We’ve been able to discern some surprising trends. A frequent criticism of the drones program is that the strikes kill too many civilians. … But even as the number of reported strikes has skyrocketed—with one every three days in 2010, compared with one a week last year and one every 11 days in 2008—the percentage of non-militants killed by the attacks has plummeted. … If the true nonmilitant fatality rate were more widely known in Pakistan, the program might be less unpopular there. Those targeted in the strikes, after all, are thought to have carried out or planned attacks not only in Afghanistan and the West, but also in Pakistan, where more than 4,000 people have been killed in militant attacks since the Red Mosque incident in July 2007.85
These authors further wrote, “Our study shows that the 265 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, including 52 in 2011, from 2004 to the present have killed approximately between 1,628 and 2,561 individuals, of whom around 1,335 to 2,090 were described as militants in reliable press accounts. Thus, the true non-militant fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 20 percent. In 2010, it was more like five percent.”86 By 2012 the civilian death rate had fallen even further, and Bergen boldly wrote, “Today, for the first time, the estimated civilian death rate is at or close to zero.”87
This independent study’s conclusion that the drones were killing civilians at a rate of roughly 5 percent in 2010 seems to speak to the drones’ unprecedented precision. The obvious question, if such findings are accurate, is, How are the drones so precise at killing terrorists and militants? Part of their success can of course be explained by the drone pilots’ ability, while flying remotely from Langley, Creech Airbase in Nevada, or elsewhere, to follow their targets up close for many hours using high-resolution cameras. For the first time in history, unseen drones can patiently wait for targets to gather in a compound, automobile, or training camp; watch to see if civilians are in the area; and then fire when the moment is most opportune. One account compared the drones to “mini-satellites that can monitor a suspected terrorist compound for weeks, watching where the people go and with whom they interact, to help confirm that the right people are being singled out for attack.”88 A New York Times article on the drones similarly reported,
Former C.I.A. officials say there is a rigorous protocol for identifying militants, using video from the Predators, intercepted cell phone calls and tips from Pakistani intelligence, often originating with militants’ resentful neighbors. Operators at C.I.A. headquarters can use the drones’ video feed to study a militant’s identity and follow fighters to training areas or weapons caches, officials say. Targeters often can see where wives and children are located in a compound or wait until fighters drive away from a house or village before they are hit.89
According to the Los Angeles Times, in some cases drones conduct surveillance for “days” to gather the “evidence that justifies firing a missile.” The report went on to say, “One former official directly involved in the program said many locations were watched so closely that the CIA could predict daily routines. ‘Is the white van there yet?’ the official said, giving an example of the degree of scrutiny. ‘Is he walking with a limp?’”90
There are additional safeguards in place as well. First, the CIA’s Covert Action Review Group leads a debate on the “kill”; then, the target is passed to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. The CIA drones cannot fire unless their pilots receive final approval from the CIA director or his deputy.91 Describing former CIA chief Leon Panetta’s direct involvement in the strikes, one senior intelligence official said, “He asks a lot of questions about the target, the intelligence picture, potential collateral damage, women and children in the vicinity.” For his part, Panetta claimed this oversight meant that the drones were “very precise” and “very limited in terms of collateral damage.”92 Panetta also said, “You know, as a Catholic, I remember when I first became director of the C.I.A., and realized that I was making life-and-death decisions—with regards to our operations. It doesn’t come lightly. … Frankly, we made very clear that if there were any women or children that were involved that we would not take a shot. That became a rule that we abided by.”93
In a rare discussion of the topic, President Obama similarly said, “We are very careful in terms of how it’s applied. It is very important for everybody to understand that it’s kept on a tight leash.”94 Obama further stated in September 2012, “We will not engage in operations if we think there’s going to be civilian casualties involved.”95 The Los Angeles Times reported that House and Senate intelligence committee members monitor the strikes and are informed about them. One Democrat member of the committee said of the process, “If the American people were sitting in the room, they would feel comfortable that it was being done in a responsible way.”96 Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, who has played a key and often restraining role in the drone strikes, stressed during his February 2013 hearing testimony that the drones are used only “as a last resort to save lives when there is no alternative.”97 Although Brennan has been dubbed the “assassination czar” by his critics for his involvement in the drone campaign, insiders at the CIA consider him to be “a rein, a constrainer. He is using his intimate knowledge of intelligence and the process to pick apart their arguments that might be expansionary.”98
Other reports have said that the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan must approve drone hits to make sure there is no political fallout from a strike and that this has even led to clashes between the CIA station chief in Islamabad and the ambassador.99 In order to carry out a strike, there must be two forms of supporting intelligence, for example, a radio intercept, a report by a spy, or a visual from a drone. If these steps were not enough, CIA lawyers must also sign off on all HVTs who are on a hit list. Newsweek described a typical precision drone attack on an enemy HVT that was approved by CIA lawyer John Rizzo:
It was an ordinary-looking room located in an office building in northern Virginia. The place was filled with computer monitors, keyboards, and maps. Someone sat at a desk with his hand on a joystick. John A. Rizzo, who was serving as the CIA’s acting general counsel, hovered nearby, along with other people from the agency. Together they watched images on a screen that showed a man and his family traveling down a road thousands of miles away. The vehicle slowed down, and the man climbed out.
