The Ethics Of Drone Strikes.

So yesterday I read Jane Mayer's incredible story in The New Yorker on the use of drone strikes in Pakistan to target al-Qaeda and the Taliban -- and there's almost universal agreement at this point that the drone strikes a) kill lots of civilians and b) produce insurgents. Attempts to draw distinctions between drone strikes and old-school assassinations based on the fact that the strikes ostensibly occur in a theater of war have to contend with the knowledge that the strikes themselves kill so many noncombatants as to be a serious moral issue. Defenders of drone strikes can argue that the killing of non-combatants in these circumstances is either justified by the circumstances or is mitigated by the fact that the U.S. isn't deliberately targeting them.

Here's the thing, though: David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum have argued persuasively that the drone attacks produce insurgents (or the perception that the drone attacks are killing civilians produces insurgents), but they are appealing because they've successfully killed high value targets. But at some point, the benefits of the drone strikes have to outweigh the cost, because the U.S. will be producing more insurgents than the U.S. is killing. That hasn't happened yet, and as I pointed out the other day, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are viewed in an increasingly negative light by Pakistanis despite the increase in drone strikes. David Rohde's account of his capture by the Taliban hints why this might be the case:

The strikes also created a paranoia among the Taliban. They believed that a network of local informants guided the missiles. Innocent civilians were rounded up, accused of working as American spies and then executed.

Several days after the drone strike near our house in Makeen, we heard that foreign militants had arrested a local man. He confessed to being a spy after they disemboweled him and chopped off his leg. Then they decapitated him and hung his body in the local bazaar as a warning.

This type of behavior is corroborated by Mayer, who notes that "militants have been so unnerved by the drone program that they have released a video showing the execution of accused informants."

At the New America Foundation's counterterrorism conference yesterday, FBI official Phil Mudd reiterated that the most discrediting factor for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups has been their wholesale slaughter of Muslim civilians. If the cost of the drone strikes hasn't outweighed the benefits, that probably has a great deal to do with the reaction of the Taliban, which is to brutally torture nearby residents into confessing to being informants and then making a public spectacle of executing them.

In other words, it's not as though the death of civilians is peripheral to drone strikes. The fact that the drone strikes provoke the Taliban into acts of savage, murderous paranoia creates a negative feedback loop that mitigates blowback and allows the U.S. to keep using them. The continued use of drones in such frequency may rely in part on the Taliban killing civilians in response.

There are other serious ethical questions about drone strikes Mayer considers, among them, the fact that -- like prisoners sent to Guantanamo Bay -- decisions about who is targeted depends on information given by "allies" who may be pursuing their own interests. The secrecy of the program has led to its metastasizing: Like torture, it was originally meant for only "the worst of the worst," but that's not the case now that the strikes are increasingly more common. Are the strikes war crimes? The lawyers Mayer talks to concludes that they probably aren't. But I don't find that all that comforting.

-- A. Serwer