After the interview with Stephanopoulos, Brennan, during a speech in Washington, further qualified his claims about the precision of drones. “Despite the extraordinary precautions we take, civilians have been accidentally killed,” he said. “It is exceedingly rare, but it has happened.” He added, “We take it very, very seriously. We go back and we review our actions.”

By mid-2012, Obama had ordered Brennan to reassess drone policy. The following spring, at the National Defense University, the President announced a new policy for American drone operations, which remains in effect. The full rulebook is highly classified. Yet Obama did make one new standard public. Before striking, drone operators must determine to a “near certainty” that no civilians are in harm’s way—a considerably tougher standard than the C.I.A.’s original one, which dates to the Bush Administration.

Ned Price, a National Security Council spokesman, while declining to discuss any C.I.A. operations, said that Obama’s “near certainty” standard was “the highest that we can set.” He added, “In those rare instances in which it appears noncombatants may have been killed or injured, after-action reviews have been conducted to determine why, and to insure that we are taking the most effective steps to minimize such risk to noncombatants in the future.”

In early 2013, Obama asked Brennan to lead the C.I.A. The President appointed as Brennan’s deputy Avril Haines, a National Security Council lawyer who had worked on drone-strike rules and operations. The number of drone strikes carried out in Pakistan fell. Since Brennan became C.I.A. director, according to the data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there has not been a single documented civilian casualty, child or adult, as a result of a drone strike in Waziristan.

Obama’s experience of drone war—including the criticism he has received from international lawyers and human-rights groups over civilian casualties—may have motivated him, last year, to tighten targeting oversight, albeit in secret and while evading accountability for errors made early in his Administration. Yet the President and his advisers don’t seem to accept how little credit the United States is ever likely to receive from targeted populations just because it chooses to bomb with more accurate drones. On the ground in North Waziristan, drone war doesn’t feel much different from other forms of air war, in that many civilians are displaced and frightened, and suffer loss of life and property.

Despite the drone campaign’s measurable successes—diminishing the influence of core Al Qaeda, the group around bin Laden that once planned international attacks from Waziristan, and of Al Qaeda in Yemen—the terrorist movement has assumed new shapes in Syria, North Africa, and elsewhere. Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are still beset by jihadist violence.

In a research paper published this summer, Micah Zenko and Sarah Kreps, two scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued that the very precision of drone technology raises the prospect for “moral hazard.” The reduction in risks may tempt governments to order drones into action more frequently than they would conventional bombers or missiles. In other words, drones may spare more innocents but they may also create more war.

“I think the greatest problem is the mentality that accompanies drone strikes,” Philip Alston, an N.Y.U. law professor who investigated drone attacks for the U.N. between 2004 and 2010, told me. “The identification of a list of targets, and if we can succeed in eliminating that list we will have achieved good things—that mentality is what drives it all: if only we can get enough of these bastards, we’ll win the war.”

One Sunday evening in Islamabad, as pre-monsoon storm clouds blew over the Margalla Hills, I crossed the city’s checkpoints to reach the French Club, an oasis notable for the imported liquor in its private bar. I accompanied Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a club member. During the Musharraf years, Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who was trained in London, investigated political corruption for the government. Later, he joined a private firm to serve corporate clients. Four years ago, inspired by an American human-rights lawyer he met in Pakistan, he decided to leave his law firm for the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, which he now leads. He spends his days working with investigators like Noor Behram to collect photographic evidence and sworn testimony about drone-targeting errors, and to advance lawsuits against the Pakistani government, the C.I.A., and sundry American officials.

Akbar is a portly man, partly bald, with a Vandyke beard. Like many members of the Pakistani élite, he is well versed in global media culture. We discussed “Homeland,” contenders for the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and European politics. Later, at his law office, we talked for hours about drones. What sets Akbar apart from Pakistan’s privileged class is his passionate advocacy for clients from a population that has virtually no influence or voice even within Pakistan, let alone in Washington: the residents of North and South Waziristan who do not wish to fight in a war.

“It’s an epic novel about a guy who’s trying to sell his car.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

“When I enter a party, people say, ‘It’s the Taliban’s lawyer,’ ” he told me. “There are lots of jokes. I’ve stopped saying what I do.” His friends argue vehemently, he continued, that while “it’s bad if there are a few civilian casualties” from drones, “there is more damage caused by Pakistani F-16s, and, anyway, if we don’t stop them they’ll take over and we’ll all have beards and our wives and daughters will be in burkas.”

When I asked how he answered that argument, he replied, “If we’re true liberals, we should also protect the rights of the Taliban.” (His foundation does not litigate on behalf of militants or their families.)

Akbar has trouble getting visas to travel to the United States. After he sued the C.I.A., he said, his car was stolen and his office was trashed—events that he assumed were not random. Obama Administration officials, speaking anonymously to the Times, once accused Akbar of fronting for I.S.I. in order to harass the C.I.A. He and his supporters in the West deny that. His foundation’s financial support has come mainly from the Bertha Foundation and Reprieve, the British human-rights group. After his lawsuits received widespread publicity in Pakistan, low-level I.S.I. officers visited him a couple of times; he told them that he was serving Pakistan’s interests, and they have left him alone.

For Pakistani human-rights advocates, the drone war in Waziristan poses a problem of lesser evils: which is worse, American bombing or Taliban revolution? Taliban suicide bombers have killed thousands of civilians in Pakistan’s cities, and the movement is loathed and feared. In June, the Pakistani Army launched a major assault on the Taliban in Waziristan. C.I.A. drones reportedly struck Uzbek militants during the operation. Over all, the Pakistani Army has fought the Taliban to a stalemate, but the group’s adherents have gained influence in areas of Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital, and can still launch successful attacks even in Islamabad. Many Pakistanis understand all too well that their government lacks the competence and the credibility to suppress the Taliban. Some among the élite, therefore, welcome—or, at least, accept—the C.I.A.’s drone strikes as a necessary, temporary compromise.

“From Day One, I’ve been saying, I’m not against drones,” Akbar said. “It’s just a machine. It’s more precise than jets. But it’s only as precise as your intelligence.” Collecting target information from the sky is difficult; so is gathering information from a semi-hostile partner on the ground, like I.S.I. Akbar wondered aloud if I.S.I., to discredit the United States in the eyes of Pakistanis and the world, might “sometimes give the C.I.A. false targeting information.” It would not be surprising.

For as long as the United States does not openly acknowledge targeting errors or pay compensation for victims, and for as long as the Pakistani government lies to the public about its complicity in drone killings, the images of dead civilians that Akbar’s investigators collect and publish will resonate. “This is not about taking the Taliban side or the American side,” Akbar said. He believes that the United States should hold itself to a higher standard than the Pakistani government. “Our work has been about the fact that there is no transparency or accountability in the U.S. drone program in Pakistan.” ♦