Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander of Western forces in Afghanistan, apologized Wednesday for the accidental deaths of nine civilians, identified by Afghan officials as children killed as they gathered firewood in a mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan. A 10th child was injured in the bombardment, Afghan officials said.

A Mehsud spokesman told the BBC that 43 people, including five militants, had been killed in the missile strikes. He said that many more had been injured, some seriously.
Maulana Noor Seyeed said no senior Taliban members had been killed.
One unnamed intelligence official quoted by the Reuters news agency said that Tuesday's attack happened when people were leaving the funeral of the militant commander.
"Three missiles were fired by drones as people were dispersing after offering funeral prayers for Niazi Wali," the official said, referring to a militant commander killed in an earlier drone attack.

It may well be that whoever was piloting the drones thousands of miles away, sitting at a computer screen somewhere in America, did have reliable intelligence that the men in the car were terrorists. It is probable, say Pakistani security sources, that a GPS chip had been secreted inside the vehicle by an agent working for the Americans in order to track it more accurately.
But after the car's destruction, and before the tribesmen could take cover, the drones came back and started firing indiscriminately at them. 'Four missiles were fired on the jirga members, who included people from all ages,' a tribesman, Samiullah Khan, told a local Pathan journalist. 'The next moment there was nothing except the bodies of the slain and injured all around.' According to Samiullah Khan, the victims' families had to be satisfied with burying disconnected 'pieces of flesh'. In all, 41 died immediately, and a further seven over the following week.

When the Obama administration took office in January 2009, drone strikes increased again, with the total number of deaths reported as between 368 and 724. In 2010, this almost doubled again, with the estimated total rising to between 607 and 993.
How many of them were really terrorists? The New America Foundation, basing its conclusions on contemporary media reports, suggests the total killed since 2004 is between 1,435 and 2,283. Around two-thirds were Taliban or Al Qaeda, it says, with a 'true civilian fatality rate' of 32 per cent. That is worrying enough: those figures imply that up to 730 innocents have been killed. However, most of those media reports derived their information from claims made by US spokesmen at the time. Some Pakistanis believe the real total of dead non-combatants may be significantly higher.

'The CIA has set up its own networks,' said Shahzad Akbar, a leading Pakistani lawyer who is preparing a class-action law suit by drone victims' families against US defence secretary Robert Gates, former CIA Islamabad chief Jonathan Banks and CIA director Leon Panetta. 'But how reliable are they? They are paying individuals who now have an incentive to say, so-and-so Khan is a very bad man. But how do they really know he is?'

Akbar compared the situation to the months after 9/11, when hundreds of prisoners who were later released without charge were consigned to Guantanamo Bay for years on the basis of denunciations by people who were able to claim a $5,000 bounty by accusing them, and were often merely settling scores: the Pathan regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, he recalled, are rife with tribal vendettas.

KABUL, Afghanistan — American and NATO troops firing from passing convoys and military checkpoints have killed 30 Afghans and wounded 80 others since last summer, but in no instance did the victims prove to be a danger to troops, according to military officials in Kabul.

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year. His comments came during a recent videoconference to answer questions from troops in the field about civilian casualties.