Concealed within a lament concerning the unjustified biases of her debate opponents, C. Christine Fair of LawFare gives an update on the costs and benefits of drone strikes in Pakistan:
With respect to Pakistan, there is one study that actually comes to the exact opposite conclusion as the one put forward by Mr. Greenwald. A few years ago, a Pakistan-based journalist sent a Waziri stringer into Waziristan to interview locals about who died in the drone strikes in their villages. According to the report from that six-month-long study, villagers claimed that “at least 194 people killed in the attacks, about 70 percent–at least 138–were militants. The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police, and 38 of them were killed in a single attack on March 17, 2011. Excluding one catastrophically disastrous strike which inflicted one of the worst civilian death tolls since the drone program started in Pakistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were militants.
Her disdain for Glenn Greenwald, one of her opponents (she also classes the debate host as an opponent), is rather clear:
In contrast to the curated quotes of prominent personalities which Mr. Greenwald gathers and describes as a “mountain of evidence” about the dangers of drones, there is actually a robust body of scholarly work that addresses the effects of leadership decapitation on a wide array of militant groups operating in diverse countries and their ability to produce violence. In general, the scholarship produces mixed results, with some work showing the efficacy of leadership decapitation (e.g. Johnston 2012; Price 2012) while other studies find that it is sometimes effective (e.g., Jordan 2009) or even counterproductive (Hafez and Hatfield 2005).
It makes for interesting reading.
