Drone strikes have a very high strike rate. Our right wing media distorts the evidence all the time. Detailed analysis by independents have revealed that the data maintained by The News described militants only as Al Qaeda. They did not include TTP, Taliban and LI as "militants". In their data, even Baitullah Mehsud didn't qualify in the "militant" category. Their reply can be that he died from wounds suffered in the drone strike, but any sane person would qualify that as a successful strike. They haven't included any TTP members as "militants" either. Al Qaeda has minimal presence in the region compared to others and The News and whole right wing fundos have said that their data is based on the fact that US says that drone attacks target Al Qaeda hence we only count killing Al Qaeda as success.
Here's the website they based their data on:-
Pakistan Body Count ::: www.pakistanbodycount.org
I guess you can read that they only count Al Qaeda and later our media refers to the count of Al Qaeda killed as militants killed which is entirely wrong.
Indpendent groups have calculated ratio of miliant to civilian/unknown death rate at 3.4 and militant casualty rate at 77.2% unlike the 1 or 2% cited by our right wing fundos. Even this is high collateral damage but way different than what our crackpots tell the people.
Read the following two papers
New Light on the Accuracy of the CIA’s Predator Drone Campaign in Pakistan
Sudden Justice? Evaluating the U.S. Predator Campaign in Pakistan
This does not mean that I inherently agree with their findings, methods or views. I wanted to present to you a scientific study rather than urban jargon.
The need to analyze the effectiveness of a remote targeting technology demands considering its strategic objectives mostly but it has to consider the political, social and economic factors as well. For the US, the necessity to avoid the loss of life on their own side is very important as well. But it would be difficult to establish whether Pentagon would discontinue its policy of drone strikes if it is established that it has caused more collateral damage than it has possibly killed militants. Nevertheless, our public opposition to this policy does not hold much weight in their opinion for our state has allowed and supported it for so long that a demand for canceling it entirely won't matter to them. Our military supplies intelligence for these strikes and it is not unimaginable that we have used them to target known militants not reachable by foot soldiers easily (meaning that we knew the presence of a militant or training school, supplied intelligence and asked for its destruction). Our military is hand-in-hand with these policies.
