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Steve Coll, in the New Yorker, on “the drone war in Pakistan“:

At the Pearl Continental Hotel, in Peshawar, a concrete tower enveloped by flowering gardens, the management has adopted security precautions that have become common in Pakistan’s upscale hospitality industry: razor wire, vehicle barricades, and police crouching in bunkers, fingering machine guns. In June, on a hot weekday morning, Noor Behram arrived at the gate carrying a white plastic shopping bag full of photographs. He had a four-inch black beard and wore a blue shalwar kameez and a flat Chitrali hat. He met me in the lobby. We sat down, and Behram spilled his photos onto a table. Some of the prints were curled and faded. For the past seven years, he said, he has driven around North Waziristan on a small red Honda motorcycle, visiting the sites of American drone missile strikes as soon after an attack as possible.

Behram is a journalist from North Waziristan, in northwestern Pakistan, and also works as a private investigator. He has been documenting the drone attacks for the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, a Pakistani nonprofit that is seeking redress for civilian casualties. In the beginning, he said, he had no training and only a cheap camera. I picked up a photo that showed Behram outdoors, in a mountainous area, holding up a shredded piece of women’s underwear. He said it was taken during his first investigation, in June, 2007, after an aerial attack on a training camp. American and Pakistani newspapers reported at the time that drone missiles had killed Al Qaeda-linked militants. There were women nearby as well. Although he was unable to photograph the victims’ bodies, he said, “I found charred, torn women’s clothing—that was the evidence.”

Since then, he went on, he has photographed about a hundred other sites in North Waziristan, creating a partial record of the dead, the wounded, and their detritus. Many of the faces before us were young. Behram said he learned from conversations with editors and other journalists that if a drone missile killed an innocent adult male civilian, such as a vegetable vender or a fruit seller, the victim’s long hair and beard would be enough to stereotype him as a militant. So he decided to focus on children…

Last year, in a speech at the National Defense University, President Obama acknowledged that American drones had killed civilians. He called these incidents “heartbreaking tragedies,” which would haunt him and those in his chain of command for “as long as we live.” But he went on to defend drones as the most discriminating aerial bombers available in modern warfare—preferable to piloted aircraft or cruise missiles. Jets and missiles cannot linger to identify and avoid noncombatants before striking, and, the President said, they are likely to cause “more civilian casualties and more local outrage.”…

Obama’s advocacy of drones has widespread support in Washington’s foreign-policy and defense establishments. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton wholeheartedly backed the drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen. Republican hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who otherwise criticize the President as effete and indecisive, are also enthusiastic. But do drones actually represent a humanitarian advance in air combat? Or do they create a false impression of exactitude? And do they really serve the best interests of the United States?…
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For decades, I.S.I. officers have harbored deep ambivalence about their putative allies at the C.I.A. (According to Pew Research Center opinion polls, a majority of Pakistanis believe that the United States is an enemy of their country.) Beginning in 2009, the Obama Administration, led by the special representative Richard Holbrooke, sought to lessen the mistrust by launching a “strategic dialogue” with Pakistan’s military and intelligence leaders, as well as with Pakistan’s weak elected civilian politicians. By early 2011, however, that effort had failed. In late January of that year, on a street in Lahore, Raymond Davis, a C.I.A. contractor, shot and killed two men who he believed were trying to kill him, touching off a furor. I.S.I. leaders felt that the C.I.A.’s unilateral operations inside Pakistan had got out of control. Now, when civilians died in drone strikes, I.S.I. helped to whip up public protests.

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