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.

John Brennan (UPPA/ZUMApress.com)

“We will destroy al-Qaeda.”

That’s how John Brennan capped his presentation Wednesday morning on counterterrorism’s role in the forthcoming National Security Strategy, and the often intense White House senior counterterrorism adviser smiled a bit as he said it. His exploration of the administration’s pathway for getting there was mostly familiar. “A broad, sustained integrated campaign” making use of “every tool of American power: military, civilian, kinetic and diplomatic, and indeed, the power of our values and partnerships,” will sustain “pressure” on al-Qaeda in “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond” while addressing the “political, economic and social forces” that can create either demand for extremism among populations or acquiescence to it. Judge for yourself how that fits within the broader National Security Strategy.

[Security1] But Brennan did highlight a new development the Obama administration faces — and subtly defended a controversial tactic that he says contributed to it. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have entered a “new phase” of their campaign against the United States, relying on operatives with “little training” who don’t fit “the traditional profile of a terrorist” for attacks of “little sophistication but with very lethal intent.” English-speaking al-Qaeda allies like California metalhead-turned-extremist Adam Gadahn and Yemen-based radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, both American citizens, seek to inspire people already in America to execute their own independently planned terrorist attacks.

All of these moves, Brennan said, are tactical responses from al-Qaeda to a successful pressure campaign from the U.S. and its allies abroad to reduce its safe havens and to hardened U.S. homeland security measures by law enforcement and at ports of entry, for which the Bush administration deserves some credit. And in only the vaguest terms, without making an explicit reference, he suggested that the drone strikes the administration has accelerated and exported in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan are a principle reason for al-Qaeda’s adjustment. Limited by an ability to speak publicly about a classified program, Brennan signaled as well that the administration is concerned that blowback from civilians killed by the drones could turn tactical success into strategic failure — but thinks the problem is under control.

In all efforts, we will exercise force prudently, recognizing that we often need to use a scalpel and not a hammer. When we know that terrorist networks are plotting against us, we have a responsibility to take action to defend ourselves, and we will do so. At the same time, an action that eliminates a single terrorist but causes civilian casualties can in fact inflame local populations and create far more problems. A tactical success but a strategic failure. So we need to ensure that our actions are more precise and more accurate than ever before. This is something that President Obama not only expects but demands.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to independently verify Brennan’s claims. Anecdotal reporting indicates that the drone program is expanding beyond precisely targeted top extremist leaders to mid-level operatives and below. There’s also a low-level rumbling in intelligence circles that the CIA’s drone strikes cause fewer civilian casualties than those executed by the military, particularly in Afghanistan, and the agency doesn’t like the media conflating two different programs. But any differences in impact on local populations are extraordinarily difficult to verify.

Brennan’s forecast of success against al-Qaeda rested on another foundation: It’s in America’s power to determine how it will react to terrorism. Al-Qaeda’s enduring strategy is to get America to “overextend” itself and compromise its values, thereby weakening the sources of its strength and isolating it internationally, until it retracts its overall global posture. “We must be honest with ourselves,” Brennan warned. “No nation, no matter how powerful, can prevent every attack from coming to fruition.” But just as the U.S. has an obligation to destroy al-Qaeda proactively, he said, it also has a responsibility not to overreact in the event of a successful attack.

“Al-Qaeda can sew explosives into their clothes, and can place explosives in an SUV, but it is our choice how to react,” he said. “They can seek to recruit people already living among us but it is our choice to treat those communities with suspicion or to support those communities.”

I asked Brennan if the Obama administration was counterproductively compromising American values by retaining policies of indefinite suspension without charge at Guantanamo Bay and beyond. “When this administration came in, in January of last year, we dealt with a number of legacy situations that we wanted to make sure we were able to deal with appropriately without compromising the security of the American people,” Brennan said.

I think as everybody recognizes, on both sides of the political spectrum, the situation at Guantanamo is a very, very difficult and challenging one. I think that even as the president said he was determined to close Guantanamo within one year, it still remains open because the president is determined not to do anything that would compromise America’s security. It is something that we are working very closely with the Congress on. We are trying to do things in a very thoughtful manner. We have transferred about 50 of those detainees over the past year and a half, and we’re continuing to look at their situations there. But this is a challenge that we need to look at from a policy perspective, from a legal perspective as well as from a security perspective.

