack. “The pickup truck was split into pieces and there was almost no sign of the five people travelling in the vehicle,” Taliban sources told our sources. The sources said those killed were Arab fighters returning to their hideouts located in the mountainous border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan after a clash with the US-led coalition forces across the border in Paktika. However, details about their nationality and identity weren’t available.130
New York Times correspondent David Rohde similarly commented on the drones’ accuracy in hitting Taliban vehicles. He wrote, “Based on the reactions of the [Taliban] guards, the attacks appear to primarily kill militants.” Among other things, Rohde described being near a drone attack on two cars that killed seven Arab militants and a local Taliban fighter, but no civilians.131
In March 2011 the New York Times reported, “In recent years they [the drone strikes] have provoked less outrage in the tribal areas, as the strikes have focused increasingly on foreign fighters loyal to Al Qaeda who have infiltrated the area, and as fewer civilians have been killed by them.”132 Christine Fair, who carried out fieldwork in the FATA, reported, “When children hear the buzz of the drones, they go to their roofs to watch the spectacle of precision rather than cowering in fear of random ‘death from above.’”133
Pakistani military officials on the ground in the region, who had intimate knowledge of who was being killed and who was not, also remarked on the drones’ increasing accuracy. One senior Pakistani official said, “You don’t hear so much about it [the drone campaign]. … Ther
e are better targets and better intelligence on the ground. It’s less of a crapshoot.”134 According to the Wikileak documents that exposed many aspects of the Pakistani and U.S. views on drones,
A U.S. diplomat, based in Peshawar near the border territories, mentions in a 2008 cable a meeting he had with a senior [Pakistani] official whose name is redacted. The official “said he wanted to say in an unofficial capacity that he and many others could accept Predator strikes as they were surgical and clearly hitting high value targets. He mentioned that fear among the local populace in areas where the strikes have been occurring was lessening because ‘everyone knew that they only hit the house or location of very bad people.’”135
Similarly, Malik Naveed Khan, a provincial police chief from the tribal zone, could not contain his admiration for the drones: “They are very precise, very effective, and the Taliban and al-Qaida dread them.”136 A former Pakistani ambassador further supported the claims of accuracy, stating, “There is no gainsaying the fact that drone accuracy has improved considerably. Of late only those get killed who are targeted. And, by the looks of it, there is no more effective way of reaching the upper echelons of the Taliban.”137 A former Pakistani general opined, “There is no doubt that the US military and the CIA, with better intelligence and sophisticated technology, have been more accurate in their targeting. They have also been successful in hitting at least mid-level Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, and with less collateral damage. Apparently, improved targeting has been possible by integrating the latest technology with a reliable network of human intelligence that places transmitters at the right places for the drones to respond.”138
Pakistani citizens also noticed the change. A Pakistani blogger on the popular Khyber Watch site wrote, “According to our latest and fresh information obtained from friends and political people that whenever drones are seen hovering in Waziristan our people are satisfied that only terrorists and their friends will be hit hard.”139 Similarly, Professor Ijaz Khattak of the University of Peshawar explained to a popular television host in Pakistan, “The drone attacks have proved effective and have targeted the terrorists and there has been little collateral damage in the US drone attacks.”140 A Pashtun researcher from the region interviewed Pashtun students from the FATA and found that these students thought that “the drone attacks cause a minimum loss of innocent civilians and their property. The respondents appreciated the precision of such attacks.”141 A resident of North Waziristan who witnessed numerous missile strikes told the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), “The attacks have become so precise. In a village, if they want to hit a house in the middle of the village and it’s surrounded by other houses, the missile would come and hit that one house only.”142
Surprisingly, the Taliban acknowledged this precision as well. One pamphlet issued by the Taliban in North Waziristan acknowledged, “Westerners have some regard for civilians, and they do distinguish between Taliban fighters and civilians, but the Pakistani army doesn’t.”143 Articles that reported the drones’ precision in killing al Qaeda and Taliban targets and avoiding civilian deaths also occasionally appeared in the Pakistani media. A December 2010 article in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, for example, read, “American officials do not acknowledge that war or discuss who is being killed in drone-fired missile attacks on al-Qaida and Taliban targets, which have surged this year to average about two a week. But they have said privately that the strikes are highly precise and harm very few innocents. Some locals agree about their accuracy, especially when compared to bombing runs by Pakistani jets.”144 A Pashtun from the FATA agreed with this when she wrote of her experience in at home:
I have heard people particularly appreciating the precision of drone strikes. People say that when a drone would hover over the skies, they wouldn’t be disturbed and would carry on their usual business because they would be sure that it does not target the civilians, but the same people would run for shelter when a Pakistani jet would appear in the skies because of its indiscriminate firing. They say that even in the same compound only the exact room [where an HVT is present] is targeted. Thus others in the same compound are spared.145
But the most important testimony to the drones’ accuracy was yet to come. On March 9, 2011, Dawn published a remarkably frank interview with a member of the Pakistani military based in Waziristan who openly supported the drone strikes on the basis of their precision in killing terrorists. The interview, titled “Most of Those Killed in Drone Attacks Were Terrorists,” was electrifying for the minority of Pakistanis who supported the drone strikes and was scorned by those who detested them. The article read,
In a rather rare move, the Pakistan military for the first time gave the official version of US drone attacks in the tribal region and said that most of those killed were hardcore Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists and a fairly large number of them were of foreign origin.
