Philosophy, drone strikes, and conditional arguments

The worst conditional in the world: IF animals where only treated and killed “humanely” THEN it would be permissible to eat animal products.

I think that a an honest Rawlsian would kill the Taliban. Drones or on-site assassination is small beer. One is not going to develop the two moral powers with those guys around, and one cannot be free with their crimping of the first p of j.

New idea : glueing hip-contrarian, just sayin’, war-is-nice philosophers to drones before sending them in the air may be justified it enhance their accuracy.

Just sayin’.

On the plausible assumptions that the antecedent is correctly assigned non-zero probability and the conditional was not already known, learning a conditional, even with no evidence of the antecedent, ought rationally to increase the credence in the consequent.

Do we really need a philosopher to apply the rather insipid truism that “if doing X is better than what we’re doing now (Y), doing X instead of Y is justified”? (In other news, pareto improvements don’t make anyone worse off!)

It does present a rather pat rhetorical formula, “If X is good (or the best, or better than the possible alternatives, or is the pareto optimum, &etc), then X is justified.” This way you never actually have to say that something is good, just that if it were good, “it really would be good, wouldn’t it?”

It seems like the go to opening for anyone playing the contrarian. “Oh ho, you think abortions are bad? But what if abortions prevented crime?” “Oh ho, you think smoking is bad? But what if smoking reduced spending on end of life care?” “Oh ho you think local food is more energy efficient? But what if long distance imports are more efficient?” “Oh ho you think sweatshops are bad? But what if sweatshop work is better than agricultural work?”

In other words, “if the facts changed about what was good and what was bad, wouldn’t you change your mind about what was good and what was bad?”

This exercise seems useful if you’re actualy elaborating various factors by which we might evaluate a policy. “Ok, we think X is better than Y. But what does it mean for X to be better than Y? Well, it means A, B, & C. Ergo, if we’re wrong about A or B or C…”

But identifying the use also, perhaps, identifies the misuse: the conditional here is meant to frame the conditions which make X better than Y. So it’s an attempt to establish evaluative criteria.

Tacitly we have a proposition: X should be evaluated against Y on the basis of A, B, & C.

So I think Marc is on to something when he says the real issue is asking the right questions. The conditional here is an attempt to define the field of battle.

So drone strikes are about what produces more or less casualties, not about the process by which drone strikes are authorized or casualties are counted.

I haven’t followed the debate closely, but it seems to me that there is an unstated premise, namely “the availability of drones won’t affect the frequency of war”. Empirically, it seems clear this is false.

The key question is (surely): should the United States be killing anyone in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other places? If the answer to that question is ‘no’, then whether or not the US should be not killing them with drones or not killing them with bombs dropped via planes is irrelevant. And if ‘yes’ then, obviously the US is under some kind of moral pressure to reduce civilian deaths

It’s worse than that – Strawser assumes the war is just, assumes that drones can reduce civilian casualties and then asks the non-question of whether, these things being the case, the fact that drones also reduce US military casualties should lead to their being used.

I think John Quiggin gets it exactly right above: Under the ‘other things equal’ clause, the arguments presume that the frequency of wars (and, I think, something like the frequency of planned strikes) will be unaffected by the use of drones. I think this is a feature of the broader assumed background into which the conditional fits: that the actors we’re imagining engaging in drone attacks are largely motivated by humanitarian or liberatory aims, so that it would be good if they were able to successfully pursue more wars. Thus it is even more deeply conditional and even less applicable to actual drone campaigns.

I also think it’s a mistake to dismiss as irrelevant arguments against drones that would be arguments against a particular war (or any war). By starting with the assumption that drone strikes are immoral and learning that if they are immoral this whole war is immoral (or, perhaps, all war is immoral), one may indeed be led to reject that initial assumption in the face of overwhelming evidence for the justifiability of the war. But in the absence of such evidence, such an inquiry into the morality of drone strikes may be one’s way of finding out that the whole war (or the whole business of war) is morally unjustifiable.

I think the latter sort of inquiry is precisely what makes considering the morality of drone strikes, even under very ideal assumptions, a valuable philosophical enterprise. We see what it would take for drone strikes to be justified and then we see how far our actual practice deviates from that. But since we little no control over how those arguments find their way out of the seminar room and into the newspapers, how do we responsibly engage in those forms of inquiry?

CB at 9:05 – sketch the thing out as a probabilistic graphical model. The note at the end of the OP contrasts the cases of “connection + affirmed antecedent” and “no connection”. (“Connection” can be causal, in probability, or something else). Now you’ve introduced a third possibility — “connection + negated antecedent”. That’s how it reads to this non-sophyphiler, anyway.

I think that your use of the phrase ‘bad guys’ is correct but can mislead some readers. If I understand some articles on drones that I have read, this predicate can be applied posthumously, to anyone who for any reason was in some designated area of the person under attack. If I’m right, the issue of collateral damage (aka civilian casualties) becomes a non-issue, by a linguistic trick.

CF the ‘ “the availability of drones won’t affect the frequency of war”. Empirically, it seems clear this is false.’

It is false, but not (of course) because of the hypothesis that drones reduce the number of Pakistani civilian deaths, but because of the fact that drones reduce the numbers of American military deaths.

Incidentally, despite what some commentators would appear to imply, the issue of Just War Theory is irrelevant to the (main thrust of) the argument about drone use. The United States has not declared war on Pakistan (or Yemen). Neither have these countries declared war on the United States. There is no “war” going on. This is one country bombing people in another country to further unclearly defined foreign policy objectives. Now you might approve of that, or disapprove of that, or whatever, but that’s what’s going on. Not ‘war’.

it would be an interesting psychological experiment (which, for all I know someone has done) to test whether people who are exposed to conditional arguments in the total absence of evidence for the truth of the antecedent become more inclined to believe the consequent

This has almost certainly been done and IF it has been done, THEN the proposition is, as you suspect, very likely to be true. Oh wait…

Seriously though, there is a whole subfield of psychology devoted to examining how people reason (see eg the International Conference on Thinking 2012 which just took place). If I can find a relevant paper I’ll post it here.

What’s going on, though? Is it a linguistic thing where some people have acquired a different definition of “if,” somehow? IOW, is it:

1) If sweatshops improve opportunities for poor people, then they are justified.

The preceding statement includes the statement, “Sweatshops improve opportunities for poor people.”

Therefore, sweatshops improve opportunities for poor people. (More generally, statements “if X then Y” are rhetorically clever ways of asserting X.)

or 2) Sweatshops improve opportunities for poor people.

If sweatshops improve opportunities for poor people, then they are justified.

My argument is entirely conditional.

Therefore, even if “sweatshops improve opportunities for poor people” turns out to be false, my argument remains valid.

Readers are free to judge the sufficiency of the evidence for “sweatshops improve opportunities for poor people” as I described it.

?

I thought it was curious that philosophers, in concocting arguments about the real world, were not morally obliged to attempt to ascertain the facts about the real world. The philosopher is not talking about killing unicorns on Neptune; what makes his arguments interesting is that drones actually kill real people.

Hidari @ 12 Re: “Obviously, I know that Bradley Strawser is full of shit (his career choices tell me that, as does his choice to write for the oxymoronic Journal of ‘Military Ethics’ (sic).). But if one takes his arguments seriously (and perhaps one shouldn’t) the legality of the American attacks on Yemen, Afghanistan etc. are the key issue. All the rest is just philosopher’s talk: scholasticism run wild.”

Unfortunately, perhaps, I don’t know if Bradley Strawser is full of shit, and I certainly could not make such a determination based on his choice to write for the Journal of Military Ethics. And while my identification with much if not most of Buddhist ethics would probably put me, at least in theory (in practice, I’m sure I can imagine situations in which I, for various reasons, might resort to violence, or understand if not attempt to argue for its justification in a particular circumstance), within the tradition of pacifism (although like Gandhi, there are certain connotations associated with that term that I would not endorse), I do think it is better to live in a world in which there is something called “just war theory” (hence the existence of periodicals like the above journal) with its two branches of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, than a world in which such a thing does not exist. Of course one might plausibly argue that this ethical tradition has had little or no effect on the frequency of war or on its actual conduct. I happen to think that is not true, although I can cite no evidence for that belief and I’m not sure how one could definitively answer that question one way or another.

