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.

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?

John Brennan, pictured with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (White House photo)

John Brennan picked a deeply symbolic day to end the “war on terrorism.”

On August 6, 2001, Brennan, then a senior CIA official and now President Obama’s assistant for counterterrorism and homeland security, “read warnings that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike inside the U.S., but our government was unable to prevent the worst terrorist attack in American history,” he recalled to an audience Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. It was a reference to a CIA analysis, called a President’s Daily Brief, that the 9/11 Commission uncovered as a key warning that an attack by al-Qaeda was likely.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Eight years later, in his first speech since joining the Obama administration, Brennan annulled several key aspects of the so-called war on terrorism — starting with both the name and the idea that the United States was involved in any sort of “global war.” Brennan said Obama will subordinate counterterrorism to “its right and proper place” as a “vital part” of the administration’s national security and foreign policies, but not the lion’s share of them. Saying he was careful not to elevate al-Qaeda to a greater position of importance than it deserved, Brennan linked the rise in support for extremists to problems of global governance, economic crisis and social stratification and said the administration would make a concerted effort to address what he considers those extremist root causes.

Above all, Brennan emphasized that the United States was not locked in a struggle with the world’s billion Muslims. He derided al-Qaeda’s self-presentation as a “highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate,” and said that the administration would abandon the use of the word “jihad” in reference to al-Qaeda, since the term carries “religious legitimacy” in the Muslim world that al-Qaeda’s “murderers… desperately seek but in no way deserve.” David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert and former adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, has recently argued in an influential book that the United States has insufficiently distinguished between implacable enemies and those who fight out of opportunism, desperation or other, non-eschatological reasons.

Brennan used that insight to explain the basis for the Obama administration’s approach to global governance, stability and development assistance. “Any comprehensive approach has to also address the upstream factors — the conditions that help fuel violent extremism,” Brennan said. Military, intelligence or law-enforcement actions are unable to confront those conditions, which he said include the “basic needs and legitimate grievances of ordinary people” for prosperity, education, “dignity and worth,” and security. “If we fail to confront the broader political, economic, and social conditions in which extremists thrive, then there will always be another recruit in the pipeline, another attack coming downstream,” Brennan said.

While Brennan said it would ultimately be up to governments and civil-society institutions in the Muslim world to “isolate” al-Qaeda, he said the role of the United States was to help strengthen “the capacity of foreign militaries and security forces” and judiciaries; to make “substantial” increases in foreign aid to fight poverty and promote global health and food security; and to demonstrate the ability of “diplomacy, dialogue, and the democratic process” to solve “seemingly intractable problems.”

By contrast, the Bush administration dismissed the idea that poverty and social injustice contributed to terrorism, and contended that a more fundamental root cause was political tyranny in the Middle East. While it pushed autocratic allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to take certain liberalizing steps, it focused more on building the outlines of democratic states in countries it sent the U.S. military to occupy, Iraq and Afghanistan. “This nation is at war with Islamic fascists,” Bush said in 2006, and several steps he took — such as authorizing the CIA to perform “enhanced interrogation” and approving indefinite detention without trial at places like Guantanamo Bay — led Muslim democracy activists to view U.S. material or even rhetorical support as counterproductive.

Brennan did not renounce a variety of military, intelligence, financial and law enforcement measures to combat al-Qaeda and unspecified “other terrorist groups.” He said vaguely that Obama had encouraged his foreign-policy and security team to “be even more aggressive, even more proactive, and even more innovative” at going after terrorists, and Brennan added, with “certainty,” that the United States would defeat al-Qaeda. Brennan did not spend much time discussing Afghanistan, the war theater where Obama has recently ordered 21,000 new troops and may soon face a request to order the deployment of more. He said U.S. forces were “pushing the Taliban out of key population areas in Afghanistan so we can prevent the return of al-Qaeda to that country,” although Obama announced the troop increase as a measure to confront al-Qaeda directly.

Asked by TWI whether measures like CIA drone strikes in Pakistan overemphasized killing al-Qaeda members at the expense of alienating a population vulnerable to exploitation by extremists, Brennan said that the Obama administration debated those issues intensely. Interagency meetings feature the questions, “What are the implications, if we take this [counterterrorism] step, what’s it going to do on the political front, on the economic front, on the social front?” Brennan said. “What we don’t want to do is just have a bunch of CT [counterterrorism] people in a room saying, ‘OK, what can we do here.’” Kilcullen and Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security have argued that the drone strikes, which have intensified this year, represent a greater long-term cost to national security than counterterrorist benefit.

Brennan would have been Obama’s CIA director had concerns in the blogosphere over statements he made in support of rendition — the extrajudicial transfer of detainees from one country to another — led him in November to pull his name from consideration. In the speech, Brennan took pains to denounce waterboarding and unspecified interrogation “practices” that “have been rightly terminated and should not, and will not, happen again.” He did not use the word “torture,” and ducked a question from Eli Lake of The Washington Times about whether he supported a classified annex to a forthcoming government-wide interrogation field manual that might contain harsher interrogation recommendations than allowed under the Geneva Conventions — rules Obama has insisted apply to interrogations policy.

He also dodged a question from TWI about the part a recent report from several government inspectors general suggested he may have played in the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance programs, saying “I’m not going to go into sort of what my role was in that instance because a lot of those activities are still considered classified and not in the public domain.”

Roads are everything in Afghanistan, precisely because there are so few of them. They’re an economic necessity and a strategic choke-point. David Kilcullen once opted to tell the story of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan through a series of observations about roads. Some roads in Afghanistan that I’ve seen are littered with the giant, boxy detritus of overturned shipping containers after bandits — insurgents or, more often, police — loot the so-called “jingle trucks” that transport goods. To deny Afghan civilians access to scarce roadspace is a surefire way to alienate them.

So, Hodge reports, McChrystal is considering telling troops in Afghanistan to be careful not to force Afghans off the road when their Humvees roll out:

Canadian Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, told Danger Room that McChrystal was considering a new directive that would set the tone for working among the population, while “maintaining the delicate balance” between cultural sensitivity and protecting the force.

“The commander is maybe thinking of producing COIN [counterinsurgency] guidance that will govern day-to-day interactions with Afghans,” he said. “And that may cover tactical driving both in Kabul and outside, and it may also deal with how you portray yourself with Afghans — but also leaving it to the tactical commander or the commander on the ground to decide.”

So, once again: what about the private military contractors, particularly those who guard U.S. diplomats? How to coordinate with them so they know not to run civilians off the road and still do their jobs protecting their charges?

The so-new-I-don’t-have-a-URL-yet report –  written by counterinsurgency luminaries David Kilcullen, Andrew Exum, Nathaniel Fick and CNAS researcher Ahmed Humayun and bluntly titled “Triage” — lays out a stark picture of the insurgencies in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and the available U.S. options to reverse the worsening situations. As the title indicates, the authors think the best that can be accomplished over the next 12 months in the conjoined wars is a stanching of the bleeding caused by inattention and poor U.S., NATO and Pakistani strategy, not anything approaching “victory.” Their recommendations will be familiar to students of counterinsurgency: protect the Afghan population, which they call “the single most important task facing the United States and its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the near term”; place U.S. civilian expertise into the Afghan ministries to “visibly decreas[e] corruption”; “strictly curtail” the drone strikes on “non-al-Qaeda targets” in Pakistan (which conspicuously stops short of the “moratorium” on the drone strikes that Exum and Kilcullen advocated in a recent New York Times op-ed); and boost a Pakistani police capacity so areas taken back from or not controlled by the Taliban can stay that way. (Interestingly, they phrase that by saying the U.S. should stop “unconditionally aiding the Pakistani military at the expense of other security forces” like the police.)

But the strength of the report comes from its helpful suggestions about how to measure the course of the war. The authors’ lodestar is that the U.S. should assess “outcomes for the population rather than inputs by governments.” In other words, don’t look at the resources that the U.S. or its allies puts into the wars to judge the strategies’ effectiveness — hey, we’ve got a new Brigade Combat Team in a place we didn’t before — look at what the population actually gets out of it. Though they concede such metrics are harder to gauge than, say, enemy body counts or NATO troops deployed, they contend that the administration will know whether it’s on the right or wrong track by examining

the proportion of the population that feels safe, can access essential services, enjoys social justice and the rule of law, engages in political activity, and earns a living without fear of insurgents, drug traffickers, or corrupt officials.

Specifically, they take the controversial step of contending that in Afghanistan, “the most telling measure of progress” will be the reduction of “Afghan civilian casualties,” either those caused by the United States or the Taliban-led insurgent coalition. Then comes the August Afghan presidential election, which can be considered a “qualified success” if it occurs “without major violence, and … is fair and transparent in accordance with international standards.” Next, count the number of Afghanistan’s 398 administrative districts that are under government or Taliban control. (They concede that can be a subjective measurement, but make a compelling case that it’s not an indeterminable one: “Can the official responsible for a district sleep there overnight? Can civilian officials travel without military escort in their district?” etc.) Rather than count enemy bodies, count “surrenders and defections,” patterns in IED attacks and attempted attacks, and whether the U.S. or the Taliban are initiating most attacks in a given area. And like in Iraq, the rate of intelligence tips from civilians about insurgent planning will be key.

In Pakistan, the CNAS authors write, the metrics are “less clear-cut,” since the United States doesn’t have remotely the influence and freedom of action it does in Afghanistan. As a result, much of what they suggest watching concerns Taliban actions — specifically, whether attacks and Taliban footholds expand beyond the Pashtun areas in the east from which the Taliban emerged; how many government-appointed tribal representatives the Taliban murder; and its infiltration rate into Afghanistan. When it comes to Pakistani government and military actions, they advise watching whether the military acts on U.S. intelligence tips and military advice about targeting and civilian control over the military. Interestingly, they do not propose looking at how the military and police forces hold areas cleared by the Taliban.

The report might be fairly criticized for not clearly articulating how these proposals and metrics contribute to the Obama administration’s objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan: “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.” None of the proposals or metrics have to do with safe havens, with the arguable exception of the proposal to look at the Pakistani Taliban’s expansion (or lack thereof) into Sindh or Punjab. But since the paper has to do with the next 12 months in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it could be that the authors decided that such a goal wasn’t yet on the table in that time frame, and the apparent focus of the paper’s effort is to look at and quantify how the U.S. can stop digging itself into a hole and reverse the Taliban’s momentum.

At any rate, the paper is pretty much guaranteed to be taken seriously by the Obama administration, as CNAS scholars and leaders are now senior administration officials, like Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy. And some general with a Dutch last name is going to be delivering the keynote speech at next week’s big CNAS annual conference.

(Also, speaking to a point raised in a previous post, the CNAS authors credit Amnesty International’s assessment that the U.S.-led coalition is responsible for 25 percent of Afghan civilian casualties, and fault previous U.S. strategy for being “unwilling or unable” to protect the population. They wonder whether the U.S. military command is really embracing counterinsurgency principles while waging a counterinsurgency campaign: “One of the more worrying trends in Afghanistan has been the way in which the U.S. military—while claiming to faithfully execute population-centric counterinsurgency—has continued to articulate its aims in terms of terrain controlled and enemies killed or captured.” Hmmm.)

The basic argument is familiar to all COINdinistas: the strikes give the veneer of efficacy while sowing the seeds for long term instability; and a real strategy prioritizes the provision of security and services to the population rather than focusing on the elimination of an enemy who you’re probably not so good at distinguishing anyway.

Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.

The drone strategy is similar to French aerial bombardment in rural Algeria in the 1950s, and to the “air control” methods employed by the British in what are now the Pakistani tribal areas in the 1920s. The historical resonance of the British effort encourages people in the tribal areas to see the drone attacks as a continuation of colonial-era policies.

Most readers here are probably persuaded. I’d be interested in reading a reply from a smart conservative observer of Af-Pak like Bill Roggio. (Not that I know what Bill thinks about the drones.) The alternative to the drones, as Dave and Exum write, is an increased U.S.-supported reliance on Pakistani forces to provide security for the population; and heretofore those forces have shown little competence or capability in doing so.

The police are a critically important element in any counterinsurgency, and I am not aware of any successful campaign in which police reform, police capability building, police intelligence and the use of police to protect the population and uphold law and order, were not key components. Pakistan needs a much larger, much better equipped, better trained, better supported and better paid police force.

And here’s Section 205, subsection (f), sub-subsection 2 of the Pakistan funding bill that Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) introduced yesterday:

(2) FUNDING FOR POLICER EFORM, EQUIPPING, AND TRAINING.—Up to $100,000,000 of the funds appropriated pursuant to subsection (a) should be used for police reform, equipping, and training.

Obviously there are more factors at play here than just Kilcullen, but Kerry is said to take the man very seriously.

1. Paying off tribal elders won’t work. Gen. David Petraeus’ strategy in Iraq of exploiting and deepening fractures in both the Iraqi insurgency and its base of support provoked study in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The tactician says that Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, can try it in Afghanistan, but he should just expect to be throwing money around. “We know our Afghans,” he says. “They will take the money from Petraeus, but they will not be on his side. There are so many people working with the Afghans and the Americans who are on their payroll, but they inform us, sell us weapons.”

2. The drone strikes actually work, to a degree. In Pakistan, the CIA’s missile strikes from pilotless drones have caused controversy, both within Pakistan, where civilian casualties are fuel for the insurgency, and among American strategists, who debate their utility both within that context and against the stark fact that U.S. combat troops largely can’t operate in Pakistan. The tactician gives the drones their due, saying they’re “very effective,” and that they’ve thinned the ranks of al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership. (All of which suggests the United States has a significant intelligence base within Pakistan after all. Otherwise, the drones wouldn’t know what to hit.) But:

The drone attacks simply prompted Taliban fighters to spend more time in Afghanistan, or to move deeper into Pakistan, straddling both theaters of a widening conflict. The recruits were prepared to fight where they were needed, in either country, he said.

Within this framework, the drones appear to be the newest hammer with which to play whack-a-mole, which is an unsustainable and insufficient long-term strategy. In Wana, he says, “the gossip has finished,” meaning people don’t gather in large groups for fear of being blown up by drones.” The tactician apparently views that as a win for the United States, but in the longer term, it poses a clear risk to U.S. or Pakistani efforts to cleave the populace from the Taliban.

3. The Taliban is not al-Qaeda. The goals of the Taliban in what The Times says the tactician sees as “one fluid and sprawling war” are to drive the United States out of Afghanistan and to take over Pakistan. What they’re not is to attack the United States at home. The Times describes the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban as “respectful but distant.” Al-Qaeda’s operatives don’t “tell us their activities,” he said. While he respects al-Qaeda’s “ambitions,” he said the Taliban will be “content in capturing Afghanistan and throwing the Americans out,” and destabilizing the Pakistani government. But when al-Qaeda needs a suicide bomber, the Taliban supplies the recruits.

4. The Taliban is in your village already. The tactician’s spent the last month moving about 80 fighters from Pakistan into Afghanistan to combat the American troop increase. They move into Afghan villages and spend four to six months getting to know the locals, who become the Taliban support base. By contrast, how much time do U.S. troops and development workers, who rarely speak the language, spend with the villagers?

5. It’s not hard to get over on the Pakistani Frontier Corps. Meet the force that the U.S. is relying on to conduct counterinsurgency operations in Pakistan.

The Taliban tactician said getting his fighters over the border was not a problem. The Pakistani paramilitary soldiers from the Frontier Corps who guard the border were too busy looking after their own survival, he said.

6. The near-term Taliban goal in Afghanistan is to control the Kabul-Kandahar highway. It’s Afghanistan’s major artery for transportation of people and commerce, and the United States has long known its strategic importance to both the Afghan government and the insurgency. That’s why the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division was ordered to deploy to the Logar-Wardak region late last year — so it could sit on that highway. The Taliban intends to harass and inflict as much damage along that highway to U.S. forces as it can. “We want to inflict maximum trouble, to lower their morale, to destabilize,” the tactician says. That includes making movies. They’re increasing their propaganda strategic communication efforts, bringing “cameramen instructed to capture video of faltering American soldiers” alongside their operations in order to make and distribute DVDs.

That in turn raises the question of why the tactician is bothering to talk to a reporter at all. Clearly he sees value in spreading this message. Perhaps what he’s saying is interspersed with false statements; it certainly can’t represent a complete account of the situation. But dismissing the report carries its own attendant risks, not least of which is willful blindness. Jane Perlez and Pir Zuzbair Shah of The Times deserve a tremendous amount of credit for what must have been an arduous report to put together, to say nothing of the personal danger they probably faced in doing so.

Vickers is a big proponent of the “indirect approach” to combating terrorists and insurgencies: providing advisors and money to work with and improve foreign militaries rather than sending in large ground forces to pull constabulary duty on foreign soil. Gates has also become an advocate of the indirect approach, and his budget proposal includes $500 million to “boost global partnership capacity efforts,” including training and equipping foreign militaries. Vickers has also pushed hard for the services to provide more, and better foreign advisors and for the Army in particular to change its culture governing promotions so that serving as an advisor is seen as career enhancing, rather than a career ender, as many now see it.

In a speech before a defense industry gathering last month, Vickers said he foresees a shift over time from the manpower intensive counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan to more “distributed operations across the world,” relying on close to 100 small teams of special operations forces to hunt down terrorist networks, part of a “global radical Islamist insurgency.”. He called it “counter network warfare,” using a “network to fight a network,” and building that network is the driver behind the increase in special operators. “The emerging challenge of this global radical Islamist insurgency is conducting operations in scores of countries with which the U.S. is not at war,” he said.

Grant admirably restrains himself from pointing out that Vickers was immortalized in the movie version of “Charlie Wilson’s War” as the nerd who can kill you without breaking a sweat. Beyond that, I wonder how Vickers’s special operations forces-heavy approach would grapple with the logistics challenges posited by David Kilcullen in a talk last week about his new book “The Accidental Guerilla“. Here’s Andrew Exum’s summary:

[I]f you decide to do [counterterrorism], you need to base a SOF team somewhere nearby — and then build a base to protect them and their air assets. So you end up with a) a pretty significant presence on the ground and b) more contact with — and need to protect — the local population than you originally bargained for.