No one should labor under the misconception that Kappes is the linchpin of the drone-strike effort, which has many authors and advocates and structural factors pushing it forward. (Simply put, it’s what you do when you perceive a terrorist threat in a place you can’t invade.) But now that Kappes is out and his replacement is a longtime CIA analyst, not an operative, named Michael Morrell, it’s an open question whether Panetta and Morrell will shift the agency’s focus at all. The smart early money is probably not, since Panetta believes the strikes to be a smashing success. But watch his next round of congressional testimony to see if any post-Kappes shift is underway.

The New York Times’s Robert Mackey has footage of the attack aired by Pakistan’s Geo TV. You see a really big boom, right above a Pepsi billboard, and billowing mushroom clouds of smoke. It’s easy to believe that the Taliban penetrated the compound, which is surely why the video exists.

Contrast that with the December attack on a CIA headquarters in eastern Afghanistan that left at least seven CIA operatives and a Blackwater contractor dead, all at the hands of an al-Qaeda double agent. That was perhaps the single greatest loss of life in CIA history. (It also appears to have sparked a retaliatory up-tempo in drone strike operations.) But it wasn’t filmed, for the obvious reason that the attacker had no intention of making it out alive.

Khost was a big terrorist success. Peshawar was a negligible one, and perhaps now a wake-up call to the consulate and other diplomatic presences in Pakistan. But as a media event, all the Taliban may have been after is projecting strength, rather than demonstrating it.

Update, 11:03 a.m.: I should say that between this attack and another complex one elsewhere in Pakistan, the Taliban have killed at least 3 dozen Pakistani civilians and security forces today. I did not mean to imply that U.S. assets are the only “real” targets the Taliban seeks in Pakistan, only that as a U.S.-vs-extremists event, the attack on the consulate was in fact negligible.

The informants provided by the Times relate that the drone strikes are intense enough to defy previous patterns employed by residents to evade them. (Apparently, that’s retaliation for al-Qaeda double agent Abu Dujaanah al-Khorasani’s successful attack on a CIA headquarters in Khost province in December.) They just appear relentless, targeting a lower level of militant than before. More surprising is this bit of information suggesting at least some locals blame al-Qaeda’s Arab recruits for the presence of the drones and not actually the U.S. itself:

Two of the government supporters said they knew of civilians, including friends, who had been killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, they said, they are prepared to sacrifice the civilians if it means North Waziristan will be rid of the militants, in particular the Arabs.

“On balance, the drones may have killed 100, 200, 500 civilians,” said one of the men. “If you look at the other guys, the Arabs and the kidnappings and the targeted killings, I would go for the drones.”

It’s important not to generalize from this case. But if it turns out this sentiment is fairly widespread — and the Times piece asserts that it is more than it demonstrates that it is — then al-Qaeda is in danger of losing its most important redoubt on the planet. That’s been predicted many, many times in the past, so, again, it’s important to withhold any judgment until more information is available.

Koh told the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law that the administration is guided by the principles of proportionality — no overreaction to an al-Qaeda attack — and distinction, meaning no civilians can be targeted. There’s more:

Koh also responded to critics who have questioned the legality of such attacks under international law. “[S]ome have suggested that the very use of targeting a particular leader of an enemy force in an armed conflict must violate the laws of war. But individuals who are part of such an armed group are belligerent and, therefore, lawful targets under international law….[S]ome have challenged the very use of advanced weapons systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, for lethal operations. But the rules that govern targeting do not turn on the type of weapon system involved, and there is no prohibition under the laws of war on the use of technologically advanced weapons systems in armed conflict—such as pilotless aircraft or so-called smart bombs—so long as they are employed in conformity with applicable laws of war.”

I have to go back here to my colleague Dave Weigel’s coverage of the conservative effort last year to keep Koh out of his job because he was allegedly a wild-eyed enemy of American sovereignty. Koh’s chief persecutor was Ed Whelan of the Center for Ethics and Public Policy, who capped tendentious readings of Koh’s writings by contextualizing them in hysterical ways like this:

“What judicial transnationalism is really all about,” wrote Whelan, “is depriving American citizens of their powers of representative government by selectively imposing on them the favored policies of Europe’s leftist elites.”

Perhaps Whelan would like to explain how launching missiles from unmanned aerial vehicles onto targets in Pakistan and Yemen — which kill, by the New America Foundation’s estimate, one civilian for every two combatants — are the favored policy response of effete European elites. The ACLU, meanwhile, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the formal legal arguments prepared by the Obama team justifying the drone strikes.