A moment later, an explosion filled the screen, and the man was dead. “It was very businesslike,” says Rizzo. An aerial drone had killed the man, a high-level terrorism suspect, after he had gotten out of the vehicle, while members of his family were spared. “The agency was very punctilious about this,” Rizzo says. “They tried to minimize collateral damage, especially women and children.”100
Another official described an incident wherein a drone pilot was able to divert a guided missile from an intended target at the last minute to save civilians: “In one recent strike, an official said, after the drone operator fired a missile at militants in a car and a noncombatant suddenly appeared nearby, the operator was able to divert the missile harmlessly into open territory, hitting the car minutes later when the civilian was gone.”101
An Esquire magazine journalist who was embedded with a drone crew in Afghanistan similarly reported,
In preparation for raids or missile strikes, crews sometimes loiter over an area for weeks, building video dossiers. …
If they’re tracking an individual, as they often will for days or weeks, they know when he goes to work, where he stops for tea, and whom he talks to along the way. Though civilians do die in some of the missile strikes, this ability to linger can do much to limit unintended deaths. If women and children or the unlucky neighbor is nearby, the plane can wait, and wait, without losing sight.102
Such safeguards have prevented civilian deaths from being higher, according to the Los Angeles Times. In an article titled “CIA May Be Avoiding Civilian Deaths,” the Los Angeles Times reported that the CIA had passed up a chance to kill Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son
and heir to the notorious Afghan Taliban terrorist Jalaluddin Haqqani, in 2010 because there was an unacceptably large number of civilian women and children near him when a drone spotted him.103
But bureaucratic safeguards and unprecedented ability to covertly monitor potential targets from afar for hours at a time using high-resolution optics are not the only explanation for the low civilian death toll. In September 2010 the Washington Post reported that the CIA had begun to run a program from bases in the border region of Pakistan from which they controlled spies in the FATA. The CIA had set up counterterrorist pursuit teams made up of Afghan and Pakistani Pashtuns who ranged beyond the borders of Afghanistan into the FATA, hunting Taliban and al Qaeda militants.104 These spies reported the whereabouts of the militants to CIA drones, which then took them out.
A Pakistani journalist quoted at the time had some interesting insights into how the CIA had begun to choose its targets with the use of local spies and surveillance: “They [the locals] see traffic coming and going from the fortress homes of tribal leaders associated with foreign elements, and they pass the information along. Some quick surveillance is done, and then someone pops a couple of hundred-pound bombs at the house.”105
In his book Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward wrote of the importance of these spies in his discussion of the transfer of power from Bush to Obama in 2008–2009:
But, he [President Bush] said, the real breakthrough had been with human sources. That is what President Bush wanted to protect at all costs. The drones were basically flying high-resolution video cameras armed with missiles. The only meaningful way to point a drone towards a target was to have spies on the ground telling the CIA where to look, hunt and kill. Without spies, the video feed from the Predator might as well be a blank television screen.
McConnell provided extensive details about these human sources who had been developed in an expensive, high-risk program over five years. The spies were the real secrets that Obama would carry with him from that moment forward. They were the key, in some respects, to protecting the country.106
The Pakistani ISI and military also stepped up their cooperation with the CIA in providing information on targets. One Pakistani official claimed that “as a result the strikes are more and more precise.”107 To enhance cooperation with the Pakistanis who were clearly acting as spotters, the United States set up a coordination center with them at Torkham Gate, on the Afghan-Pakistani border near the Khyber Agency, and there they shared footage from drone strikes with their Pakistani counterparts.108
The Taliban quickly came to conclusion that the drones’ unique ability to target their fighters was the result of the CIA’s reliance on a network of local spies. One Taliban spokesman said, “The growing drone attacks in North Waziristan are proving that someone on the ground is guiding the spy planes to strike targets. The improvement in hitting accurate targets, as witnessed in the recent weeks, is nothing but an indication that the CIA-paid agents are very much active.”109
Spying activities were also noticed by al Qaeda, which published an online book titled Guide to the Laws Regarding Muslim Spies. In it, al Qaeda leader Abu Yahya al Libi stressed the danger of spies to his organization: “It would be no exaggeration to say that the first line in the raging Crusader campaign waged by America and its allies against the Muslims and their lands is the network of spies.”110 He went on to lament the spies’ negative impact on al Qaeda, writing, “One single piece of information transmitted to them [the Americans], by one of their spies, is able to exasperate spirits, honor, and possessions in a way that thousands of their mobilized soldiers cannot do.”111 Libi then writes in paranoid terms about the seemingly ubiquitous presence of the spies in the FATA:
The spying networks are their eyes to see the hidden things that they cannot see and are their hands that are still extending inside the houses, in the forests, up the mountains, into the valleys, and inside the dark caves in order to catch a target that their developed technology was not able to reach. The spies are the brigades, the soldiers, and they are present and absent at the same time. They were sent to penetrate the ranks of the Muslims generally, and the mujahidin specifically, and spread all over the lands like locusts.
