The CIA’s assassination of Baitullah Mehsud now appears to be a Pyrrhic victory. According to the New Yorker, 200-300 bystanders also died while the CIA took 16 shots to finally off the alleged Benazir assassin:

… the recent campaign to kill Baitullah Mehsud offers a sobering case study of the hazards of robotic warfare. It appears to have taken sixteen missile strikes, and fourteen months, before the C.I.A. succeeded in killing him. During this hunt, between two hundred and seven and three hundred and twenty-one additional people were killed… [NewYorker]

That is an unbelievable statistic: less than half a percent accuracy. It’s the equivalent of dropping a daisy cutter on a crowded market to get one target. Many of those killed were no doubt Mehsud henchmen, but it’s not clear how many. The bystander killings will likely inspire acts of revenge. Mehsud was exactly the kind of high-value target which begged for a more targeted ground operation.

Then there’s the inevitable mission creep. Like Afghan warlords, the Pakistani military feeds the U.S. bad tips to eliminate political enemies:

… the U.S. government keeps broadening the definition of acceptable high-value targets. Last March, the Obama Administration made an unannounced decision to win support for the drone program inside Pakistan by giving President Asif Ali Zardari more control over whom to target. “A lot of the targets are nominated by the Pakistanis–it’s part of the bargain of getting Pakistani coöperation.”

… only six of the forty-one C.I.A. drone strikes conducted by the Obama Administration in Pakistan have targeted Al Qaeda members… the Pentagon’s roster of approved terrorist targets, containing three hundred and sixty-seven names–was recently expanded to include some fifty Afghan drug lords who are suspected of giving money to help finance the Taliban. [NewYorker]

Extremely troubling.

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