Pakistan Drones’ Success Rate: 2%

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/dvids/5059554087/sizes/z/in/photostream/">DOD photo</a>/Flickr Commons

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


[Editor’s Note: NAF researcher Katherine Tiedemann reminds us that US-led drone strikes in Pakistan tend to be CIA-run, not military-operated. The headline and post have been updated to reflect this.]

Our indefatigable editorial coordinator, Jen Phillips, pointed me to a New America Foundation study this morning on drone strikes in Pakistan…and the data does not inspire confidence.

According to NAF’s research, there have been 215 drone attacks since 2004 in the bad-guy tromping grounds of northwest Pakistan, killing between 1,372 and 2,125 people. (The wide variation in estimates shows how difficult it is to track these stats, even with press and government reports.) Of those, 1061 to 1584 were called militants “in reliable press accounts.” For those of you keeping score at home, that means that between 23 and 25 percent of all deaths from drone strikes are noncombatants. But here’s the worse news:

Of all those semi-confirmed deaths since 2004, only 36 have been “militant leaders,” like Al Qaeda’s third in command. (It goes without saying that we haven’t hit the terrorist group’s two really big fish, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahri.) That means that only about 2 percent of NATO’s drone kills were strategically important enemy personnel. If Meat Loaf were a US combatant commander in South Asia, he’d have to cut a new track: “Two Out of 100 Ain’t Bad.”

So what does the US do when its winning percentage is so poor? It doubles down on the strategy, apparently. USA Today reports this morning that the Air Force in 2010 “more than doubled the number of airmen in Afghanistan who call in airstrikes, as the use of bombs, missiles and strafing runs has spiked to its highest level since the war began.” Presumably, live bombing runs by fighter and attack pilots would be more reliable than CIA-led strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles, but not that much better. And more ordnance invariably means more casualties, no matter how smart a weapons system (or its operator) may be.

Anyway, check out the NAF study, which is an ongoing labor of love. Its compilers are terrorism expert (and MoJo contributor) Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, the fantastic analyst who also runs Foreign Policy‘s “Af-Pak Channel” blog. Like NAF itself, they’re progressive, but they’re most interested in unvarnished national security facts. You could do worse than to follow their work closely.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate