Very important article about the drone war in Pakistan. U.N. says it may be illegal. JK supports it

[beachmom]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/10/29/bergen.drone.war/index.html

Pakistan drone war takes a toll on militants -- and civilians

Washington (CNN) -- The Obama administration has dramatically ratcheted up the American drone warfare program in Pakistan. Since President Obama took office, U.S. drone strikes have killed about a half-dozen militant leaders along with hundreds of other people, a quarter of whom were civilians.

As a result of the unprecedented 42 strikes by drone aircraft into Pakistan authorized by the Obama administration, aimed at Taliban and al Qaeda networks based there, about a half-dozen leaders of militant organizations have been killed.

The dead include two heads of Uzbek terrorist groups allied with al Qaeda and Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, in addition to hundreds of lower-level militants and civilians, according to our analysis.

The number of civilian deaths caused by the drones is an important issue, because in the charged political atmosphere of today's Pakistan, where anti-Americanism is rampant, the drone program is a particular cause of anger among those who see it as an infringement on Pakistan's sovereignty. A Gallup poll in August found that only 9 percent of Pakistanis favored the strikes, and two-thirds opposed them.

And, according to Philip Alston, a U.N. human rights investigator, the use of drones to carry out targeted assassinations that end up killing civilians may well violate international law.

Read the whole article, which tries to analyze what the rate is of how many militants were killed and how many civilians. Peter Bergen, the writer, used press accounts to come up with the following conclusion:

Since 2006, our analysis indicates, 82 U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan have killed between 760 and 1,000 people. Among them were about 20 leaders of al Qaeda, the Taliban and allied groups, all of whom have been killed since January 2008.

...

However, of those killed in drone attacks from 2006 through mid-October 2009, approximately 500 to 720 were described in reliable press reports as militants, or roughly two-thirds of the total killed.

Based on our count of the estimated number of militants killed, the real total of civilian deaths since 2006 appears to be in the range of 260 to 320, or one-third of those killed.

One of the terrorists the drones got was the planner of the assassination of Bhutto. Read the whole article. Very interesting.

[karynnj]

1. Thanks for posting this and starting this discussion This really is a difficult question

I think the US, if they are going to continue this, needs to develop a basis by which this does not violate international law. After reading the excellent article you linked to, I went to the link in the last line which has more on the study. On the issue of international law, it explains the difficulty in doing this under the law.

The first is that the strikes, which almost inevitably kill civilians, may be on shaky legal ground. Columbia Law School professor Matthew Waxman points out that this is a tricky judgment call: "The principle of proportionality says that a military target may not be attacked if doing so is likely to cause incidental civilian casualties or damage that would be excessive in relation to the expected military advantage of the attack.... But there is no consensus on how to calculate these values (how do you compare the value of civilian lives versus the value of disrupting high-level terrorist operational planning?) Nor is there consensus on what imbalance is ‘excessive.' It's very hard to draw definitive conclusions because it requires assessments about such things as the expected military gain from neutralizing the target, the likely civilian harm, and the availability of alternative means of attacking that could save innocent lives."

There are also problems, I had never heard of - including a scary prospect that one effect is pushing the terrorists into areas of Pakistan that we would not use predators on, which could destabalize Pakistan, as well as leading to Taliban retaliations against civilians. It also mentions, drone attacks don't result in us getting the laptops and cell pones.

Third, the strikes no longer have the element of surprise. It is highly unlikely that the drone program will be expanded from FATA into other, non-tribal regions of Pakistan because of intense Pakistani opposition to such a move. Understanding that fact, some militants have undoubtedly moved out of FATA and into safer parts of Pakistan, potentially further destabilizing the fragile Pakistani state.

It then speaks of the limitations of the program (which seem to also be why pure counterterrorism can't succeed):

Fifth, the drone program is a tactic, not a strategy. Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor widely regarded as the dean of terrorism studies, says, "We are deluding ourselves if we think in and of itself the drone program is going to be the answer." He points out that the 2006 U.S. airstrike that killed the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not exactly shut down the organization. Following Zarqawi's death, violence in Iraq accelerated.

