Nearly half of Air Force drone pilots reported high stress levels in a new survey. The stress, linked to long and erratic work hours and a dramatic increase in the use of drones, leads to “high operational stress” for Reaper, Predator and Global Hawk drone pilots. A smaller number — including approximately a quarter of Global Hawk operators — exhibited signs of “clinical stress,” defined as anxiety, depression or stress severe enough to affect an operator’s family life or job performance.

Drone operators fly missions over Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Pakistan and Iraq from bases in Nevada and California. The study — conducted by the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio — found that frequent shift-changes, “mind numbing” monotony, and increasing workloads contributed to the heightened stress levels. Between 65 and 70 percent of drone operators with symptoms of mental illness were not seeking treatment.

The dramatic growth in the use of drones in recent years has led the Air Force to increase the number of drone pilots but the ratio of pilots to drones remains low. The Pentagon has about 7,000 aerial drones and about 1,100 drone pilots. “There’s just not enough people,” Wayne Chappelle, an Air Force psychologist who helped conduct a six-month study of drone operators from 2010 to 2011, told USA Today. “You have to constantly sustain a high level of vigilance, both visual and auditory information, and that would be really tough to do when there’s a lot of monotony.”

While Lt. Gen. Larry James, Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, told USA Today that he didn’t think instances of pilot error could attributed to high stress levels among drone operators, instances of pilot error and civilian deaths have increased as drone mission over Afghanistan and Pakistan increase.

In April, a Predator done killed a Marine and a medic in what appeared to be the first case of “friendly fire” from a drone. And in late October, the drone program drew more negative publicity after 16-year-old Tariq Aziz and his cousin were killed in a drone strike one day after attending a “Waziristan Grand Jirga,” an official meeting, to discuss the impact of drone strikes on communities in Pakistan.

Our guest blogger is Colin Cookman, research associate for national security at the Center for American Progress.

Last night’s passage of the Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA) in the House will bring with it new conditions on how the U.S. provides assistance to Pakistan through the two primary Pakistan-specific military aid accounts. With U.S.-Pakistan relations still in crisis from a November 26 cross-border raid which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, these changes have drawn fresh critiques from the Pakistani foreign office. But while congressional patience with Pakistan is clearly wearing thin and mutual distrust between the two countries is rising, the conditions in the Defense Authorization bill are actually rather muted.

The authorization won’t actually release the money for the fiscal year, which technically started in October — that comes through appropriations, which have yet to pass as the House and Senate engage in a fight over an omnibus spending package. That bill is likely to introduce new certification requirements as well, but without the final conference text it is unclear at this point how Congress will come down in terms of exact restrictions. For now, the new Defense Authorization bill would make the following changes to the two main Pakistan-specific aid accounts controlled by the Department of Defense — the Coalition Support Fund (CSF) and the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Fund (PCF):

• Coalition Support Funds — The bill renews the CSF program for another year and increases its annual budget slightly to $1.69 billion; the administration had requested $1.75 billion. As a reimbursement program, CSF depends on Pakistani claims to determine how much is actually paid out. In recent years the U.S. has been more stringent in how it scrutinizes those claims. There are no conditions on CSF spending, but the bill does require a report from the Pentagon to Congress on how CSF money is being used and an assessment of its effectiveness.

• Pakistan Counterinsurgency Fund — The bill renews the PCF but for the first time places limits on its disbursement. Sixty percent of the funds appropriated (which would be approximately $660 million if the administration’s $1.1 billion request for PCF is met by Congressional appropriators, not $700 million as some accounts have reported) are frozen until the Defense Department submits a report to Congress outlining what Pakistan’s counterinsurgency capability needs actually are and how the fund will be used, among other issues. The report must also include “a discussion” of Pakistani cooperation in counter-IED efforts; fertilizer from Pakistan is reportedly a component in many Afghan bombs. The remaining 40 percent of PCF money (approximately $400 million) is free to be spent in the meantime. Beyond the submission of the report there are no further restrictions on its use.