Given that we train soldiers to fight wars “for us,” it seems better that they learn something about “military ethics” rather than not; in other words, it would not be preferable that their training as soldiers is such that they come to believe that, so to speak, anything goes when it comes to their conduct in a war (this may seem often to be the case but I suspect that it is false). Given the nature of war, it is certainly understandable that some soldiers (or even those that lead them: like General Curtis LeMay in my country’s history of warfare) may come, in the heat of battle or as a result of their soldiering in general, to lose all sense of ethical perspective and self-restraint, to ignore any and all ethical rules or values (let alone those that have arisen in the just war tradition), to succumb to the most deleterious effects of anger and rage, the sorts of behavior we morally and legally categorize under the heading of “war crimes.” It seems clear that this is a generative reason behind the historical emergence of the notion of “soldier’s honor” that, as Larry May reminds us, “is as old as war chronicles going back at least as far as the Iliad:” “Socializing soldiers to view their honor as of paramount importance is the chief way that soldiers are motivated to restrain themselves according to the rules of war.”* May elaborates:

“A sense of honor offsets other emotions, especially anger, that can run so high in way. In ‘On Anger,’ Seneca rails against the sort of anger that he defines as ‘a burning desire to avenge a wrong.’ If States only instill a strict sense of justice—at least that form of justice that is based on what is owed to another because of what he or she has done—the violence of war can spiral out of control as we move from one angry episode of revenge taking to another. If soldiers see their own honor as requiring restraint toward their enemies, now seen as merely fellow soldiers, such a spiral can be broken. Both sides in a war should lead their soldiers to feel honor-bound to restrain themselves and instilling a code of honor for all soldiers enforced by rules of war is one of the best ways to do this.”

For more along these lines, see Martha Nussbaum’s chapter, “Seneca on Anger in Public Life,” which begins with her recounting of a visit to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to lecture on a required cadet ethics course on moral dilemmas, in The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994). The work of the philosopher Nancy Sherman is also invaluable for this discussion.

By the way (and this speaks to Hidari’s comment @ 21), while it is true that we’re typically not talking about a war with regard to the current use of drones and targeted killing, the legal language of international and non-international armed conflict as understood in humanitarian international law is relevant, and it is within that ethical and legal context that principles associated with either jus ad bellum or jus in bello are often discussed: see, for instance, the volume Targeted Killings: Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical World, edited by Claire Finkelstein, Jens David Ohlin, and Andrew Altman (2012).

* See May’s War Crimes and Just War (2007).

Philosophers will typically then say that the argument is merely conditional, and that therefore, if the antecedent is false then the conclusion doesn’t follow. Clearly that’s right. But does it get us off the hook in a world of propaganda, mass media, think tanks and the like? […] Of course this kind problem, involving the escape of the argument from the seminar room into the wider world, isn’t limited to just war theory.

One clear example of this, not mentioned in your original post, is the “ticking bomb” hypothetical. Philosophers and lawyers start discussing whether it would be justified to use torture in an imaginary case specifically designed to elicit that response, then export their pre-determined outcome back to the real world, resulting in the horrors of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

Wow, Sandwichman, that’s a great quote. Time to reread “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” I think…

One clear example of this, not mentioned in your original post, is the “ticking bomb” hypothetical.

Jim Henley’s classic post on this is relevant here, too. These arguments always reason backwards from what the authorities want to do anyway.

Of course there’s a reason why the Strawser’s of the world focus on the trivial part of the argument: the hard part is hard! Do drone strikes reduce civilian deaths? Do sweatshops raise incomes for (some) poor people? These are very hard questions that can only be answered with both specialized empirical research and some strong ideas about how societies work. Better to leave them to the experts.

