in a Washington Post column titled Assassination by robot: Are we justified?. It is a column well worth reading, and its first paragraph puts the case bluntly:
The skies over at least six countries are patrolled by robotic aircraft, operated by the U.S. military or the CIA, that fire missiles to carry out targeted assassinations. I am convinced that this method of waging war is cost-effective but not that it is moral.
Robinson quotes John Brennan, Obama's counterterrorism advisor, as describing the drone strikes as "surgical," then notes
surgery is designed to save lives, not take them.
. Robinson then offers three arguments against the use of such drones. These are practical, legal and moral. On all three grounds Robinson argues that the drone srtrikes are not justified.
Pracical - there is the question whether such strikes create more terrorists than they kill. There is a great deal of anger against them in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The former has banned the use of an airfield from which such strikes have been flown.
Legal - on this I will offer Robinson's exact words:
The Obama administration asserts that international law clearly permits the targeting of individuals who are planning attacks against the United States. But this standard requires near-perfect intelligence — that we have identified the right target, that we are certain of the target’s nefarious intentions, that the target is inside the house or car that the drone has in its sights. Mistakes are inevitable; accountability is doubtful at best.
We know how often mistakes have been made, yet somehow we tend to assume we were justified including any collateral damage - because the strikes are not always so narrow that just the targeted individual is killed, even if our intelligence is correct in identifyying the target - and too often we have killed groups that included no terrorists. As one of my generation, I remember the use of body counts in Vietnam. The use of such as a metric ism, like the misuse of tests of student knowledge to evaluate teachers, a clear example of Donald Campbell's famous law:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
But the heart of Robinson's opposition is on moral grounds.
This is a program not of war but of assassination.
Robinson accepts the idea of targeting Ayman al-Zawahiri, who has succeeded Bin Laden as the official head of Al Qaeda. Here I will, anon, offer some disagreement. He then questions whether those like the Somali militants now being targeted are legitimate targets - they may offer verbal threats against us but do they really have such a capability, can we identify an overt act in that direction? If not, then Robinson bluntly asks
Absent any overt act, is there a point at which antipathy toward the United States, even hatred, becomes a capital offense?
Robinson finds a difference in targeting al Qaeda, "with whom we are at war" as against using drones in Libya, a country with which no state of war exists. I'm not sure I do.
There is a next logical step if one does justify use against Al Qaeda, and that is the acceptance of collateral damage. It is one thing if one bombs a camp training Al Qaeda operatives, but we may be on a slippery slope. In such a case, if spouses or children are present we probably are willing to accept their deaths. But what if the only time we can target an Al Qaeda leader is when he is visiting his doctor. If we use a drone to destroy the building in which he is, even if our intelligence is perfect and no other building is destroyed, we will kill the doctor and any personnel assisting him, we will kill any other patients in that facility.
We might describe this as "surgical." Perhaps in comparing such strikes to the way we bombed entire cities in World War II. There one justification was that Germany had already bombed entire British cities, attacking with planes and later V-1 buzz bombs and V-2 rockets, and thus destroying entire cities with incendiaries was a legitimate response - thus the firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden. From there we somehow reached the rationalization of destroying two entire Japanese cities with nuclear weapons. So yes, in comparison to that kind of approach, our drone attacks appear "surgical" although such euphemisms tend to ignore the other lives that can be killed even with an accurate drone strike based on accurate information - and as we have seen too often either the strikes are inaccurate or the intelligence upon which we justify their use is either outdated or inaccurate.
But let's posit that our intelligence is accurate, and collateral damage will be minimal. What if, for example, Osama bin Laden were attacked at his residence. What if we could target his bedroom at a time when he was the only one therein, and thus kill no one else except him. Would that be justified?
Here I think we begin to slide down the seaward side of a sand dune - we are embarking on a journey whose end is horrible to contemplate, at least for those with a conscience.
Yes, the leaders of a force with which we are at war (whether or not a declaration of war exists) are legitimate targets. After all, command and control centers and personnel are legitimate targets. But how far down the chain of command and control are we prepared to go, how many levels become legitimate targets for such killing?
During the Clinton administration, we had multiple attempts to kill Bin Laden. On at least one occasion that has been publicly discussed, we did not execute the attempt because he was hunting apparently with a member of a ruling house from one of the smaller gulf states - we decided that collateral damage was too great.
During the Bush administration, anyone in the infamous deck of cards was fair game. Capture or kill, it did not matter.
In fairness to the Obama administration, the Seal team raid into Pakistan that killed bin Laden did not kill the members of his family. Part of the reason for that raid was to be certain that we either captured or killed bin Laden - had we just done a drone strike, we might not have known who was killed, because we certainly would not have had access to the compound after destroying it. I am not going to argue about the Seals decision to shoot. In that situation, as high risk as it was, there was at least the possibility of capture, and a great lessening of the possible "collateral damage" in the killing of civilian non-combatants. In drone strikes they are far less surgical, although they have advantage of minimizing or eliminating direct risk to American service personnel.
Direct risk - although we should remember that as we continue inflame the people in the nations where we use drones, we create a situation where those we fight can use such anger to generate more attacks against Americans, and then not just American military personnel. After all, we are using the weapons at our disposal, and it is not hard to imagine those we target thereby justifying the use of the weapons at their disposal - IEDs and suicide bombers.
Robinson rightly points out that as a nation we have not properly debated our use of drones for such purposes. Perhaps key members of Congress have been "read in" by being informed of the details, but I question if that is sufficient given the theoretical nature of our government as a representative democracy - how can we even properly exercise our right to select our leaders when there is no opportunity for our representatives to act on our behalf, when such policies are made without any opportunity for the American people or their representatives to fully participate in the shaping of such policy?
There is of course an additional issue here at home - the administration is moving to deploy aerial drones within our boundaries. Now, at least for now, these will be primarily for surveillance purposes. One advocate of such use is Senator Schumer, who wants the control base for such purposes to be in New York State, which he represents. There are all kinds of issues of how even information from such surveillance can be used - this includes what is left of the Fourth Amendment.
Remember that it is a very small step from using unarmed drones for surveillance and arming them - to go after drug gangs, perhaps? But then what? Do we target a building housing a club full of Mafia types? Do we target a group of terrorist wannabees? Do not we have to revisit the question Robinson has raised. He poses it terms of terrorism: Absent any overt act, is there a point at which antipathy toward the United States, even hatred, becomes a capital offense? Cannot the same logic be applied towards those who might be planning ordinary criminal acts? Could an administration assert that a group represented an internal threat to the US and thereby justify "taking them out?" Given the cavalier disregard for constitutional protections demonstrated by the last administration, should not we be concerned? And after all, is it not a normal tendency that having developed a particular weapons system or capability one wants to demonstrate how it can be used, to test it out in real world applications? Where might that lead us?
My concerns are somewhat broader than those offered by Robinson, but I would be happy if we could even address those he raises. Thus I will end as he does, with his finally paragraph:
We urgently need to explore these issues, because the use of robotic aircraft — and, surely, robotic devices that operate on land and sea — will inevitably expand as the technology improves. And we need to relearn an ancient lesson: that no method of waging war is without risk or without consequences.
Peace?