THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

If we are to believe a man whose entire career has revolved around not telling the truth to those who don't need to know, drones are the greatest thing since sliced bread and will insure the American Empire endures around the globe on the cheap.

TARGETED killing using drones has become part of the American way of war. To do it legally and effectively requires detailed and accurate intelligence. It also requires some excruciatingly difficult decisions. The dialogue above, representative of many such missions, shows how hard the commanders and analysts work to get it right.

The longer they have gone on, however, the more controversial drone strikes have become. Critics assert that a high percentage of the people killed in drone strikes are civilians — a claim totally at odds with the intelligence I have reviewed — and that the strikes have turned the Muslim world against the United States, fueling terrorist recruitment. Political elites have joined in, complaining that intelligence agencies have gone too far — until they have felt in danger, when they have complained that the agencies did not go far enough.

The program is not perfect. No military program is. But here is the bottom line: It works. I think it fair to say that the targeted killing program has been the most precise and effective application of firepower in the history of armed conflict. It disrupted terrorist plots and reduced the original Qaeda organization along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to a shell of its former self. And that was well before Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011.

Not many years before, the targeted killings were fairly limited. But by 2008, we knew that the terrorist threat had increased to intolerable levels, both to American forces in South Asia and to the United States itself. From our surveillance platforms, we could observe training camps where men leapt off motorbikes and fired on simulated targets. Early that year, the C.I.A. and I began recommending more aggressive action.

We were confident that the intelligence was good enough to sustain a campaign of very precise attacks. To be sure, it was not, is not, always error-free. In late 2006, for instance, a strike killed a one-legged man we believed was a chieftain in the Haqqani network, a violent and highly effective group allied with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It turned out that the man was indeed affiliated with the Haqqanis, but he wasn’t the leader we wanted. With all the land mines in the region, there were many one-legged terrorists in South Asia.

I demanded a full explanation for the misidentification. There were no excuses. People were thoroughly, maybe even excessively, contrite.

And the one legged man was still dead. Hayden chose an example that ernestly implies that we would have gotten him later anyway. And the ones who did not deserve to be struck down from above but were anyway? Well, we are only human and must live with our imperfections. When we make mistakes, we save them from that burden, don't we?