War

New report claims that 98 percent of the people killed by US drone strikes are low level militants and civilians. That tells us nothing. If you are waging war, killing low-level opposition is a good thing. Killing civilians is bad. You have to distinguish between them, not lump them into one statistic. Granted, the story does refute the US government claim that drone attacks pretty much always kill al Qaeda leaders, but for it to be effective, any criticism must differentiate between militants, regardless of level, and civilians.

"They argue that the strikes have done more harm than good, in fact, by so alienating the local population that drones have "facilitated recruitment to violent non-state armed groups, and motivated further violent attacks."
As GlobalPost has discussed in a special series, The Drone Age, US forces favor drones because they reduce and even eliminate danger to American personnel, while supposedly allowing them to target enemies with "surgical precision."
However, the technology isn't flawless. "Human operators peering at grainy video shot by high-flying [unmanned aerial vehicles] have repeatedly mistaken civilians for militants," writes GlobalPost's David Axe. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that as many as 884 Pakistani civilians were killed by US drones between 2004 and 2012.
Aside from death and injury, the report lists several other ways in which strikes can harm civilians — for example, by damaging property, causing economic hardship, creating sustained fear and stress, and interrupting education when children are taken out of school for fear of being caught in a drone attack.
"[D]rone attacks create widespread devastation," one interviewee told the researchers. "They have killed so many young men, who have left behind helpless young orphans. We cannot figure out when a drone will strike — they may strike in two days, three days, ten days, or a month — but they are always there.""

We just need to end this war.