Drone Death Tolls & Double Standards

Speaking before Congress, David Kilcullen said that U.S. Predator drone strikes in Pakistan had killed 14 al Qaeda leaders and 700 Pakistani civilians. "The drone strikes are highly unpopular," he said. "They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they've given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism. ... The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population."

This led Commentary's Noah Pollack to observe:

...imagine that Israel had been conducting a Predator drone war over the past few years that had killed 14 Hezbollah leaders and 700 Lebanese civilians. Is there any chance that this would not be a constant source of global hysteria?

And so, as far as the U.S.’s drone war is concerned, I have a few questions: Where are the shrill denunciations of disproportionate force and extrajudicial killings? Where are the UN investigations? Where are the condemnations from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN Human Rights Council? Where are the front-page New York Times exposes of American war crimes? Where are the indictments of U.S. officials by European judges? Why hasn’t Pat Buchanan compared the United States to the Nazis?...Why isn’t anybody detailing the outrageously disproportionate force the Army is employing against a group of rural tribesmen armed only with RPG’s and rifles?

That seems like a fair point to me.

Of course, it doesn't answer the central question: is the U.S. doing more damage to itself and the Pakistani government by killing this many civilians to reach al Qaeda leaders or not?