But it’s precisely because the question of whether drone strikes “work” is so hard to answer that we need clear ethical rules about (or better, against) them. A rule that assassination, torture, etc. should only be used when the benefits outweigh the costs (or even only when the benefits really, really outweigh the costs) is not operational, since the people who need to be restrained are precisely those who can claim privileged knowledge of the benefits and costs. (That Israeli press release, etc.) If ethics as such is going to contribute anything here, it can only be hard categorical rules: You may not torture. You may not assassinate.

(One of the specifically objectionable things about drones is that they seem almost designed for a campaign of assassinations. Which, as Hidari notes upthread, is a better description of the context than “war”.)

We’ve had these norms. They’re weaker now than a decade ago, but one wouldn’t want to be to exaggerate how much worse things are now — these norms have always been contested. What I’d like to see from political philosophy is some underpinning for these kinds of categorical prohibitions. Not because there can never be exceptions, but because categorical rules are the only kind that we can enforce on the authorities at all.

One good thing that seems to have been happening, a little, is increasing openness among liberals to the idea that we also need a categorical prohibition on war. I think if we were to take a poll of, say, CT regulars, we’d find far less support for the idea that the military is just another tool which government can use to pursue any desirable objective.

his career choices tell me that, as does his choice to write for the oxymoronic Journal of ‘Military Ethics’

That’s just nasty. Do you support expunging ethical behavior from the armed forces? Do you seriously deny that military practice involves ethical considerations? You were just fine with Abu Ghraib, because hey, there’s no such thing as military ethics?

It was a good idea then too.

I do think that Straswer is probably right about the claim that drones are more precise, result in fewer unintended deaths of civilian bystanders than other weapons, such as manned aircraft, carrying out similar missions. And this could become even more true of cyborg insect warfare in which individual robot insects could be controlled to kill single individuals.

Hidari @21
We do have declared war in Afghanistan though (or at least as declared as they get nowadays), and the attacks inside Pakistan are aimed at people who keep crossing the border into Afghanistan to fight.

To the best of my knowledge drone attacks do cause fewer unintended casualties compared to other forms of attack. The big problem is with intended casualties caused by misidentifying a target as hostile, which is a general problem with air power used in isolation.

I actually think Henley is wrong in his old post. Torture didn’t become a method of interrogation merely because lots of people enjoy torturing, but because it actually has some effectiveness (his honest pervert terrorist is far less plausible than numerous instances of suspects giving up under duress). Even if you made sure everyone in charge was a “good guy” who possibly hated torture, and you made great demands that they get results, they could wind up torturing. As with much of the justice system, I think the argument for prohibiting torture is not that it can never contribute to the properly formulated social good or whatnot, but that by permitting it at all you will almost assuredly wind up with abuse. That is a rule-utilitarian argument, which I understand not everyone accepts.

I actually think Henley is wrong in his old post. Torture didn’t become a method of interrogation merely because lots of people enjoy torturing

I suggest reading it again.

I’m struck by the juxtaposition of this discussion with the annual Atomic Bomb reconsiderations. “If it saved [Japanese/American/both] lives, then the bomb was justified, even necessary” is still pretty much the state of discussion, though the symposium linked there is much heavier on the “should not have been used” side (where I also fall, still) than usual.

In addition to all the good points regarding the limitations of drone warfare in strategic terms – we are all arguing it from the safe side.

If somebody ever managed to redirect drones towards, say, KStreet, the wailing & retaliation would be beyond hideous.

Analyzing argument as hypnosis rather than, say, logical proof, and the rhetorical structure of particular arguments as hypnotic trance induction followed by suggestions to the unconscious, is a sadly neglected topic.

It is well-known to students of hypnosis that the unconscious mind, for example, is incapable of processing a negation as exclusionary. The classic illustration is telling a person, “do not think of a pink elephant!” Logical exclusion may absolve the speaker of moral responsibility for the command to think of a pink elephant (“but, I told you, don’t do it!”, but it doesn’t reduce the effectiveness of the imperative one iota.