When this money is appropriated, it’s an open question how much the U.S. will actually be able to spend, even discounting these constraints. The freezing of $800 million in combined CSF and PCF funds earlier this summer was forced to a considerable degree by the Pakistani ejection of almost all U.S. trainers from the country in the wake of the Raymond Davis episode at the beginning of the year. It will be a challenge to actually spend even $400 million over the year without any actual trainers in Pakistan to spend it on, so the practical effect of the new Congressional restrictions (should the administration choose to trigger them by withholding reports or certification) may be limited.

During the Senate defense programs and policy amendment debate, in which Senators vote on amendments to the annual Defense Department budget, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) spoke up against a bi-partisan amendment designed to expedite the troop drawdown from the U.S.-led Afghanistan war. The drawdown the president announced this year will still leave around 60,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of the year. But even maintaining that level of troops isn’t good enough for McCain.

The most curious thing about McCain’s argument, though, is that the anecdote he delivered in support of it didn’t bolster the case for, as he claimed to put it, maintaining U.S. troops through the “fighting season,” the warmer months when there tends to be more fighting. But rather, McCain made the case for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan for a very, very long time.

McCain relied on the usual conservative trope that Obama should have deferred to the generals on his withdrawal decision — despite the chain of command (which the generals themselves understand well) and McCain’s own selective reliance on the brass’ word. But he had a twist: He posited that the end of the war would come when the Taliban insurgency acquiesced to the terms of a peace deal. This, his story suggested, would never happen if the U.S. leaves.

Here’s McCain’s story about an unnamed former George W. Bush administration official:

A story was related to me just recently. Former member of the previous administration, high ranking, in a meeting with one of the highest ranking members of the government of Pakistan. He said, to this high-ranking government official, “What do you think the chances of peace with the Taliban are?” That individual just laughed and said, “Why should they make peace? You are leaving.” Those are fundamental facts.

Watch the video of McCain on the floor of the Senate here:

But McCain’s anecdote isn’t about staying through this “fighting season,” as he claims commanders on the ground advocated for, with the Obama administration setting the partial drawdown timeline for a few months earlier. Rather, McCain’s statement that the Taliban won’t make peace because the U.S. is leaving applies just as much to the middle of the “fighting season” as it does the end of the “fighting season.” Instead, McCain’s anecdote seems to call for a heavy, long-term military presence, perhaps an interminable one. After all, according to McCain’s story, no peace deal can be made to end the Afghanistan war if the U.S. leaves. Perhaps that’s why, over McCain’s objections, the amendment to expedite the Afghanistan withdrawal passed the Senate.

Indeed, like in Afghanistan, if McCain had his way in Iraq, American troops would be there for at least 97 more years, instead of coming home by the end of this month.

Last night during the GOP presidential national security debate, debate moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who is on the House Intelligence Committee, if she agrees with Gov. Rick Perry’s that Pakistan should no longer receive American aid. “I would continue that aid,” the Minnesota congresswoman said, but in setting up her answer, she revealed that terrorists have attempted to compromise Pakistan’s nuclear sites. She repeated the claim this morning on Fox News, citing a story in the Atlantic, and said that the incident means that nuclear weapons can make their way “into the hands of terrorists and make their way to the United States.” Watch it:

CNN fact checks Bachmann’s claim. While their report doesn’t confirm whether the sites were nuclear facilities, CNN says her assertion is “misleading” because the attacks “do not appear to have been attempts to seize the country’s nuclear weapons.”

While the Atlantic reported recently that the six facilities Bachmann is presumably referring to are “widely believed to be associated with Pakistan’s nuclear program,” the National Journal’s Yochi Dreazen notes: “U.S. intelligence and military officials believe that Pakistan has 15 nuclear sites, but no U.S. official has publicly said that all of the sites were vulnerable to militant attack or confirmed that any of them had previously come under any form of jihadist attack.”

GOP presidential primary frontrunner Mitt Romney told the audience at Saturday’s CBS News/National Journal debate that Pakistan is “comfortable” with U.S. drone strikes within their borders. But after years of deadly drone strikes, and as many as 10 civilian deaths for every militant killed, polling data from Pakistan would suggest that Pakistanis are anything but “comfortable” with U.S. drone strikes.

