The CIA can kill militants all day long. If the drone war in Pakistan drives the local people into al Qaeda's arms, it'll be failure. A new poll of the Pakistani tribal areas, released this morning, suggests that could easily wind up happening. Chalk one up for drone skeptics like counterinsurgent emeritus David Kilcullen and ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden.

Only 16 percent of respondents to a new poll sponsored by the drone-watchers at the New America Foundation say that the drone strikes "accurately target militants." Three times that number say they "largely kill civilians."

CIA director Leon Panetta, by contrast, has staunchly defended the drone program as meticulously targeting terrorists. In a war that depends heavily on perceptions, it's a big discrepancy.

There's more bad news for Panetta and his boss in the White House. A plurality of respondents in the tribal areas say that the U.S. is primarily responsible for violence in the region. Nearly 90 percent want the U.S. to stop pursuing militants in their backyard and nearly 60 percent are fine with suicide bombings directed at the Americans. That comes as NATO accelerates incursions into Pakistan. Just this morning, it announced that a pursuit of insurgents in Afghanistan's Paktiya Province led to a U.S. helicopter shooting at the militants from Pakistani airspace. Enraged Pakistani officials responded by shutting down a critical NATO supply line into Afghanistan.

Whatever NATO says, very few in the tribal regions are inclined to believe the U.S. is in Afghanistan and occasionally in Pakistan to fight terrorism. They think the U.S. is waging "larger war on Islam or... an effort to secure oil and minerals in the region."

On the brighter side, wide majorities in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas disapprove of al Qaeda (over three-quarters), the Pakistani Taliban (over two-thirds) and the Afghan Taliban (60 percent). There's also strong support for the Pakistani army: almost 70 percent want the army to directly confront al Qaeda and the Taliban in the region; 79 percent say they wouldn't mind if the tribal area were run by the army.

Now for the qualifiers. Polling in the conflict-heavy tribal areas is a dicey proposition. A survey last year of the tribal areas published in the Daily Times found that almost two-thirds of respondents wanted the U.S. drone campaign to continue. So either support for the drones has bottomed out or there's significant methodological discrepancies. The Pakistani firm that actually conducted the new poll of 1000 respondents across 120 FATA villages, the Community Appraisal and Motivation Programme, has polled the area for years.

Not everyone is convinced. During a trip to Pakistan this summer, Georgetown University's Christine Fair, an influential defender of the drones, heard a lot of support for the drone strikes among her hosts. (Though one imagines that those willing to host Americans would probably be favorably inclined to the drones.) From her perspective, the opposition to what she's termed the "most successful tool that the United States and Pakistan have" against militants is based on a "disinformation campaign" spread by terrorist sympathizers in the Pakistani intelligence services.

Fair says she's unsurprised by New America's poll. "The biggest problem is that they fail to control for the proximity to the drone strikes," she tells Danger Room. "That is, the farther from the actual point of impact [of the drones] the distrust and ignorance of the program expands, due to the prevailing propaganda." The upshot from the poll, in Fair's view, is to "impress upon [Pakistani intelligence] that the disinformation campaign needs to stop," not to stop the drones.

Indeed, stopping the drones is a remote possibility. As (possibly dubious) fears of a FATA-based plot to attack European cities expand within the intelligence community, September alone has seen 20+ unmanned attacks, making it the most drone-intense month of the war thus far. Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's Wars, revealed a behind-the-scenes decision late last year by the Obama administration to intensify aerial and even ground assaults on the extremist safe havens in Pakistan. It'll take more than local outrage over the drones to get an administration fearing domestic terror attacks to place them back in their hangars.

Update, 2:40 p.m. Kenneth Ballen of Terror Free Tomorrow, one of New America's partners on the poll, emails to explain the methodological difference between today's poll and the 2009 survey. " Our poll of FATA was a methodologically valid random sampling of opinion. Informal and anecdotal interviews of residents, while important, do not have the same statistical validity," he says.

Photo: USAF

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