Stanford Law School report on Drone Airstrikes

I think it's even stranger to think that it's OK, wiping out so many civilians , in the process of exterminating a tiny handful of suspected terrorists.
Read the report for the details of the numbers. You might know what you're talking about then.
This is where those civilians live .. they're some of the poorest people on the planet. How on earth could the bulk of those civilians, those most harmed by the drone attacks possibly even entertain the notion of "killing your women & children in massive numbers"?

My lord these poor 'innocent' people are willingly offering aid to the would be killers of our women and children and if to handle that danger to us we need to kill some of those people when going after the killers among them so what?

That is war and always had been war as in for example the Germany and Japanese people paid one hell of a price in rivers of blood for their leader actions.

Now if the people you are crying about do not care to paid that price of aiding our enemies all that need to be done is the welcome mat to these terrorists be withdrawn.

Hell they are damn lucky that technology have advance to the point we do not need to do carpet bombings of their population centers do deal with this threat.

I leave it here on this exchange, Bill.
I think it would help if you read the report. You'd learn quite a bit. That's what this thread was supposed to be about, I thought.

Maybe someday we will have weapons that can be set to go after someone by their DNA and kill him or her in a crowded room without harming anyone else but until that day it is not a good idea to be hanging around our enemies.

If that comes to pass, we can call it the God Drone.

The drones, in my opinion, cause America more harm than good. And the statistics on their efficacy are fatally flawed by the Obama administration's decision to include all adult males as terrorists, regardless of never establishing the identity of the majority of the ones hit (the logic is that if it's a baby girl or something, it's collateral damage, but that any adult male near an enemy is likely a co-conspirator, so even if you merely have the misfortune of being an adult male taxi driver that's being counted as a terrorist taken out).

Obama does everything he can to portray his use of drones as "surgical" and precise, but he's killing orders of magnitude more innocents than Bush was doing with the drones (this is partly due to the natural evolution of technology, of course) but in America it's my party right or wrong and now that the Democrats are spilling blood it's suddenly not as important to liberals as it was when Republicans were. And, of course, this kind of "tough" foreign policy is the Republican stock and store so there's really nobody but the handful of independents and libertarians left to speak out against this.

The world does not hate America for its freedoms, it hates America because America is perennially one of the world leaders in killing people. We simply do not face a security threat worth the current rate of loss of life and loss of generations of hearts and minds. The goals in Afghanistan have been clearly self-delusional for about 5 years now and the whole world knows it and is just trying to figure out how to extricate themselves with the least personal embarrassment and loss of personal political capital.

It's pathetic, most of the universe recognizes this as bloodletting in an exercise in futility and merely needs to get out slowly enough for no single thing to be pointed at as an obvious concession of such.

And meanwhile, we keep killing people and making new enemies in exchange for precious little gain in security and while actively harming our geopolitical interests.

We are just new at how to use drones most effectively, I believe. I would guess that eventually drones will be used world-wide for surveillance of populations. In effect, I would think that anti-terrorism will evolve into a law enforcement effort. Sort of like dealing with organized crime.

Just like children used to be taught that the policeman on the corner was their friend, I would predict that children will be taught that the drone in the sky is our friendly eye in the sky.

Ok, I will be more specific. Deploying armed drones into other sovereign countries and killing their citizens with them is the practice I am calling into question.

I am saying that the CIA's decision to simply start killing by drone instead of even bothering with rendition is a bad one.

I make no moral judgements on the existence of drones per se, but rather the use of them to go around killing people in an exercise in futility.

Perhaps, historians will one day think of the drone as eliminating the people that previously rose to power and caused major wars?

Mayhap. But we shouldn't bank on their future idiocy in order to end up on the right side of history.

This is analog to inviting drug dealers to set up shop in your home and then complaining when during a police raid members of your family get hurt.

Do not offer aid and shelter to people who had killed our people in the jumbo jet full and the skyscrapers full lots and we will not need to fly arm drones in your sky.

Seems not to be a hard concept for anyone to understand even if Robert and others are having a hard time with it.