There are other hypnotic techniques commonly used in propaganda and salesmanship, such as deliberately distracting the conscious mind with some imponderable dichotomy. “There are two kinds of people . . . ” It works as well as the cinematic shiny pocket watch swinging as a pendulum, to increase suggestability.

A third is to transfer emotional associations from one already established trigger to one desired by the hypnotist, using the phenomenon discovered by Pavlov with his dog’s dinner bell (the dogs would naturally salivate when they smelled food, but from association, they began to salivate when they heard the dinner bell). So, a car salesman may ask you about your best memories of cars, and subtly touch your should or elbow, while you recall the enjoyable experience; then, later on, when he wants you to have those feelings about the lemon car he’s about to sell you, he’ll touch you again and, like Pavlov’s dogs, you will feel an echo of those good feelings, but associate them with what’s in front of you.

I don’t think you have to be an analytic philosopher to recognize that strong emotional associations are sometimes tasked to do a lot of work, even in purportedly dry academic exposition.

At its best, “just war” analysis has always struck me as a clumsy way to go about thinking about strategic and tactical effectiveness of war as policy. But, maybe, there’s no graceful way to think about war as a means to an end or a way to control a process productive of some desired good. War is, by its nature, a clumsy way of persuading others to cooperate. Still, watching documentaries on WWII, I am struck by how the sheer scale of the thing required enormous rationalizing effort, both to choose what to do, why to do it, and then to carry it out, logistically and administratively. Because of the documentary trail of that rationalizing effort, historians are able to document the many strategic and tactical errors — errors that the generals and politicians were, mostly, acutely aware of, at the time, again because of the rationalizing effort that created specific expectations before, and measured results after.

What strikes me about Obama’s Terrorist Tuesdays is just how unconcerned everyone is, about feedback. They do not really know, or apparently care very much, about who they are targetting or why they are targetting them. There’s no indication that they are working off a social theory (let alone a moral theory) of how these strikes are supposed to further state security interests.

It occurs to me that the elite likes the fake “war” of the Global War on Terror, precisely because it creates a dramatic framework, like a Hollywood screenplay, which frees leaders from the tedious constraints of exercising institutional power, which might entail deliberation and persuasion. War by drone strike is “war” and therefore empowering to the executive, in accordance with Shock Doctrine and authoritarian politics in general, in the sense that people are willing to accept massive accretions to the exercise of unconstrained authority, and it is also, in a weird way (since it does require a huge technological infrastructure), “small-scale”, and satisfies the well-known preference of executive committees to spend all their meeting time on trivial questions and issues.

These technical toys seem to accelerate a degenerate spiral of some kind, not just morally, in the ability of the elite to lead or manage affairs of state.

JQ@11: “there is an unstated premise, namely “the availability of drones won’t affect the frequency of war”. Empirically, it seems clear this is false.”

Very probably so. But you have to ask: are the wars that would have been prevented by the unavailability of drones those that were inherently unjustified, or those that while in themselves justified would not without drones have been accepted by the public on account of the casualties involved, both innocent civilians and our own soldiers?

There is a difference, you know: unless you believe all US wars are unjustified.

Is there already a name for the fallacy proposed by Jonathan 7?

Substituting for expensive institution or state-building in the territory of failed states

Bruce, I look forward to your plan for “expensive institution or state-building” in Pakistan. Just the executive summary will do. Thanks!

You’re rather missing the point. Better we don’t fight wars, but given that we are going to fight them, better that we use means that aren’t as likely to inflict massive casualties on bystanders.

And I think you’re the one missing the point: “given that we are going to fight them” is not a good assumption to make. The counterfactual to the US carrying out a campaign of assassination in Pakistan, Yemen, etc., is not full-scale invasion of those countries.

“Since there’s no actual war (an armed conflict between states or with belligerent powers aspiring to become states), maybe we could dispense with reasoning about drone attacks as a means of waging war, altogether.”

I wonder whether there’s a cottage industry of philosophers debating whether IED are, on moral grounds, preferable to suicide bombings. That is really the kind of question being debated here.

Aha. If me punching a random guy on the street into the face does less damage than me shooting him into the face, then I am justified to punch him. Ooookay.