General Officer Commanding 7-Division Maj-Gen Ghayur Mehmood said in a briefing here: “Myths and rumors about predator strikes and the casualty figures are many, but it’s a reality that many of those being killed in these strikes are hardcore elements, a sizeable number of them foreigners. Yes there are a few civilian casualties in such precision strikes, but a majority of those eliminated are terrorists, including foreign terrorist elements.”
The Military’s 7-Division’s official paper on the attacks till Monday said that between 2007 and 2011 about 164 predator strikes had been carried out and over 964 terrorists had been killed. Of those killed, 793 were locals and 171 foreigners, including Arabs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Chechens, Filipinos and Moroccans.
In 2007, one missile strike left one militant dead while the year 2010 was the deadliest when the attacks had left more than 423 terrorists dead. In 2008, 23 drone strikes killed 152 militants, 12 of them were foreigners or affiliated with Al Qaeda.
In 2009, around 20 predator strikes were carried out, killing 179 militants, including 20 foreigners, and in the following year 423 militants, including 133 foreigners, were killed in 103 strikes. In attacks till March 7 this year, 39 militants, including five foreigners, were killed.
Maj-Gen Ghayur, who is in-charge of troops in North Waziristan, admitted that the drone attacks had negative fallout, scaring the local population and causing their migration to other places. Gen Ghayur said the drone attacks also had social and political repercussions and law-enforcement agencies often felt the heat.146
A subsequent article in Dawn also applauded the frank tone set by General Mehmood: “Is the army hinting that the strikes are a useful and precise tactic in neutralizing identified militants and terrorists? If that is the case, then the military and political leaders should publicly change their stated position and matters should move on—the battle against local and foreign terrorists hiding in the country’s north-western regions is far from over.”147
But such opinions were clearly the minority in Pakistan, and the general’s surprising frankness has done little to sway his compatriots’ ill will toward the drone strikes. A 2009 Gallup poll found that 67 percent of Pakistanis were opposed to the drone strikes, while 24 percent had neutral feelings toward them and just 9 percent favored them.148 To a large extent, even those who opposed the Taliban were against the drone strikes for the simple reason that they believed that they were uniquely targeting innocent civilians, not militants. Such contrafactual perceptions have been driven by the Pakistani media, which, as stated earlier, is dominated by journalists who equate drone attacks with random acts of Taliban terrorism.
Several journalists in the Pakistani media have written articles on the drone strikes that have inflated the number of dead civilians and, in so doing, inflamed public opinion against the drones. In April 2009 the Pakistani newspaper the News, for example, published an article that completely inverted the low-civilian-casualty trend identified in the preceding case-by-case study of media reports as well as in the New America Foundation report. According to this article, which referenced “cross-border raids” (as previously note
d, the drones were actually based in Pakistan), the drones proved to be, in the history of bombing campaigns, uniquely incapable of killing their designated targets. The News report stated, without citing any study to back up its claim, “Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing [sic] 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent.”149 The newspaper reported that this translated to more than fifty civilians killed for every slain al Qaeda member.
Another Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, raised the ante and claimed that “of the 44 predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians. … For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by the American drones, 140 civilian Pakistanis also had to die.”150 This stunning report of course led Pakistanis to believe that the high-tech drones were the most uniquely inaccurate “bombers” in history. The remarkable statistics of fifty or 140 civilians per al Qaeda and Taliban death reported by Dawn and the News were not, however, backed by any published databases and were actually contradicted by the day-to-day reports of Taliban and al Qaeda deaths found in both newspapers. In fact, a casual perusal of articles on drone strikes in both these newspapers reveals a striking contradiction. In the vast majority of specific articles about drone strikes, reporters described the majority of victims as “militants” or “terrorists,” not as “civilians.”
A case-by-case analysis of Pakistani and Western reports of drone strikes by me and two of my colleagues at the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth, Avery Plaw and Matthew Fricker, for the Washington, D.C.–based Jamestown Foundation found that a mere 5 percent of drone-strike victims were described in the media as “civilians.”151 The previously mentioned New America Foundation study similarly found that in 2010 approximately 6 percent of those killed in drone strikes were identified as “civilians.”152 Research conducted by the Long War Journal on drone strikes from 2004 to 2011 indicates that approximately 108 civilians were killed in drone strikes that successfully targeted 1,816 Taliban and al Qaeda extremists (i.e., a civilian death rate of less than 6 percent).153
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