Romney made the assertion in the following exchange with debate moderator Scott Pelley:

ROMNEY: Right now they’re comfortable with our using drones to go after the people who are representing the greatest threat. I would continue to do that.

PELLEY: Are the Pakistanis ‘comfortable’ with us using drones?

ROMNEY: We have agreement with the people we need to have agreement with to be able to use drones to strike at the people that represent a threat.

Watch it:

A Pew poll (PDF) from July, 2010, found that 93 percent of Pakistanis who are familiar with drone strikes think they are a bad idea, and 56 percent of Pakistanis who have heard of drone attacks say they are unnecessary to defend against extremist groups. Ninety percent thought the strikes kill too many innocent people.

Last week, Pratap Chatterjee at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, reported on the death of Tariq Aziz, a 16-year-old Pakistani who attended a “Waziristan Grand Jirga,” an official meeting, to discuss the impact of drone strikes on local communities. Three days later, Aziz and his cousin were killed in a drone strike.

Opposition to drone strikes has become a popular political position in Pakistan. Last month, cricket legend Imran Khan held a rally with more than 100,000 supporters in which the opposition politician spoke out against U.S. drone strikes, telling the crowd:

Our leaders owned this war on terror for the sake of dollars. Let me curse you. You sold out the blood of innocent people.

Indeed, Romney is correct the U.S. has an “agreement with the people we need to have an agreement” in order to conduct drone strikes. But polling and popular politics in Pakistan would indicate that the Pakistani public is far from “comfortable” with the growing civilian death-toll from the CIA’s drone program.

On Oct. 27, a 16-year-old Pakistani named Tariq Aziz traveled to Islamabad from his home in North Waziristan to attend a “Waziristan Grand Jirga,” an official meeting the following day to discuss the impact of drone strikes on local communities in Pakistan. According to Pratap Chatterjee at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Aziz “had come after he received a phone call from a lawyer in Islamabad offering him an opportunity to learn basic photography to help document these strikes.” Three days later, Aziz and his cousin were killed, Chatterjee reports:

The next day, Tariq and the other Waziris returned to their homes, eight hours drive away.

On Monday, October 31, Tariq took his cousin Waheed Khan to pick up his newly wed aunt, to take her back to Norak. When the two boys were just 200 yards from the house, two missiles slammed into their car, killing them both instantly.

‘I don’t see the logic and reasoning in killing two young boys,’ [Human rights lawyer] Shahzad Akbar told the Bureau. ‘We wanted to work with the youth, to include them in the search for accountability.’

Akbar is suing the CIA for killing innocent civilians through drone attacks in Pakistan. And Tariq’s father is reportedly in discussions to join the lawsuit. Akbar wondered why the CIA didn’t apprehend Tariq while he was in Islamabad. “If they were terrorists, why weren’t they arrested in Islamabad, interrogated, charged or tried?” he asked. Writing for the Guardian today, Chatterjee, who photographed and videotaped Tariq Aziz at the meeting in Islamabad, had a similar question:

The question I would pose to the jury is this: would a terrorist suspect come to a public meeting and converse openly with foreign lawyers and reporters, and allow himself to be photographed and interviewed? More importantly, since he was so easily available, why could Tariq not have been detained in Islamabad, when we spent 48 hours together? Neither Tariq Aziz nor the lawyers attending this meeting had a highly trained private security detail that could have put up resistance.

The CIA’s drone campaign has expanded significantly during the Obama administration. U.S. government officials say 1,500 suspected militants have been killed since President Obama took office while the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has examined every recorded drone attack in Pakistan and said at least 175 civilians have been killed.

The CIA “has had freedom to decide who to target and when to strike” and the White House is usually notified after the fact. However the Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Agency has tightened rules after State Department officials and military leaders “demanded more-selective strikes.” “The bar has been raised. Inside CIA, there is a recognition you need to be damn sure it’s worth it,” a senior official said.