That kind of reasoning is philosophy in the same way that leeches are medicine.

In Vietnam, a hostile Russia and China supplied and funded the other side in a civil war, in which the U.S. had no recognizable interest

Wow.

Ignorance like this is a real achievement–the Pentagon Papers were published something like 40 years ago. Congratulations, Bruce!

@Stephen: Given that most of the drone wars currently under way wouldn’t be fought at all otherwise (at least not by US forces), we now have pretty much the opposite of Strawson’s claim, namely that the civilian casualties caused by drones are sufficiently limited that their deaths are justified by the opportunity to kill bad people who would otherwise survive.

As you say, this might be true, since not all US wars are unjustified, but in practice the drone wars appear to me to be among the great majority of US wars that aren’t justified either because they directly do more harm than good or because any net benefit is outweighed by the undermining of the general sanction against wars of choice (undertaken both by the US and other powers).

Chris writes, “There’s quite a lot in what LeVine says that’s going to grate with philosophers.” It rather seems non-philosophers have found an occasion for which to prattle on about philosophy and philosophers, to wit:

“I guess a lot of philosophical reasoning works by reasoning backward from an intuition….”—A rather strong inference and corresponding blunt generalization based on one article (setting aside how accurate the synopsis of arguments in fact is), is it not?

“All the rest is just philosopher’s talk: scholasticism run wild.” Hmm: a constitutional animus against philosophy? Philosophy as scholasticism? Of course this assumes the term is purely pejorative, but assuming it refers to something like scholarly conservativism or pedantry, or some sort of sectarian narrow-mindedness, how accurate is that as a characterization of “philosophers’ talk?” One begins to taste a bit of sour grapes.

“I thought it was curious that philosophers, in concocting arguments about the real world, were not morally obliged to attempt to ascertain the facts about the real world. The philosopher is not talking about killing unicorns on Neptune; what makes his arguments interesting is that drones actually kill real people.” Res ipsa loquitur.

“I wonder whether there’s a cottage industry of philosophers debating whether IED are, on moral grounds, preferable to suicide bombings. That is really the kind of question being debated here.” Evidence of never having taken a philosophy course? Of having read works of philosophy? Of lacking a disposition for philosophical argument?

@JQ:

“Given that most of the drone wars currently under way wouldn’t be fought at all otherwise (at least not by US forces)…”

Obviously counterfactuals are difficult, but I really don’t see it. ISTM that in the absence of drones, the US would still be fighting these “wars” but doing so by 90s-style aerial bombardment and the occasional helicopter gunship, which would (1) lead to more civilian casualties (2) eventually lead to escalation into something even worse. Just look at US conduct before getting drones. The primary driver seems to be the wish to be seen to be “doing something”; civilian casualties (and maybe even operational success) are minor factors compared to that. Like Bruce Wilder, I don’t see feedback loops here – as long as people are being blown up, it’s “success.”

We have a crazy man running around stabbing people for his own ineffable reasons. Given that, I’m pleased that he’s decided to stop using a rusty dagger and switch to a sterilised scalpel. Yes, it would be nice if the stabbings would stop, but this is still a positive development.

I’m disappointed that only JW Mason has responded to the Benjamin quote I posted. What that suggests to me is that people are thinking of “war” as some kind of eternal, unchanging aspect of human nature that has nothing to do with what Kalecki called “The Political Aspects of Full Employment.” Meanwhile, over at Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View, the good people will grind on impotently about how somebody’s just gotta do sumpin’ about unemployment and not breath a whisper about the philosophy of drones.

I got news for you, folks. The real target of the drones is not the brown people they turn to grease stains. Just like the object of torture is not the poor schmuck with the electrodes attached to his testicles. It’s theatre, ladies and gents. A very special kind of theatre designed to keep the masses in their nationalistic seats while the vultures of finance pick their boneses clean. “[Mankind’s] alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

War debt is the mother of sovereign credit money. Unemployment is the lubricant and shock absorber that prevents capital from grinding itself to a seize-up. Credit money is only admissible remedy for excessive unemployment (all the rest is “LoL”).

