Progress is a wonderful thing. I think we can continue to progress even more and waving hands and saying “can’t be helped” over civilian deaths won’t help.
I’m pretty sure even you know this is a complete and utter strawman.
It sure sounded like you wouldn’t accept anything other than no collateral deaths. My mistake.
And they are being killed as a more direct result of AMERICANS DROPPING BOMBS ON THEM.
In this little world of yours, is there anything America could do that you wouldn’t blame on terrorists? If you were consistent, if we dropped a nuclear bomb on Pakistan and killed millions, that would be the responsibility of the terrorists too. I find that … troubling.
Maybe not? It’s like that meathead who screams "Look what you’re making me do. THIS IS YOUR FAULT! while beating his wife.
Nowhere in this thread have I said I require zero civilian casualties. What I have pointed out is that your assumption of “minimal civilian casualties” may not be correct.
There was a full declaration of war present at the time… unlike those attacks done by these drones.
Gee whiz. Thanks for pointing that out. I don’t know how that point never ocurred to me. The Americans are there targeting (with bombs that cause minimal collateral damage) terrorists who attacked America. These terrorists have chosen to hide among their own civilians. Primary responsibility? Still the terrorists. Secondary? Still the governments that harbour them.
Your ability to extrapolate wildly on no basis whatsoever is what I find troubling.
If the wife has first killed one of their kids, and has vowed to go after the rest, you wouldn’t then be so quick to condemn him would you? Sure what he’s doing is still wrong, but it’s the sort of thing that I find morally untroubling, and I assure you, I am not alone.
How many fewer could you want? Especially placed in a historical context, drones have GOT to be the most targeted weapon of war for murdering people there is. See? I didn’t even dehumanise it by calling it ‘taking out targets’ I’m still ok with it, especially when those people being murdered are terrorists.
Not the point - What gives the USA the right to just go there and kill people?
After all, those people/countries did not attack the US until the US started messing with their politics, killing their countrymen and telling them how to live their lives.
I know, Right? When your actions directly cause the death of innocents, you have to take part of the blame too. Whew. Glad we got that cleared up.
Oh, wait. It didn’t quite sink in the way I thought. I thought the whole "your actions cause the death of innocents, you deserve blame’ was pretty clear, but apparently we’re back to the wife beater “they made me drop those bombs!” rationalization.
YOU’RE the one who insists the US isn’t to blame for the bombings they conduct, I was just wondering how far it goes for you. If we nuked Pakistan, wouldn’t that also be the terrorists fault first and then Pakistans second?
If, while trying to stop the wife from going after the rest of his kids, he killed another 176 children, then, yes, I would be as quick to condemn him. Because that’s what were talking about here.
I have no doubt you’re not alone. I do doubt that you’re right.
I “want” no innocents to die. But as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, that’s not going to happen. I do know I’m not happy with a 50% civilian casualty rate, or even a 33%, especially when the the stats are so hard to ascertain and I have little faith in what my government is telling me are the rates. But we also need to look at the upside of the drone attacks. As I cited to earlier, the have killed children at a rate (5%) higher than “high profile targets” (2%). They also have created more anti-American animosity and worked as a propaganda tool for the terrorists.
There is a lot that goes into the determination of the morality and even the practicality, of these drone strikes. And what I want is more people looking at these issues intelligently and deeply and not simply saying “Well, it’s all the terrorists and Pakistan’s fault” or “those civilians need to get out of the way” when confronted with dead innocents.
I’ve been asking for a cite for this since the middle of page 1 and have received squat. To be fair I think you’re saying it in a less specific way, but then again, if the claim is just “more animosity” and “terrorists can use it for propaganda” (they use everything for propaganda), that doesn’t mean much of anything.
There are big chunks of the previously cited to Stanford/NYU report that deal with the unintended consequences of the drone attacks. For example:
“Furthermore, evidence suggests that US strikes have facilitated recruitment to violent non-state armed groups, and motivated further violent attacks. As the New York Times has reported, “drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants.” Drone strikes have also soured many Pakistanis on cooperation with the US and undermined US-Pakistani relations. One major study shows that 74% of Pakistanis now consider the US an enemy.”
and
“However, it is clear that the majority of the population oppose current drone practices. A Pew Research Poll conducted in 2012 found only 17 per cent of Pakistanis favor the US conducting “drone strikes against leaders of extremist groups, even if they are conducted in conjunction with the Pakistani government.”
