Drone Attacks in Pakistan have a 2.5% strike rate against Al-Qaeda
The Pakistan Body Count, a website run and managed by Zeeshan Usmani, a professor at Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute has documented over 124 drone attacks since 2004 and as per the last documented attack on May 11th 2010 in Miranshah shows that only 30 Al-Qaeda operatives have perished in the last six years but more significantly 1266 civilians were killed and over 445 civilians were left injured to run a tally of 2.5% as the strike rate against the Al-Qaeda operatives.
A strike rate of 2.5% is a failure by any measure, its not a statistical probability, or the result of a mathematical equation analysis but actually 97.5% innocent people have lost their lives in lieu of a high flying sophisticated drone targeting an Al-Qaeda terrorist, and by coincidence they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to have been killed instead. I believe such targeting success rate can at best be adjudicated to handing a blind man an automatic machine gun hoping to get lucky in killing people around him, even then I predict he will have a higher strike rate than these remote controlled drones.
The heavy cost of the ongoing American War on Terror in Pakistan has continued to pay its dividends, it has significantly contributed in helping Pakistan stand on the verge of an economic melt down, while sadly the political leadership remains oblivious to the disasters brewing around them, kept at bay with the lucrative smell of crisp dollar bills that funnel their way from Washington to Islamabad in lieu of their silence and their deliberate ignorance. Zeeshan Usmani a Fulbright scholar who studied at Florida Tech did his doctoral research was to develop a computer model which would accurately simulate how suicide bombs explode, surprisingly the study was so accurate that it beat previous prediction models by a long margin, for example Usmani estimates that fatalities can be cut by 12 percent if crowds are in vertical rows rather than circular or random formations. His insights into the protective measures on how to protect against such explosions put many security installations to shame.
Quite naturally such a researcher is natural to documenting the suicide bombers and drone attacks that have besieged our country. What so ever be the logic by the American and the Pakistani government to continue this failing offensive against the terrorists, the facts over three years calculated by Dr. Zeeshan seem to indicate that this offensive is not working and is killing more innocent civilians then being a strategic attempt to target Talibans.
The results are shocking and definitely worth renewing a string of serious political dialogue on the need for such collateral damage where hundreds of Pakistanis loose their lives in lieu of killing a bare handful of Al-Qaeda / Taliban terrorists. I have continued to lobby against an all out war and still to-date believe that a genuine peace attempt be made to solve this crisis. modern warfare simply cant be that blind, unless its deliberately meant to target everyone else except the intended terrorists !!!
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