That’s the way the money goes.
Pop! Goes the weasel.

@71: Drones are mostly used in Afghanistan, and their increased usage coincided with a steep drop in the rate of bombing campaigns in that war. I don’t see the working assumptions in this thread as being justified in an objective sense.

I also am not seeing the evidence that US policy was moved much, if at all, by military casualties in a volunteer force – how long did it take to leave Iraq, where there were substantial risks for soldiers over many years? How long have NATO forces been in Afghanistan?

Rlaing: “violence is a terrific way for one party to advance its interests at the expense of another, and often the only way”

Wow, just . . . wow.

So is it a given, then, that there are no terrorist-sponsoring groups in Afghanistan or the NW Province, and that the rest of the world has no rational basis to fear terrorist attacks originating from that quarter?

That’s right. If terrorist attacks originating in northwest Afghanistan are anywhere among the top 500 things you’re afraid of, you’re being irrational.

“That’s right. If terrorist attacks originating in northwest Afghanistan are anywhere among the top 500 things you’re afraid of, you’re being irrational.”

A sentence you undoubtedly would have written, with just as much self-satisfied brio, on 9/10/01.

A sentence you undoubtedly would have written, with just as much self-satisfied brio, on 9/10/01.

Ah, the old argument a 9/11, don’t see that so much these days.

So, lets see, in the last 100 years, 3,000 Americans killed in attacks originating in Afghanistan, that’s about 30 a year. About the same as the number of deaths from dog bites, and one-tenth the death rate from falls in bathtubs. No doubt you believe that the President must immediately assume dictatorial powers to ensure that all Americans install those no-slip rubber flower thingies in their tubs. Right?

So is it a given, then, that there are no terrorist-sponsoring groups in Afghanistan or the NW Province, and that the rest of the world has no rational basis to fear terrorist attacks originating from that quarter?

If I were in, say, South Korea, I think it’d pretty safe to say that I’d have “no rational basis to fear terrorist attacks originating from that quarter”. But you must mean something else by “the rest of the world”?

If the use of drones reduces civilian casualties compared to what? Going home and declaring victory? Leaving as somebody else’s problem (e.g. Russia, Iran, Pakistan)? Negotiation? International police work? Applying rules that limit warfare to what is obviously defensive, such as national guard? Testing original offer by Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden? Not funding Mujahideen? Meeting Osama’s three demands (haven’t we pulled out of Saudi Arabia anyway)? Not diplomatically blocking Palestinian statehood with Security Council vetoes since the 1970’s?

And there’s another logical problem here… A long lasting war converts civilians and inactive forces into combatants. So perhaps what needs to be counted is total increased or forced deaths?

Finally, there’s a future question. What will this lead to in the future? I suspect the answer is not less terror (from the skies and otherwise), death, and violence. And with the funds used for drone strikes, how many lives could be saved by other means?

There are a lot more antecedents than that. In relation to drone strikes, you need to accept that killing people is OK. With sweatshops, you need to accept that paying workers as little as you can get away with (which includes the use of force and fraud) is OK. And that’s only scratching the surface.

There are two repugnant forces that kill innocent people in the name of an indefensible religious radicalism, forces which, by their very existence, degrade the very ideas of human cooperation and human dignity. They are the Taliban, and the swimming pool.

There are two benign pastimes that sometimes result in a tragic fatality. They are the Taliban, and swimming.

I am tired of people making the wrong and lazy argument that so long as there exists a thing that causes as much or more harm than another thing, we are wrong in some (financial, moral, etc.) way for devoting more resources to one than the other.

Correction to my post #94, the main conceded problem with doomsday weapons is accidents including technical failures.

Indeed. And what about the (many) terrorist attacks that have their origin in Washington, D.C.? What are we to feel/do about them?

What if these terrorist attacks are among the top 500 things I object to on moral grounds, however unafraid of them I may be?
Then you are accepting innocent deaths as part of your moral crusade, even though no real threat is forcing your actions.