Although the spies are busy day and night carrying out their duties in an organized and secret manner and taking directions, even orders like soldiers, still you never feel their presence. You can see their influence like killing, destroying, imprisoning, and tracking, but you do not see them.112
In May 2009 the British newspaper the Guardian published a story that revealed for the first time a fourth means by which the CIA drones had been able to track their targets with uncanny precision. The Guardian reported that the CIA spies in the FATA region had been planting small homing beacons known as pathrai (chips) in the vehicles, compounds, hujras, and camps of al Qaeda and Taliban militants. These infrared flashing beacons were previously used by the military to identify friend from foe, mark drop zones, and outline perimeters.113 Now the drones picked up the signals emitted by the beacons and were able to fire their missiles precisely at the targets beings designated, or “lit up,” by the pathrai. According to the Guardian,
“Everyone is talking about it,” said Taj Muhammad Wazir, a student from south Waziristan. “People are scared that if a pathrai comes into your house, a drone will attack it.” According to residents and Taliban propaganda, the CIA pays tribesmen to plant the electronic devices near farmhouses sheltering al-Qaida and Taliban commanders. Hours or days later, a drone, guided by the signal from the chip, destroys the building with a salvo of missiles. “There are body parts everywhere,” said Wazir, who witnessed the aftermath of a strike. … For the US military, drones have proved to be an effective weapon against al-Qaida targets, and they are becoming increasingly accurate.114
The targets of the attacks quickly understood that the drones’ precision was no coincidence. The Taliban and al Qaeda, as previously mentioned, became vitally aware that tribesmen around them, and even some of their own members, had been hired to spy on them and relay their location to the CIA drones through various means, including pathrai homing beacons. In al Qaeda’s Internet book, the organization wrote of the chips, “These result in the firing of the murderous and destructive missiles whose wrath is inflicted on the Mujahedeen and the weak.” The book includes photos of some of the devices that “spies painstakingly transport to the targets they are assigned by their infidel patrons.”115
The Taliban were shocked by the accuracy of the strikes guided by the pathrais. One Newsweek account of a drone strike on a Taliban safe house that killed several al Qaeda operatives and their Afghan allies reported,
After one of the latest U.S. Predator attacks in North Waziristan, a Taliban subcommander visited the site. He’s seen the results of many airstrikes over the past year or two, but this one really impressed him. The missile didn’t just hit the right house; it scored a direct hit on the very room where Mustafa al-Misri (“Mustafa the Egyptian”) and several other Qaeda operatives were holed up. The hit was so accurate, the subcommander says, it’s as if someone had tossed a GPS [global positioning system] device against the wall. Unfortunately for others at the scene, the mud-and-stone house collapsed, killing several Afghans along with the foreign fighters. Nevertheless, the subcommander told Newsweek, “We are stunned” by such precision.116
Al Qaeda has similarly bemoaned the existence of “spies who have spread throughout the land like locusts.”117
To combat these spies, according to local sources, the Taliban launched a witch hunt in the FATA, which has resulted in the deaths of real or suspected spies for giving away militants’ positions to the CIA.118 The beheaded or mutilated bodies of locals who were said to have been spying for the Americans or “Indian and Jewish agencies” have been turning up in record numbers since the drone campaign began.119 According to the Times of London, “After every raid witnesses say that the Taleban react with rage, abducting, torturing and killing anyone suspected of planting a c
hip. ‘Sometimes we see a body a day lying by the roadside,’ said Gul Rafay Jan, from Miran Shah. ‘They’ve got signs around their necks saying they were spies planting chips. Sometimes they have been tortured to make confession videos by having rods pushed through their arms or stomachs, or being suspended over a fire.’”120
As the CIA began to focus on hitting automobiles carrying Taliban and al Qaeda members, the militants even began executing dozens of car mechanics whom they blamed for placing pathrais in their trucks and cars. So concerned were the Pakistani Taliban about local spies that they created a special force in North Waziristan, known as the Lashkar al Khorasan (the Army of Greater Afghanistan) or the Khorasan Mujahideen, to hunt down and execute real or perceived spies.121 This two-hundred-man task force of masked killers whose faces are covered in black balaclavas began kidnapping and killing real or suspected spies on an almost “daily basis” and terrorized much of North Waziristan. One Pakistani source said, “According to local tribal elders, in most cases militants execute so-called spies just to terrorize ordinary tribesmen. In some cases, the militants are also known to put suicide vests on those accused of spying and detonate the vests in front of large crowds to demonstrate the power of the Taliban.”122 In another case, “the bodies [of suspected spies] were beyond recognition because militants had repeatedly shot the victims in the face.”123
American reporter David Rohde, who was captured by the Haqqani Network and held prisoner in North Waziristan, saw for himself the Taliban’s efforts to hunt down real or suspected spies. His extraordinary eyewitness account reveals some insight into their feverish witch hunts:
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