Panetta credited an increasingly aggressive campaign against al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies, including more frequent strikes and better coordination with Pakistan. He called it “the most aggressive operation that CIA has been involved in in our history.”

“Those operations are seriously disrupting al-Qaeda,” Panetta said. “It’s pretty clear from all the intelligence we are getting that they are having a very difficult time putting together any kind of command and control, that they are scrambling. And that we really do have them on the run.”

Circumstances are such that there’s practically no independent way of evaluating Panetta’s claims, and yet you can’t exactly not report them when he gives them to you. As such, it’s kind of like saying, “Senior Official Says His People Are Doing a Great Job at Something Important.”

According to McChrystal’s command, however, there is no change in tactics. Or, rather, the only change in tactics is an increase in drone strikes under his six-month old command from his predecessor. Overall airstrikes, particularly from piloted aircraft, are indeed down under McChrystal. But “the two-in-one-day strikes you saw the other day may have been unusual from a press release standpoint,” McChrystal spokesman Tadd Sholtis, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, emailed, “but it wasn’t an operational aberration.”

Indeed, according to data provided by Sholtis, the first half of January has seen six airstrikes from remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) like the Reaper. December 2009 featured 14 so-called RPA strikes; while under McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, December 2008 featured three. From Sholtis, here’s the full monthly breakdown of those drone strikes since McChrystal took command in Afghanistan this summer, as compared to the previous year:

July 2009:  13 — July 2008: 15

August 2009:  14 — August 2008: 11

September 2009:  8 — September 2008: 5

October 2009:  11 — October 2008: 12

November 2009:  23  — November 2008: 12

December 2009:  14 — December 2008: 3

January 1 – January 14, 2009: 6 — January 2008: 3

The spike in recent months compared to the previous year looks like the result of a combination of factors. First, the increased operational tempo of U.S. troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan’s south and east, despite the (increasingly less relevant) traditional winter lull. Second, senior military leaders like Central Command’s Gen. David Petraeus and Iraq’s Gen. Raymond Odierno have spoken for months about accelerating the transfer of combat-support assets like surveillance drones to Afghanistan; and those drones can be outfitted with Hellfire missiles. “More strikes by these aircraft is probably best understood as a function of more ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] -and-strike capable assets flowing to the theater,” Sholtis said. And finally, the precision capabilities contained within the remotely-piloted drones satisfy McChrystal’s guidance for a “a higher degree of certainty, patience and restraint in employing air strikes,” in Sholtis’ phrase. Or, as a Marine officer quoted in The Washington Post put it, “It has pinpoint precision, and it limits collateral damage.”

And that’s the most important aspect of the increase in drone usage: it has occurred during an internationally validated reduction in U.S./NATO-attributable civilian casualties. A United Nations report released yesterday determined that the U.S. and its allies are responsible for 28 percent fewer civilian deaths in Afghanistan in 2009 than in 2008, a drop that the U.N. specifically attributed to McChrystal’s instructions to prioritize the protection of Afghan civilians. It looks like McChrystal’s command has found the sweet spot: an increase in aerial lethality that does not result in significant collateral damage.

For more on the air war in Afghanistan and McChrystal’s role in it, I can’t recommend this recent Wired piece by Noah Shachtman highly enough.

The civil liberties group today filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA and the Departments of State, Justice and Defense for documentation establishing the legal basis for the drone strikes. Drone strikes in Pakistan have risen substantially during the first year of the Obama administration.

Additionally, the civil liberties group wants to see the government’s estimates for how many civilians the drone program is responsible for killing. A recent New America Foundation report arguing that most drone critics overstate overstate civilian casualties still found that one in every three Pakistanis killed by the drones is a civilian, not a combatant.

From a just-released ACLU statement:

“The American public has a right to know whether the drone program is consistent with international law, and that all efforts are made to minimize the loss of innocent lives,” said Jonathan Manes, a legal fellow with the ACLU National Security Project. “The Obama administration has reportedly expanded the drone program, but it has not explained publicly what the legal basis for the program is, what limitations it recognizes on the use of drones outside active theaters of war and what the civilian casualty toll has been thus far. We’re hopeful that the request we’ve filed today will encourage the Obama administration to disclose information about the basis, scope and implementation of the program.”

American missiles, presumably fired by remotely piloted drones, struck twice Wednesday in North Waziristan, the tribal region that is a stronghold of Qaeda and Taliban militants.

One hopes the targeting wasn’t the result, in some vestigial manner, of spotting done by the suicide bomber who murdered CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week.