Sixth, while there is little doubt that the strikes have disrupted al Qaeda's operations, the larger question is to what extent they may have increased the appeal of militant groups and undermined the Pakistani state. This is ultimately a lot more worrisome than anything that could happen in Afghanistan, given that Pakistan has dozens of nuclear weapons and is one of the world's most populous countries.

http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/revenge_drones

Kerry was at one point very concerned about the use of the drones, I wish he had not shifted to arguing that their effectiveness and precision justified them. Even from these articles, there is the problem that it might be the least bad alternative. It is very very important to stay with what complies with international law. There is also something extremely unattractive (for lack of a better word) with the US sending them into a country we are not at war with without any involvement or oversight by them. This, not KLB, seems to me to infringe on their sovereignty. I wonder if that is by the choice of the Pakistani government because it channels what would be anti-government sentiment to anti-American sentiment.

I know it is more the jurisdiction of the Armed Services committee, but I wish Kerry would have hearing to determine if this is against international law and if it is, how, if possible, it could be made legal. (A joint hearing with Levin's Armed Services committee could really be fascinating.) For Kerry not to be concerned that he supports a program that some say could violate international law would be counter to much that he has stood for.

[TayTay]

2. Yet, the drones are popular in sales around the region

Israel is selling drone technology to the Russians. And the US is selling UAV (unarmed airborne vehicle) technology and Pakistan wants to buy it so that they can use it. (Their argument is that having a foreign govt, like the US, use the technology violates their sovereignty. It's okay if they use it though on insurgents and Taliban and Al Qaeda. BTW, there is no way Pakistan gets this technology without India getting it too.)

Warfare is changing. This is a 3rd generation of UAV's. The next generation will be smarter still. (The next generation already has another names, hunter-killers, which, for you geeks out there, is what the machines were called in The Terminator. Science Fiction meets reality again.)

The UN arguments are valid. I find this type of weapon very bothersome. (It is the power of the gods, quite literally, to shoot thunderbolts from the sky and kill. Humans don't have the moral development to have the power of the gods, imho.) Senator Kerry said that he gets two speeches on drones, one public, and one private. They differ greatly.

[karynnj]

3. To me the problem is less the ability to attack remotely, but the ability

to do it thinking you are doing it absolutely precisely. There are plenty of techniques, such as cruise missiles or more crudely, even ieds, that allow someone to kill without being face to face. Even bombing runs done from miles above. In some ways, it may be because of both the lack of risk to the troops using it and because it gives the illusion of being precise, that those using it have few second thoughts.

The fact that the idea of Pakistan and India using it against each other (or Israel and the Palestinians ) is horrifying to me, suggests that something is wrong. Yet, this likely kills fewer people than the massive bombing runs in WWII or Vietnam, not to mention the bombs dropped on Japan.

(There is also the fact that we are doing this in a country we are not at war with and who we do not get permission from. I completely understand the mixed feelings of the Pakistani. (One thing I read is that there was jubilation when the man suspected of the killing of Butto was killed.)

To me, the hard thing when considering what can and can not be used in war is that the things already accepted are awful.

[TayTay]

4. We keep inventing these horrible weapons

In WWI, it was mustard gas, a weapon so bad that surely it would end all wars. Then came bombings from the air, the atom bomb, hydrogen bombs, etc.

We keep inventing the weapon to end all weapons, then not ending war. Sigh!

Our technology and ability to kill via long-distance is advancing rapidly. Our moral education in what this means is not.

I wrote earlier about research Dr. Dan Ariely did on behavioral economics. One of the chapters in his book talks about white collar crime, which costs many, many times the money that we lose to actual violent bank robberies. Dr. Ariely found that the farther away people got from paper money and face-to-face financial exchanges with actual humans, the easier it got for people to cheat. Bernie Madoff didn't think he was cheating people, he was cheating on a mere system of paper. There are countless examples of this.

