But a forthcoming study, led by Brian Glyn Williams, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, finds that the civilian death toll from the drones is lower than most media accounts present. “We came to the conclusion that the drones have a unique capability for targeting militants, as opposed to civilians,” Williams said in an interview.

Williams’ study, which he provided to The Washington Independent, has yet to be published. A writer for a blog affiliated with the International Herald Tribune, Farhat Taj, blogged some of the key details of his research today, but prematurely stated that the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point will be publishing Williams’ work. Erich Marquardt, the editor of the center’s journal, said that he hasn’t even begun to review Williams’ submission yet.

Much like the New America Foundation study, Williams’ team relied on English-language media accounts of the drone strikes in Pakistan to compile a data base of how many civilians and militants were reported to be killed. He conceded from the start that such a reliance is a “serious limitation” of the study — news reports can, after all, be incorrect — but the tribal areas of Pakistan where the strikes occur are often off limits to Western researchers, and even their Pakistani counterparts. (Still, Williams plans on traveling to the tribal areas on June 10 to attempt a poll of local attitudes about the strikes.) His team took measures to mitigate that limitation: they only considered strikes that had been reported by multiple independent outlets and they erred on the side of treating the deaths of people in disputed militant status as either civilians or “unknown.”

Williams’ results, which he said have been peer-reviewed, are as follows:

According to our database, as of 1 April 2010, there have been a total of 127 confirmed CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, killing a total of 1,247 people. Of those killed only 44 (or 3.53%) could be confirmed as civilians, while 963 (or 77.23%) were reported to be “militants” or “suspected militants.”

That leaves just over 19 percent of reported deaths out of either category, as their status as civilians or combatants can’t be rigorously determined under Williams’ methodology. But he writes that “even if every single ‘unknown’ is assumed to in fact be a civilian, the vast majority of fatalities would remain suspected militants rather than civilians – indeed, by approximately a 3.4:1 ratio.”

Williams insists that he went into the study with an open mind. “We didn’t know what to think” about the drone program, he said, and he considers his research agnostic on the wisdom of the drone strikes (to say nothing of their legality). “We’re not necessarily trying to alter policy on this,” he said.

Both of the principle authors of New America’s drone strike survey, Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, are on vacation, but they both still (generously) addressed my questions. All three researchers — Bergen, Tiedemann and Williams — appeared to agree that New America was more methodologically aggressive than Williams in counting as civilians all who could not be clearly identified as militants, which perhaps accounts for the variance in their results.

Bergen observed in a Blackberried message that although his civilian death tallies are higher than Williams’, he has observed that the drone program has increased its accuracy over time, “so the later the the date that the study begins the lower the rate [of civilian deaths] will be.” That’s in line with Brennan’s intimation (he never actually uses the word “drones”) that the drone strikes “are more precise and more accurate than ever before.”

Accordingly, Bergen now pegs the civilian death rate from the drone strikes at 20 percent. Williams pegs it at 3.53 percent. What no one knows, however, is how many outraged Pakistanis take up arms against the U.S. or its allies as a result. There are media reports suggesting that Faisal Shahzad, the naturalized U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin accused of attempting to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, claimed to investigators that his attempted terrorist act was vengeance for civilians killed by the drones. Leaving aside the question of the legality of the drones — which the State Department’s legal adviser claims to result from a September 2001 act of Congress that doesn’t mention the program — only policymakers can determine if the benefits of the drones outweigh the risks of blowback.

It’s a long study, with seven authors, and I’ve barely made a crack in it, so I won’t try to summarize the specific recommendations. But CNAS, looking at recent cases of international peacekeeping forces in transitional states or autonomous provinces, examines what security conditions need to be met for a viable independent Palestine that doesn’t threaten Israel to come into being.

Israel generally has balked over the years at the prospect of international peacekeeping forces patrolling the West Bank, as such a force would limit Israel’s freedom of military action in occupied Palestine. (Andrew Exum, one of the studies’ authors, lists a short host of reasons why Israel shouldn’t have a problem with such a force while — at least in the introduction — glossing over the fact that it does.) But less important than any specific recommendation is the fact that the think tank that has launched many an official into the Obama Pentagon and State Department, CNAS, is expending any intellectual heft on the issue at all, let along thinking through the modalities of interim internationalization of West Bank/Jordan River Valley security. Such a detailed study, coming in advance of a potential Obama peace plan — which the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu definitely does not want — will most likely be read at the Israeli embassy and in Jerusalem as a sign that a real U.S. push on a two-state solution is gathering momentum.

And it reaffirms a linkage that some on the American Jewish right and the Israeli government don’t want to see made. “Although peace in the Middle East is hardly the exclusive responsibility of the United States,” Exum writes in the introduction, “it is a goal long sought by its political leaders and one inextricably linked to U.S. interests.” That viewpoint was roundly mocked as simplistic at the AIPAC conference this year, despite it being the stated policy of decades of American administrations.

