I know we're talking about drone strikes, but we should always and forever note that the civilian casualties from the US' war on terror far outweighs [0] those who died from terrorism. Not to mention the US troops who died to make Iraqi oil available to US businesses, or who continue to die by suicide and social deaths related to their experiences in the war [1].
Ya, I wouldn't defend the broader war. I think Afghanistan was reasonable and necessary but probably should have been more surgical, and Iraq was basically indefensible. However, conditional on being committed to fighting the wars, I think drone strikes are an excellent tactical choice.
And now think about other countries conducting drone strikes on US soil as they see fit.
It would be only fair, right?
And what level of collateral damage would be acceptable in that scenario?
2000-3000 would be OK?
Maybe 10000-20000 since those other countries can't afford precision munitions and global surveillance network.
It's easy to justify any number of collateral damage when it's not you and yours that is the collateral damage.
And if you exclude the black swan event of 9/11 which the US was unprepared for, the numbers get a lot smaller, e.g.:
"According to the GTD, 80 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks from 2004 to 2013, including perpetrators and excluding deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, the majority of which are combat-related. Of those 80 Americans killed, 36 were killed in attacks that occurred in the United States."
Why would we exclude the largest terrorist attack in American history, the thing that the interventions in question were explicitly designed to prevent a recurrence of?
And anyway, if you want to get into that question, then we'd have to start including the civilian deaths caused by ISIS, and that's going to make the balance even more favorable to drone strikes. There's no reason to limit the analysis to Americans, either. Dismantling Al Qaeda, ISIS and other terrorist networks contributed to the reduction in terrorist violence against many groups, not just Americans. Probably not even primarily Americans.
Not to mention the rather obvious fact that the interventions in question were designed to reduce terrorism, and so their efficacy can only be truly benchmarked against the counterfactual world in which they were not implemented. However, conveniently, the balance is still overwhelmingly favorable even in the actual world that we happen to inhabit.
From your first link: The "estimates of civilian casualties are hampered methodologically and practically";[5] civilian casualty estimates "are largely compiled by interpreting news reports relying on anonymous officials or accounts from local media, whose credibility may vary."
So let's not speak with too much certainty. Drone operators have harrowing stories of false positives that were never reported as such. A false positive is a strike on civilians.
Sure, there's plenty of uncertainty. But there are also far more casualties of 9/11 than the immediate ones. Tons of people got cancer and died, or were seriously disabled, etc. Drone strikes had some similar collateral damage too, I imagine, but certainly not on the scale of 9/11.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks