Drones - the impossibility of accurate statistics

Whilst accepting that US drone strikes in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) - and elsewhere - regularly result in the deaths of non-combatants as 'collateral damage', I have always argued it is impossible to be precise about the numbers.
Reports in the last year from the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, Stanford Law School/NYU School of Law, the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal all rely on figures provided to local reporters by unnamed security officials - usually members of Pakistan's ISI, who refuse to divulge their identity. Outsiders cannot check these figures as they are banned from entering FATA. The US authorities, which claim that civilian deaths are minimal, fail to provide any evidence to back up their argument.
All the various analytical reports attempt to portray themselves as authoritative, although all use different methodologies.
The debate on drone casualties is rapidly becoming a classic debate on the use and abuse of official statistics. The latest contribution comes from the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, whose report, Counting Drone Strike Deaths has produced a further set of estimates - although it makes a point of stating the impossibility of accuracy: “Drone strike casualty estimates are substituting for hard facts and information about the drone program,” says Naureen Shah, Acting Director of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, adding: “These are good faith efforts to count civilian deaths, but it’s the US government that owes the public an  accounting of who is being killed, especially as it continues expanding secret drone operations in new places around the world.”
Columbia Law School also recently published The Civilian Impact of Drones: Unexamined Costs, Unanswered Questions, which examines the way drones are rapidly becoming the centrepiece of US counter-terrorism strategy.

Disparity in official figures for civilian killed by drones

How many civilians in Pakistan have been killed in drone strikes? Leaving aside the question of who is a civilian and who is a combatant, there is an enormous disparity, as pointed out in an article by Justin Elliot of ProPublica - not least, in those given in off-the-record briefings by Obama Adminstration security officials.
Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal website, which bases its estimates on news reports, puts the number of civilian killed in Pakistan at 138, against 2,307 Islamist fighters. The New America Foundation states that, based on press reports, between 293 and 471 civilians have been killed in the 300-plus attacks since 2004. 
The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which draws on sources including researchers and lawyers in Pakistan, puts the number of civilians killed at between 482 and 832. The authors of the various estimates all emphasize that their counts are imperfect.
Elliot has used another indicator to analyse civilian casualties. He has compared the many claims made by Obama Administration officials about the number of civilian casualties. His research shows that a wide variety of figures have been given out - off the record, of course - over the last few years. These include "a handful", "zero", 60, 50, "about 30", "under 40", "at most a few dozen", "roughly 30" and so on.
US security officials - the CIA - claim they know the figures because they monitor phone and other conversations after a strike and they observe funerals and other events connected to the strikes. Sounds good, but with such a variation in figures, their case is undermined.
For some people even a single civilian death is one too many whilst for others the issue is that of proportionality - whether or not the number of civilians being killed is proportional to the military advantage anticipated. For those running the CIA drone campaign in Pakistan it seems that the only figures that matter are the number of senior al-Qaeda and other militants who are being killed.

Survey reveals public opinions in Pak tribal areas

Nearly nine out of 10 people in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) oppose the US pursuing the Taliban and al-Qaeda in their region, according to a survey of more that 1,000 people from 142 villages in all seven tribal agencies that make up the region.
Carried out for the New America Foundation and Terror Free Tomorrow, the interviews were conducted by Community Appraisal and Motivation Programme (CAMP), a Pakistan-based NGO that works in FATA and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
They also reveal that nearly 70 per cent of FATA residents want the Pakistani military alone to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda. While only one in ten think suicide attacks are often or sometimes justified against the Pakistani military and police, almost 60 per cent believe they are justified against the US military.
More that three-quarters of FATA residents also oppose drone strikes, with only 16 per cent believing that they accurately target militants, while 48 per cent think they largely kill civilians and another 33 per cent feel they kill both militants and civilians.
However, despite the strong opposition to the US, more than three-quarters of FATA residents oppose the presence inside their region of al-Qaeda and over two-thirds oppose the presence of the Pakistan Taliban. Sixty per cent oppose the presence of the Afghan Taliban. If al-Qaeda or the Pakistan Taliban were on the ballot in an election, less that one per cent of FATA residents said they would vote for them. Only 12 per cent would support justice being delivered by the Taliban.
The antipathy of FATA residents towards US policy in the region is not a sign of opposition to the US in general. Most people would support America if it changed its regional policies.
FATA residents strongly support the Pakistan Army, with nearly 70 per cent backing the Army's campaign against militants. The most popular person, by a significant margin, is General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistan Army's Chief of Staff. And while they are opposed to the US drone missile strikes, opposition falls dramatically if those attacks were to be carried out by the Pakistan Army instead.
For more information and a regional breakdown of the survey, check out the website.