In order to claim sovereign you need to have control of the territories in questions and Pakistan does not have control of the independent tribal areas that we are concern about.

If the Pakistan move troops into this territory and stop it from being used as a base to plan and launch attacks on the West the drones could remain on the ground.

Most of the targets are just local insurgents. They aren't "attacking the West" from the region. They are fighting invaders in Afghanistan.

Why not just leave Afghanistan earlier than planned? What is the point of continuing to kill the people trying to retake the land we intend to cede shortly anyway?

First as long as we do have troops in Afghanistan we have an obligation to offer as must security from cross border attacks as possible to them.

Second those drones had gotten some very high level terrorists and that is worth doing in and of itself.

That doesn't say why we shouldn't remove them, so that we can stop having to kill a bunch of people to defend them. The tactics are not in question, the strategy is. What is the strategic benefit of staying? I get the tactical need to protect them while there but what are they doing there in your opinion that justifies the bloodshed and cost?

We aren't wanted there. We don't have an achievable objective. There is no point to the loss of life. Cut our losses and get out. Try to help Kabul how we can remotely, to navigate this power vacuum we left. But there's no further gains to be had and no reason to keep troops there.



I have much less problem with this part of it, but it has represented the minority of the casualties and even then they don't represent much of a threat to the west, just the west's presence locally to them.

Once again you are clueless Billy

Since the use of drone attacks has greatly expanded since Obama took office, it has become his preferred method of dealing with terrorists (Osama excluded only because he wanted a 100% verifiable kill) and he personally selects the targets, it's reasonable to argue that any criticisim of America's use of drone attacks is a criticism of our president.

It is therefore, also reasonable to expect his supporters to support him against such criticism.

Get it now?

But of course that wasn't the CIA's decision, it was the Obama Administration's.

Obama ran for president on a personal platform that Gitmo was a horrendous hellhole and that snatching terrorists from within the borders of sovereign lands and then possibly subjecting them to enhanced interrogation was heinous and illegal.

He found the shutting down Gitmo was a lot tougher than promising he would, but he doesn't want any part of adding to its population.

On the other hand he either realizes that terrorists present a threat to the nation he has sworn to protect or that in order to remain sufficiently popular he has to neutralize them.

Since he won't try and capture them and he, correctly, understands we can't invade every country in which they operate, he has taken to the use of drone attacks to satisfy whatever imperative is motivating him.

While not cheap, drones are less expensive than complex and dangerous attempts to send humans into a country to snatch or kill a particular terrorist, and if one gets "caught" he need only send the reigning dictator a polite letter asking for it back rather than dealing with all the bother of a hostage situation.

His supporters insist that above all else he is pragmatic and the use of drones is a pragmatic solution to his problem.

While some people, such as yourself, find them atrocious they have not and were never going to lead to anti-war demonstrations in the streets of American cities.

They are perceived as clean killers, and since the extent of collateral deaths is largely not reported in the media (Let's face it, even the above average American isn't going to read a 186 page paper on the subject), everyone is happy. Bad guys are getting theirs, no American servicemen are in harm's way, and we can rationalize that the little children and taxi drivers would not be dying to if the terrorist were not such cowards, and didn't travel alone.

I don't have any way near the problem with their usage that you do.

First of all, 176 dead children is probably a small fraction of the children killed in an all out war.

Secondly, for the most part, the targets need to be killed. I know the perception is that Obama is omniscient and by selecting the targets himself he assures that only the really guilty bad guys get vaporized, but I don't even have to read the 186 page report to know that to some extent it must call into question target selection. No doubt there have been people targeted and killed by drones who didn't deserve to die. I'm sure this isn't any problem for Obama since he rejects any notion of absolute truths like its wrong to kill innocent people.

Finally, the notion that these attacks create additional enemies of the US is, I think, fatuous. Apparently there is a never-ending flow of reasons for the people in this region of the world to hate America, and if we stopped drone attacks tomorrow, the number of people who stopped hating us would be infinitesimal. This is the weakest of argument against these attacks.