Of those familiar with the drone campaign, the study noted that 94 per cent of Pakistanis believe the attacks kill too many innocent people and 74 per cent say they are not “necessary to defend Pakistan from extremist organizations.” Further, particular strikes (such as those targeting first responders), as well as the constant presence of drones overhead, have caused significant hardships for many in FATA.”
and
“Opposition to drone strikes has accompanied increasingly negative perceptions of the US. Roughly three in four now consider the US an enemy, an increase from both 2010 and 2011.”
and
" Those interviewed for this report were acutely aware of reports of the practice of followup strikes, and explained that the secondary strikes have discouraged average civilians from coming to one another’s rescue, and even inhibited the provision of emergency medical assistance from humanitarian workers."
and
"Dennis Blair, former Director of National Intelligence, described how unilateral
American drone attacks in Pakistan are eroding US “influence and damaging our ability to work with Pakistan to achieve other important security objectives like eliminating Taliban sanctuaries, encouraging Indian-Pakistani dialogue, and making Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal more secure.”
There is much more in there about the secondary effects of the drone program, the opinion of those trying to work with Pakistan, and questions into the actual efficacy of the program in accomplishing what it is meant to.
The part I’ve been most interested in was the claim that the drone strikes were just going to make terrorist groups bigger and bring about more attacks. And to be fair you made a more limited claim. But that’s what I was asking about in post #37. The cites don’t address that. I don’t have a problem believing the drone program is unpopular, although how much weight that deserves is an open question. If the strikes OK, they’ve replaced Guantanamo as a talking point that’s unfortunate, but if it means the drone strikes are just discussed instead of something else that would have surely been brought up anyway, I am not sure there’s much of an ultimate effect.
Haven’t really weighed in on this, but especially the poll figures from Pakistan are fairly ludicrous. Basically, we are and have been VERY unpopular with most Pakistanis, regardless, so I’m fairly sure that anything we did (or even if we did nothing), our polling numbers wouldn’t exactly improve in that region. I’m fairly sure that shooting a little girl in the head while she is on a bus taking her home from school would be unpopular with most Pakistanis as well, but I’ve not seen a noticeable drop in support for the Taliban.
I’d say that most Americans ‘morally justify’ the drone strikes on terrorist targets in the same why we ‘morally justify’ any military action…as the lesser of two evils, and hope that our civilian leadership is weighing possible costs verse potential harm with an attempt to mitigate, as much as possible, innocent deaths.
Right. And that data showed the strikes were unpopular when the Pakistani government was allowing them and when it opposed them (and you’ll recall why they stopped supporting them). You don’t need much information to be mad at the U.S. military for striking your town or your family, but how accurate a picture do we think people in Pakistan have of what’s going on?
I seriously doubt that the average Pakistan has much of a picture at all of what’s going on outside of their little village, tribe or region. They probably don’t give much of a thought to the fact that, especially along the border regions Pakistanis have historically crossed the border to fight in Afghanistan (against the Brits, the Russians, in the seemingly ceaseless civil wars between warring factions in Afghanistan, and lately against the US and allied forces), using Pakistan as a safe base to operate from, to rest, recruit, retool and head back to the sound of the guns. Any actions (even from their own government) into the affairs of those tribes is going to be unpopular (vast understatement here) and seen as highly unfair and unwarranted. Look at how unpopular the raid to get ObL was, for instance…and the shock that we just went in on our own initiative and did it.
Well we do have the quote from Gruman earlier in the thread: "Take Faisal Shahzad, the so-called Times Square bomber. One of the first things the Pakistani-born US citizen said upon his arrest was: “How would you feel if people attacked the United States? You are attacking a sovereign Pakistan.” Asked by the judge at his trial as to how he could justify planting a bomb near innocent women and children, Shahzad responded by saying that US drone strikes “don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody.”
Sure it’s just an anecdote, not data, but you’re not going to find hard data, one way or the other, on “what makes a terrorist” and “what makes a terrorist attack”. I personally have no problem concluding that animosity toward the US is a big part of why terrorists become terrorists and/or why they attack. The rhetoric from the terrorists themselves makes it even more clear that their hatred of America is a big chunk of why they attack.
I have no problem concluding that the more young men angry at the US for killing innocents, the more terrorists there will be, and the more likely they will to attack.
I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial opinion. 
And yes, I did see that someone mentioned the Times Square moron in response to my question. I’m looking for some general data, though.
