A couple weeks ago, Jeremy Scahill and I were appalled to hear Christine Fair — who’s both a worthwhile South Asia scholar and a human being who shares, exactly, my sense of humor — say on TV that the drone strikes in Pakistan don’t kill civilians. Just a few days later, I looked up from Hamid Karzai’s USIP appearance with Secretary Clinton and found myself seated next to her. So we talked for awhile about her MSNBC claim, and she didn’t back off — I think she allowed that it was overbroad to say no civilians have died — and instead contended that there’s research to bear her out. Fair kept circling back to how the media typically conflates the more-bloody drone strikes by the military in Afghanistan with the more-precise ones by the CIA in Pakistan. I kept circling back to how the basis for any claim of exclusively-militant casualties is based on the dubious premise that the media that initially reports the casualties — which is the only available data pool — are able to precisely distinguish “militant” from “civilian.”

So today I got ahold of a new study that backs Fair. (And Obama, and Panetta, and Brennan.) Brian Glyn Williams of the University of Massachusetts finds that the drones in Pakistan have a 3.53 percent civilian-casualty rate. That’s 44 civilians killed out of 1,247 people killed by the drones in Pakistan since the program’s 2004 inception. Read the whole post for the methodology. Williams concedes that no matter what, you’ve got the problem of the source data presuming an accurate distinction between “militant” and “civilian.” From my perspective, I respect the attempts at rigor here, but that basic problem appears insurmountable.

What we’re left with is a policy choice:

Accordingly, Bergen now pegs the civilian death rate from the drone strikes at 20 percent. Williams pegs it at 3.53 percent. What no one knows, however, is how many outraged Pakistanis take up arms against the U.S. or its allies as a result. There are media reports suggesting that Faisal Shahzad, the naturalized U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin accused of attempting to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, claimed to investigators that his attempted terrorist act was vengeance for civilians killed by the drones. Leaving aside the question of the legality of the drones — which the State Department’s legal adviser claims to result from a September 2001 act of Congress that doesn’t mention the program — only policymakers can determine if the benefits of the drones outweigh the risks of blowback.