In Defense of Drones

Anti-drone protesters disrupting a Feb. 7 hearing on the nomination of John Brennan as CIA Director

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

?UN: Drones killed more Afghan civilians in 2012,? says the Associated Press headline. The article begins: ?The number of?U.S.?drone strikes in Afghanistan jumped 72 percent in 2012, killing at least 16 civilians in a sharp increase from the previous year.? The message seems clear: More Afghans are dying, because drones kill civilians.

Wrong. Drones kill fewer civilians, as a percentage of total fatalities, than any other military weapon. They?re the worst form of warfare in the history of the world, except for all the others.

Start with that UN report. Afghan civilian casualties caused by the United States and its allies didn?t go up last year. They fell 46 percent. Specifically, civilian casualties from ?aerial attacks? fell 42 percent. Why? Look at the incident featured in the UN report (page 31) as an example of sloppy targeting. ?I heard the bombing at approximately 4:00 am,? says an eyewitness. ?After we found the dead and injured girls, the jet planes attacked us with heavy machine guns and another woman was killed.?

Jet planes. Machine guns. Bombing. Drones aren?t the problem. Bombs are the problem.

Look at last year?s tally of air missions in Afghanistan. Drone strikes went way up. According to the UN report, drones released 212 more weapons over Afghanistan in 2012 than they did in 2011. Meanwhile, manned airstrikes went down. Result? Fifteen more civilians died in drone strikes, and 124 fewer died in manned aircraft operations. That?s a net saving of 109 lives.

On Monday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai banned his security forces from requesting NATO airstrikes in residential areas. Why? Because a week ago, an airstrike killed 10 civilians. What kind of airstrike? Bombs.

In war after war, it?s the same gruesome story: crude weapons, dead innocents. In World War II, civilian deaths, as a percentage of total war fatalities, were estimated at 40 to 67 percent. In Korea, they were reckoned at 70 percent. In Vietnam, by some calculations, one civilian died for every two enemy combatants we exterminated. In the Persian Gulf War, despite initial claims of a vast Iraqi death toll, we may have killed only one or two Iraqi soldiers for every dead Iraqi civilian. In Kosovo, a postwar commission found that NATO?s bombing campaigned killed about 500 Serbian civilians, almost matching the 600 enemy soldiers who died in action. In Afghanistan, the civilian death toll from 2001 to 2011 has been ballparked at anywhere from 60 to 150 percent of the Taliban body count. In Iraq, more than 120,000 civilians have been killed since the 2003 invasion. That?s more than five times the number of fatalities among insurgents and soldiers of Saddam Hussein?s regime.

Why so many noncombatant deaths? Study the record. In Vietnam, aerial bombing killed more than 50,000 North Vietnamese civilians by 1969. Each year of that war, the least discriminate weapons?bombs, shells, mines, mortars?caused more civilian injuries than guns and grenades. In Kosovo, the munitions were more precise, and NATO tried to be careful. But according to a postwar report by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, NATO?s insistence on flying its planes no lower than 15,000 feet?a rule adopted ?to minimize the risk of casualties to itself???may have meant the target could not be verified with the naked eye.? In Afghanistan, a 2008 report by Human Rights Watch found that ?civilian casualties rarely occur during planned airstrikes on suspected Taliban targets.? Instead, ?High civilian loss of life during airstrikes has almost always occurred during the fluid, rapid-response strikes, often carried out in support of ground troops after they came under insurgent attack.?

Drones can overcome these problems. You can fly them low without fear of losing your life. You can study your target carefully instead of reacting in the heat of the moment. You can watch and guide the missiles all the way down. Even the substitution of missiles for bombs saves lives. Look at the data from Iraq: In incidents that claimed civilian lives, the weapon with the highest body count per incident was suicide bombing. The second most deadly weapon was aerial bombing by coalition forces. By comparison, missile strikes killed fewer than half as many civilians per error.

How do drones measure up? Three organizations have tracked their performance in Pakistan. Since 2006, Long War Journal says the drones have killed 150 civilians, compared to some 2,500 members of al-Qaida or the Taliban. That?s a civilian casualty rate of six percent. From 2010 to 2012, LWJ counts 48 civilian and about 1,500 Taliban/al-Qaida fatalities. That?s a rate of three percent.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=956fbc8d3e7d0b6490082fb84e1a120c

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