You may have no problem making that conclusion, but I think it needs to be supported somehow by facts. And the problem is not with the claim itself because I don’t doubt it’s true in some individual cases. The problem is making the claim over and over again for years because at some point it does cry out for evidence. That evidence doesn’t exist, and then the claim becomes, you know, bullshit. Drone strikes began in 2004 and have expanded a lot since the beginning of 2009, so if this were actually true there has been plenty of time for the evidence to accumulate. The evidence to me says that while these strikes have killed a substantial number of innocent people and there are serious concerns about the using them and how they work in addition to the counting methodology, they’ve been effective (the Stanford study acknowledges that) and the other options are probably worse. Unless you jump for the convenient fantasy that the U.S. only uses these strikes to look busy and murder Muslims because terrorism no longer exists - and clearly you understand that’s all crap - there’s a serious problem that has to be dealt with here.
Up next, I conclude that clean water is good and that the moon landing isn’t a hoax.
How would you go about getting that data? I’m not sure Gallup is polling very many terrorists, and I don’t think those terrorists that do these acts are seeing therapists who can report their mental state. What kind of data would convince you?
I don’t think the drone strikes will ever be the sole cause of terrorism, nor do I think we’ll get anything more than anecdotal evidence. But we do know that, despite the best efforts of the strongest nation in the world, there are still terrorists out there and they still want to destroy our country.
And I think you have to seriously limit your conclusions to decide that they’ve been “effective”. Have the drone attacks killed “militants”? Yes. So in that sense they’ve been effective. But have they made our country safer? I’m not sure you can reasonably conclude that (as the Stanford study points out). Nor, with that 2% “high profile targets” stat, can you conclude the drone attacks are important. Finally, and even further, I’m not sure you can conclude the benefits of the drone program outweigh the costs.
I fully admit it’s a huge gray area dealing with such unquantifiable issues as the cause of terrorism, statistical misreporting, weighing the value of human lives, necessity of “war”, and much, much more. And before I’m willing to commit to actions that will result in this number of dead innocents, I’d want a lot more evidence on the “let’s use drones” side of the ledger.
I admit that’s difficult. But if people could even point to an increase in terrorist recruiting and terrorist attacks since this program started they could make a case that it’s been counterproductive overall. Can anyone do that? I don’t think so. There have been some attempted terrorist attacks in the U.S. (the underwear bomber, the Times Square guy), but evidently the FBI is so starved for real terrorist cases that it’s putting a fair amount of energy into sting operations against morons. (Also a tactic that creates some difficult questions.) You’ll often see the same people complaining about both approaches, but no connection is drawn between the two.
Yes, that’s why some of us have been saying for years that the concept of a War on Terror was stupid. You can’t make people not want to use terrorist tactics. You can deal with broader problems that can contribute to terrorism and you can limit the effectiveness of terrorist groups, and drone strikes are intended to do the second one.
Exactly.
But as noted, you’d be hard-pressed to conclude the opposite (as some people want to do).
That depends on how they’re used.
Which is a much more serious argument. The costs to civilians are high. But I think the evidence says that this is part of a strategy that’s worked.
I agree with all of that. The problem is the lack of other good options because of untrustworthy governments and the also-high human toll of war on a bigger scale.
I’ll check out my latest copy of “Terrorist Recruiting Weekly” and let you know if they’ve seen an uptick in numbers.
I tend to think that the lack of evidence on these issues should weigh in the favor of “not killing innocents” than “keep bombing them”.
And may contribute to the first one.
So, again, we’re back to who should bear the burden of evidence, those that want to bomb people and maybe kill a few innocents or those who want stronger evidence and more successes before supporting the program. Me, I’m on the “let’s not kill innocents unless we’re damn sure it’s necessary”. Maybe the US government has such evidence. But, given the problems I’ve seen with their credibility, I’m not sure I trust them all that much.
Again, the conclusion that the program has “worked” is of use only if your definition of “worked” is “killed people that were targeted”. Once you get beyond that, to the costs, the value of killing those people, and the rest of what we’ve discussed, it’s not anywhere near clear that the drone program has “worked”.
I think it’s a debate that doesn’t have a clear, or easy, conclusion, especially considering the lack of evidence. In those cases, I’m much more likely to support the choice that doesn’t result in dead innocents.
I consider Atta to be crazy, because he threw away his life (while young, healthy, and well-educated) in a act of mass murder for the sake of a political ideology which a sane observer would judge to be unobtainable.
I wouldn’t classify either Nidal or Khaled as crazy. Evil and/or stupid, but not crazy.
Since the thread’s long been Godwinized, I’d say Atta was like Hitler, Nidal was like Heydrich, and Khaled is like Hess.
This rather eloquently distills the thoughts which prompted my OP.