I wondered when I read this if you can extrapolate this to weapons and the ability to hurt people via remote weapons systems. It is easier to sit in a room or on the deck of a ship and push buttons that tell machines what to do and never see the results, except to confirm kills. I wonder if we want to do that and if there is any moral, UN approved way to do that, ever, no matter the circumstance. Yet, that is the path we are going down with the Pentagon budgeting process. We are operating the world remotely, without a human interface and that impulse is growing.

[karynnj]

5. I watched the video you had in the link on Ariely and it was fascinating

I agree with you that it may be far easier for someone not seeing the result to react almost as if he/she were successfully playing a video game, where they eliminate the target or not, rather than comprehending that they had just killed people.

While I get what you are speaking of, here is a contrarian view. War is a logical thing only as a country's strategic policy - and even that is only rarely true. At a personal level, it usually makes no sense - as Cassius Clay said "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong ... They never called me nigger." (The exceptions are defending against people invading your land and killing people close to you.) There are so many novels and books where the observation that the individual soldiers have no reason to dislike each other and the soldiers on both sides, in their normal lives, include many who are "good". (ie All quiet on the Western Front ) You also get this from Kerry never telling his daughters that he killed a North Vietnamese soldier and his comments on wanting "a merciful God to erase memories" for the vets in his 1971 speech.

The distancing you speak of is likely there. It could be seen as a blessing to our troops as it keeps them safer and it might keep most from ever feeling the pain from having seen the damage they inflicted in their country's name. If this creates no more deaths than alternative methods, it is hard to say that this should not have been used. In fact, it might be easier for officials to insure that only official targets are targeted - where in Vietnam, there were many abuses that were not ordered.

The morality (or immorality) of approved attacks really rests on those who set the policy and those who define the missions. If you accept that, this simply reduces the emotional burden as well as the physical risk to the "cogs" of the effort. Given that soldiers rarely can impact what they were told to do, it is not clear that the revulsion to the things they were asked to do puts a natural brake on things. In Vietnam, you had some who argued against policy and even bent it at times out of conscience, but you also had many that committed atrocities out of anger at what they saw happen to friends and maybe fear.

I am not sure that I see the drones in the category of nuclear weapons, white phosphorous, mustard gas etc. Even carpet bombing a civilian area or setting ieds seem likely far worse in that the death and destruction is indiscriminate. With the drones, the question is what they are replacing. If they are replacing alternatives which kill far fewer civilians, than they can't be justified. If they are replacing bombing runs, that potentially kill more or the same number, but at less risk to the US, then it is hard to say they shouldn't be used. (Those are the easier cases to assess. The murkier questions are when they will likely kill more innocents, but they also likely kill fewer Americans.) To me, if they can answer that the drones do not increase harm to innocent people from that that would have happened with the likely alternatives, it would seem you could make the case to the UN. If we can't make that case, then they likely should be banned.

[karynnj]

6. Kerry did address the conceptual issue of how war is to be conducted at Pepperdine

After writing the thoughts in the above post, I suddenly remembered that Kerry did address this in his Pepperdine speech. There he said:

"Augustine felt that wars of choice are generally unjust wars, that war -- the organized killing of human beings, of fathers, brothers, friends -- should always be a last resort, that war must always have a just cause, that those waging war need the right authority to do so, that a military response must be proportionate to the provocation, that a war must have a reasonable chance of achieving its goal and that war must discriminate between civilians and combatants."

He also said :

"People of faith obviously don't have to agree with me about how we keep America safe, how we prevail over terrorists, or how we end our disastrous adventure in Iraq. But I do hope people of faith step up to the challenge of rejecting the idea that obedience to God somehow stops when the fighting starts. We need a revival of the debate over what constitutes Just Wars and how they must be conducted, and all people of faith, whatever their political allegiances, should participate in the debate.

http://www.jkmediasource.org/node/129 (Didn't google find me a nice source)

I really think it is fair to ask him to lead the debate that he said needs to happen - especially as the legality of the drones has been called into question.