That means somewhere between 8 percent and 47 percent of Pakistan drone strike victims were probably civilians. Work out the civilian deaths per drone strike ratio for the last eight years, and on average, each drone strike seems to have killed between 0.8 and 2.5 civilians.
These are gruesome calculations: behind the numbers, regardless of which data set is right, lie the mangled bodies of human beings. But whether drones strikes cause "a lot" or "only a few" civilian casualties depends what we regard as the right point of comparison. A study by the International Committee for the Red Cross found that on average, 10 civilians died for every combatant killed during the armed conflicts of the 20th century. For the Iraq War, estimates vary widely; different studies place the ratio of civilian deaths to combatant deaths anywhere between 10 to 1 and 2 to 1.
Compared to the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, drone strikes look pretty good. Compared to world peace, not so much.
The most meaningful point of comparison is probably manned aircraft. It's difficult to get solid numbers here, but one analysis published in the Small Wars Journal suggested that in 2007 the ratio of civilian deaths due to coalition air attacks in Afghanistan may have been as high as 15 to 1. More recent UN figures suggest a far lower rate, with as few as one civilian killed for every ten airstrikes in Afghanistan.
But drone strikes have also gotten far less lethal for civilians in the last few years: the New America Foundation concludes that only three to nine civilians were killed during 72 U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan in 2011, and the 2012 number -- so far -- is zero civilians killed in 36 strikes. In part, this is due to technological advances over the last decade, but it's also due to far more stringent rules for when drones can release weapons.
2. Drones strikes are bad because killing at a distance is unsavory.
Really? If killing from a safe distance (say, Creech Air Force Base in Nevada) is somehow "wrong," what should be our preferred alternative -- stripping troops of body armor, or taking away their guns and requiring them to engage in hand-to-hand combat? If drone strikes enable us to kill enemies without exposing our own personnel, this is presumably a good thing, not a bad thing. Maybe we shouldn't kill anyone, or maybe we're killing the wrong people -- but these are assertions about ethics, intelligence and strategy, not about drones.
Drones don't present any "new" issues not already presented by aerial bombing -- or by any previous historical method of killing from a distance. In the early 1600s, Cervantes called artillery a "devilish invention" allowing "a base cowardly hand to take the life of the bravest gentleman," with bullets "coming nobody knows how or from whence." (Much like drones.)
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