Whatever the legality of Osama bin Laden's apparent execution, he was certainly a murderer, probably a war criminal, and his demise flowed, albeit bloodily, from a carefully planned and targeted attack – the greatest care being taken to avoid the horror of innocent casualties.

President Obama himself, it is said, vetoed a bombing raid: the risk that innocents would die in full view of the watching world was too much to contemplate. Predator drones, launched by technicians in California, were too crude a weapon because hearts and minds, the president well understood, matter almost as much as bombs.

So it's a shame that these presidential scruples don't always translate to other areas of attack in that struggling part of the world. Western television viewers may not always be watching, but in Karachi and Lahore they are glued to their screens. In the four years between 2004 and 2007, there were just nine US drone strikes in north-west Pakistan, with around 25 deaths a year; in 2010, there were 118, with estimates of up to 1,000 people killed. But how many of these dead were innocent?

When President George W Bush announced his experimental policy of neoconservative kidnap in Guantánamo Bay, he reassured an anxious world that the 779 prisoners being held there – many seized from Pakistan's Afghan border areas – were the "worst of the worst" and deserved no legal rights. Nine years later, just over 600 of those men have been released, each one of them found to pose "no threat to the United States or to its coalition partners".

It seems that tossing a dime would be a better way of identifying a "high value terrorist" than relying on US military intelligence. Guantánamo proves the tragic inability of the US military to differentiate between an enemy and an incidental bystander, and if you live in north west Pakistan, that matters very much. History reflects an unfortunate precedent: when he was asked, during the Albigensian crusade in the 13th century, how to distinguish Cathar heretics from ordinary, decent believers, the pope's emissary is said to have replied: "Kill them all. God will know his own."

Leaving omniscience tactfully to one side, we can all understand the US point of view, that drone attacks reduce the human cost of military action to the nation that sends them humming out over the horizon and into other people's houses. Americans may care little for the expense of their technology; but they do, reasonably enough, care a great deal about the deaths of their servicemen. Naturally, this means that Washington is more likely to take violent action where no American lives are at stake.

So while no sane person would wish any harm on American soldiers, an obvious danger of drone warfare is that it encourages reckless military activity, risking a high likelihood of innocent civilian death – with the hapless victims, including the very young, remaining faceless with no meaning at all to the military planners pressing their buttons several thousand miles away.

Yet, these victims, young and old, have great significance in Pakistan, and their collateral destruction will surely have unintended consequences, coming back to haunt us soon enough.

It may be quite true, as the research suggests, that as many as 33 important militant leaders have been killed by American drones over the past seven years, and the value of this is not to be lightly dismissed. But it is equally true that the same research shows what we might have already guessed: several hundred innocent people of all ages have also died most violently in their wake.

Yet hypocrisy is a dangerous quality, particularly in a superpower. So in the shadow of Bin Laden's death, the question for the west may be whether it is time at last for a different kind of campaign: one based less upon the skilful delivery of random and sudden death, and a little more focused on the democratic values on which we lecture our enemies.

Otherwise, it seems safe to assume that these horribly unjust killings, limb blasted from damaged limb, and delivered so pitilessly, will set off a rancid hatred, lasting for long, bitter generations. Once again, a strategy designed to make us all safer seems likely to risk, in the long run, a tragically contrary effect.