The best I can do with Amb. Karl Eikenberry’s leaked cables cautioning against an increase in U.S. troops in Afghanistan is report that some in the White House think Eikenberry himself leaked them. Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security finds that explanation implausible, and makes a good case. Laura Rozen tries to offer a more plausible scenario:

“The [White House] political operation is using him to push back [against the] Pentagon,” one Democratic foreign policy hand suggested.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Vice President Joseph Biden have publicly expressed skepticism about surging troops to Afghanistan, and reservations about what can be achieved working with Hamid Karzai.

I don’t know. And chances are I won’t.

I can, however, say that numerous military officials in southern Afghanistan with whom I have spoken identify AWK and his activities as the biggest problem they face — bigger than the lack of government services or even the Taliban.

Exum, who specifies he has no insider information, thinks this could be quite a point of friction between McChrystal’s command and the CIA.

I worry that the CIA is carrying out their own campaign in part because a) it’s been getting kicked around so much since 9/11 that it is now overly focused on killing high-level al-Qaeda targets rather than gathering intelligence and that b) it’s trying to justify and defend its budget through what it can claim is a successful program.

Exum correctly argues that the drones are a tactic — not a strategy, and certainly not a silver bullet. The implication, though, is that CIA can’t be expected to come up with a strategy. That’s the president’s job. As best as I can determine, the agency really does consider the program a remarkable success — rightly or wrongly — and while it helps that such a success gets the agency out of its post-9/11 whipping-boy mode, that alone doesn’t explain CIA’s all-guns-blazing support for the program.

Nor is the agency responsible for how policymakers want to view it. But ultimately, the faith that some invest in the Predator program is toxic for CIA. Ultimately, the drones can’t solve the United States’ counterterrorism problems in Pakistan, and the easiest tendency in the entire national security bureaucracy is to blame the CIA for not magically resolving all strategic complexities.

After praising the Obama administration’s strategy review as healthy, Exum structures the paper into three scenarios that he presents as ways to view the direction of future Afghan policy. The “worst-case scenario” is one in which the Taliban overthrows the Afghan government and allows Afghanistan to become an expansive safe haven for al-Qaeda, after which the two organizations export terror. “It is hard to imagine U.S. and allied policies in Afghanistan that would allow such a nightmare scenario,” he writes.

More likely is a protracted stalemate that would follow “a limited and short-term ‘surge’ into Afghanistan” of additional U.S. troops that gives way to a restricted U.S. commitment over time, including a focus on counterterrorism instead of counterinsurgency. “In this scenario, President Obama’s policy of not allowing Afghanistan and Pakistan to be a safe haven from which transnational terror groups can plot attacks against the United States and other Western states will likely not be realized,” Exum writes. He assesses, free of euphemism, that this would amount to a policy of “liv[ing] with risks previously unthinkable, or admit[ting] policy failure” as the costs would be considered too great.

The best-case scenario is a “functioning Afghan state inhospitable to transnational terror groups.” Well, sure. How to get there from here? Exum advises continued pressure on President Hamid Karzai (who he assumes, evidently, will remain president of Afghanistan — I gather he wrote this before the news of the runoff broke, though that’s not to say Karzai will lose the runoff). “The United States has leverage over Karzai so long as he and his allies believe a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan remains a real possibility,” Exum writes. Another proposal is less intuitive:

Aid in Afghanistan, meanwhile, should be shifted away from large-scale development projects and toward those projects that address issues – such as irrigation rights and land disputes – driving conflict at the local level. U.S. military units in southern and eastern Afghanistan have already begun such efforts. But for this reason, conducting a census and building a land registry are more important in many areas than building schools and hospitals. It is difficult, in fact, to overestimate the degree to which these two measures would stabilize the country. Such efforts support the establishment of the rule of law and enable ISAF and Afghan units to resolve disputes the Afghan people currently rely on the insurgent “shadow” government to adjudicate.

I’m not ultimately sure what Exum means by labeling the “most likely scenario” to be the subpar one. Specifically, it’s unclear to me whether he’s forecasting Obama’s decision or whether he’s making a point about what, objectively, is more likely to play out even if the resources for an expansive commitment are provided. (I gather not the latter, as it wouldn’t really make sense for him to advocate such a course.) But his conclusion about what’s possible is clearer:

[A]n Afghanistan at peace with itself and its neighbors is not the ahistorical fantasy some critics would like the public to believe. Until the Marxist coup of 1978, Afghanistan was at peace for half a century – an anomaly among Asian states in the 20th century. Returning Afghanistan to a similar state of peace should remain a goal of the United States and the rest of the international community.

Assume those figures are correct for a moment. Take a look at the latest installment of an extraordinary series by David Rohde, the New York Times correspondent taken prisoner by insurgents in Afghanistan for ten months. I’m holding off judgment until the series concludes in a few days, but this is significant. Here, Rohde describes his conversations with his captors, members of Sirajuddin Haqqani’s network in Miram Shah, the capitol of North Waziristan in Pakistan:

For the next several nights, a stream of Haqqani commanders overflowing with hatred for the United States and Israel visited us, unleashing blistering critiques that would continue throughout our captivity.

Some of their comments were factual. They said large numbers of civilians had been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories in aerial bombings. Muslim prisoners had been physically abused and sexually humiliated in Iraq. Scores of men had been detained in Cuba and Afghanistan for up to seven years without charges.

To Americans, these episodes were aberrations. To my captors, they were proof that the United States was a hypocritical and duplicitous power that flouted international law.

My emphasis. It’s worth remembering that the Haqqani network was not implacably opposed to the U.S., having once worked with the CIA. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2007 that the CIA reached out to him in 2002, only to have found that counterproductive military actions — in this specific case, arresting the brother of patriarch Jalaluddin Haqqani — pushed the organization into the hands of the insurgency.

Rohde’s experience rather starkly supports Exum and Kilcullen’s analysis. And indeed, while neither Bergen nor Tiedemann make this argument, it’s worth considering the utility of a program that has a 30-plus percent civilian death toll. The prospect that the drone strikes don’t exclusively kill civilians does not change the strategic consideration.

Oh, and you noticed the torture and Guantanamo considerations on the part of the Haqqani network, right?

In the absence of having a credible Afghan partner … it makes no sense to ramp up. On the other hand we cannot afford to pull out. … At this point, no surge. … [W]e also don’t have unlimited resources and unless those troops can secure an area in a way that then Afghan partners, the government, the Afghan army, the Afghan police can come in and fill in after them, we’re going to be there as an occupying force for a very long time and that to me doesn’t make sense.

That’s been a critique — if not necessarily a prescription — endorsed by, among other people, Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security, one of the advisers to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy review. And it’s at the heart of the current White House debate over changing strategy. Cue the speculation about whether Galbraith was trying to influence the administration’s decision making on behalf of someone in the White House meetings.

I also notice that the chyron used by Diane Sawyer in this clip is “Surge Or Leave?” Absolutely no one within the Obama administration is arguing that the U.S. needs to leave Afghanistan. Galbraith’s substantive recommendations are closest to those of Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who has not ruled out a counterinsurgency strategy and leans most heavily on more Afghan troops to prosecute it.

For more on the strategy/resource question within the administration, The Post’s analysis is really amazing, and contains a wealth of detail. It is not clear that the Obama administration will abandon a counterinsurgency campaign, but it is clear that new strategic facts have caused the administration to question whether it’s over-committing itself to Afghan governance:

The principal game-changer, in the view of White House officials, was Afghanistan’s presidential election last month, which was compromised by fraud, much of it in support of President Hamid Karzai. Although the results have not been certified, he almost certainly will remain in office, but under a cloud of illegitimacy that could complicate U.S. efforts to promote good governance.

This, it’s worth remembering, was also a game-changer for Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security, one of the advisers to McChrystal’s strategy review, who wondered if historians will remember the election as the moment when “we should have cut the cord on the Afghan government.” Counterinsurgency doesn’t require nation-building. But it’s fair to ask whether the Obama administration’s expansive rhetorical commitments to Afghanistan from the start — escalating most recently with Obama’s “war of necessity” line in August — preordained such a thing. If anything, the administration is in a position of trying to calibrate how much state-building, as opposed to nation-building (state-building focuses on indirect strengthening of host-nation institutions while nation-building is a set of governance and economic actions done for that host nation), is enough and how much is not enough. That’s perilously subjective.

There is also starting to be some tension between McChrystal and Obama’s people. From The Post:

“Who’s to say we need more troops?” this official said. “McChrystal is not responsible for assessing how we’re doing against al-Qaeda.”

True, and sure to be read with acrimony in Kabul. Just like this is sure to be read with acrimony in Washington:

But Obama’s deliberative pace — he has held only one meeting of his top national security advisers to discuss McChrystal’s report so far — is a source of growing consternation within the military. “Either accept the assessment or correct it, or let’s have a discussion,” one Pentagon official said. “Will you read it and tell us what you think?” Within the military, this official said, “there is a frustration. A significant frustration. A serious frustration.”

McChrystal can’t be faulted for presuming that Obama’s commitment in March to a counterinsurgency campaign for a counterterrorism goal meant he should interpret counterinsurgency as broadly as he could or pursue it as aggressively as he could. Nor can the administration be faulted for worrying that such commitments push the means into overtaking the ends they’re supposed to yield. And the public can’t be faulted for turning away from a war that exhibits such strategic drift. But the leak of the strategy review means it’s now harder for everyone to make rational decisions without worrying whether their bureaucratic adversaries are going to undermine them in the media.

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Andrew Exum, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and an adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Afghanistan strategy review, calls this outcome “the worst case scenario.” It remains to be seen how counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, dependent as it is on promoting the legitimacy of a host government’s rule, will be impacted by the dubious electoral outcome.