I do agree that we should return to the practice of capturing and, if that fails, assassinating these folks, because I believe we are losing very valuable intelligence by just obliterating them.

I've stated on more than one occasion that we are foolish for not using assassination far more often as a tool of our foreign policy, and certainly more often than conventional military actions.

Since the biggest drawback to assassinating a prominent person in an enemy state is the possibility that our prominent persons will become reciprocal targets, and least the practice would put an end to the uneasiness many of us seem to have with our prominent persons blithely ordering us to put our lives and limbs on the line in wars they order.

No president could be considered a chicken-hawk if he was on the firing line due to an assassination order he gave.

But then the vast majority of us are suckers for rules of war, preferring to drag the killing out and escalating it in the aggregate rather than attempting to quickly win and end the horror by inflicting massive (though overall less) and indiscriminate immediate casualties among the enemy.

Obama's die-hard supporters are conspicuous by their absence in this thread, which I think speaks volumes about their principles.

My objection is not to the use of drones, per se, but to the continued bloodshed that America has chosen, for which drones are merely one of the most attractive options, that does not have a corresponding strategic objective that is both worthy of the loss of life (and the enmity it generates, where it is now one of the leading motivations cited by new militants who take up arms against America).

The prosecution of this campaign has a diminishing rate of return, and for many years now we are prosecuting it without a clear objective.

I'm not just opposed to the drone strikes, but the continuation of a senseless war. The green on blue attacks grate on me too. What the **** is the point of continuing to put soliders out there to get shot at? We clearly aren't going to beat the Taliban anymore and aren't even trying to reach a truce with them anymore. We certainly aren't going to get anyone trained anymore, and any further joint patrols are cruel experiments with the lives of the participants. We gave up on all the objectives, and the whole world knows this but stick around to just spasmodically keep killing people till our leaders can find a way to extricate ourselves while saving face and preserving personal political capital.

Because admitting that the end of this war has been largely an exercise in futility is not something easy to do in an election year.



I think this is the strongest argument against the attacks. Most of the people we are striking are people who merely oppose our invasion and want us out. Most of the militants being killed are not terrorists who aim at striking America but militias fighting a foreign army in their territory.

Our continued presence in Afghanistan is why we are having to protect our interests there from attacks there. Most of the killing America is having to do is to kill people who are simply fighting our presence in their backyard, and a backyard we've already strategically abandoned.

Most of the people we target aren't plotting attacks against America, but against American soldiers who are still fighting them in a war that has long lost any real point to its continued prosecution.

The dramatic escalation in drone killing is just a way to make clear to Democrats that Obama has chosen this path of a "surge" of bloodshed, and that from the levels at which he took office he decided that we should escalate, not decrease, the pointless killing done in our name.

I have no problem with legitimate self-defense, and the ugly realities of waging just warfare. But most of the killing America has done under Obama is during the prosecution of a war that has become completely pointless to all and that we are just trying to stretch the end past election season for (next year he'll finally do what he should have started in his first year).

To clarify, in places like Yemen I think this is an accurate statement. The targets that have been selected there are not targets I am going to loose a lot of sleep over and those strikes are most often ones I think can be construed as legitimate self-defense.

The ones whose moral position I call into question are the ones in the Pakistan/Afghanistan theater where the majority of the targets would go away as soon as we leave.

The Taliban, and the Haqqani network, as odious as they are and as clear enemies of the US in their theater as they are, are simply localized enemies resulting from our presence in their territory. Staying around just to keep killing them is pointless. They are enemies created by our presence and while we certainly should do what we can to not turn Afghanistan over to them we should do so remotely and not stick around to just keep the trickle of bloodshed going for no good reason.

Whether or not they would indeed stop trying to kill Americans if our troops was no longer there is beside the point as our troops are there and that means that anyone who is likely to try to kill them is a target for our drones or any other weapons we can bring to bear.

Those who of their own free will who are giving them shelter or just keeping in their company that also get harm come under the case of just to bad.

When the troops are no longer there and if we keep the drone campaign going that is another subject.