Drone strikes rely on fallible intelligence from local informants, which leads to errors. The price is innocent people’s lives. It also sets a dangerous international precedent – that the secret extrajudicial execution by one country, to kill people in another country, with minimal oversight and no judicial process, is acceptable. This is the policy being carried out by drones.
At a very basic level, it is difficult to gauge whether the policy actually works. Supporters claim the policy has successfully disrupted terrorist networks. Yet suicide attacks in Pakistan and violence in Afghanistan and Iraq have often intensified following the drone deaths of senior al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives.
Of course the information behind the drone attacks can’t be revealed. It would compromise intelligence sources. That’s how you find the bad guys. If you tell them how they can be found, they will stop doing the things we use to find them. Is that really so hard to understand?
The world doesn’t possess an international police force or an international court (with no apologies to the comical farce in the Hague). There are no international search warrants. There isn’t any right to due process. There isn’t any international criminal law. There isn’t any international law at all. This is all so much smoke from idealists who want this whole problem of terrorism to be treated as an exercise in law enforcement. It can only be treated as a law enforcement problem if the state holds a monopoly on violence. That’s not the case here.
You can prosecute this conflict as a war. You can appease the enemy and hope they leave you alone. You can ignore it and hope it goes away. What you cannot do is pretend it is a perfect case for DCI Barnaby and DS Jones. The conflict isn’t found in Midsomer, and it won’t be solved by making an arrest. It will be solved by killing people. Preferably before they kill any of us.
carl
All of the points made in the article apply also to bullets and bombs. In that sense, a drone is not different in kind, just in degree (and not even as much degree as many would think). I think the author would like to give the impression that there is some new principle or issue involved here, but its hard to see how there is.
Well, the concern might be that, without any declaration of war, the President is authorizing act of war on another country and killing that countrie’s citizens. That seems to be what we do now.
Or if we are not at war, then the President is authorizing assassinations of either US citizens or citizens of another country. That also seems to be what we do now.
I guess the question is do we have any right to complain when someone else does this to us?