“What if these terrorist attacks are among the top 500 things I object to on moral grounds, however unafraid of them I may be?”

“Then you are accepting innocent deaths as part of your moral crusade, even though no real threat is forcing your actions.”

Yes, I accept that. I believe that certain things cannot be allowed to go on, even if they are no real threat to me, personally. That is the essence of certain liberal conceptions of justice that I believe in. By all means, tell some person stoned to death by the Taliban for asserting her basic freedoms that she a had a greater chance of drowing in a swimming pool, or that you weren’t going to intercede because ther stoning death was no real threat to you.

So yes, again, I accept that.

This is a question for the people above who know who they are: based on your logic, you seem to support the Taliban’s use of drones against the US. Is that true?

WL: “. . . with great success in reducing the frequency and severity of terrorism.”

And, you know that . . . how?

And, you know that . . . how?

“I don’t see any tigers around, do you?”

Bomb attacks always decrease bomb attacks. DO THE MATH.

@109
The PFLP still exists.
(google or wikipedia it)

Retrospective analysis. Consider various actual wars since 1945, and decide if unhistoric availability of drones would have helped the more technologically advanced and generally but not always pro-US side. (Not worth considering it otherwise; yes, with drones Geronimo might have defeated the US Army, but so what?) Possible examples:

Wars that would have been lost anyway even with drones: US in Vietnam, given corruption and incompetence of Saigon regime. Lost with fewer civilian casualties, though.

Wars that were lost but might have been won with drones: maybe French in Algeria, Russians in Afghanistan. CIA vs. Fidel Castro, if you count that as a war.

Wars where drones would have made little difference: Falklands, and not entirely clear which was (or now is) the pro-US side. Guevara’s doomed effort in Bolivia.

Wars that would have been won faster with drones: Oman? Russians in Chechnya ? First anti-Iraq war?

Wars where drones would have retarded victory: British vs. IRA in Ireland? Given outcry against unspeakably evil alleged British shoot-to-kill policy…

Further examples, and reflections on the morality/immorality of drones, welcome.

Adam @ 114

Why not simply assassinate criminals domestically? Is it a makework program for investigators and lawyers and judges, to give the accused due process?

Stephen, by definition having a capability always helps. At worse you don’t use it, assuming you aren’t General Bragg. The ethical issues of drones as compared to sending people with knives to knife people aren’t any different. I think you are barking up the wrong tree here.

Fundamentally we are in a new era where all democratic states face threats from countries without the means to control their territory. This means controlling it for them. If Pakistan wants to stop the drone attacks, they can invade the Northwest Territories and make it free of Taliban and al-Queda, just as European countries could arrest and imprison members of terrorist groups in the 1970’s.

If not drones, then what?

“During the entire course of this time Mossad has carried out assassinations of persons known to be planning and carrying out terrorist attacks, with great success in reducing the frequency and severity of terrorism. ”

This is actually funny. Israel is being held up as a model for how to deal with terrorism.

Watson Ladd @117:
Fundamentally we are in a new era where all democratic states face threats from countries without the means to control their territory. This means controlling it for them.

W/r/t Pakistan, it actually does have the means to control its territory in the relevant respects, I think. What it (meaning the Pakistan govt and military) lacks, for various reasonably well-documented reasons, is the will to do so. The Pakistan govt/military has been much more aggressive w/r/t, e.g., the Pakistani Taliban than w groups, such as the Haqqani network, whose main targets have been NATO/ISAF and Afghan govt forces in Afghanistan.

It helps to be a bit specific, b/c situations vary from place to place, rather than announcing the advent of a “new era” in which “democratic states” must “control” the territory of countries who cannot control their own.

If not drones, then what?

If you’re talking about Pakistan, the answer is actually fairly simple. You resolve India-Pakistan relations. Maybe the status of Kashmir has to change, though I’m not sure that’s as relevant now as it was, say, 15–20 years ago. In any case, if you want to take the primary motivation Pakistan has for tolerating/supporting fundamentalist Muslim militants, that’s the way to go.

(N.B. I’m going to go ahead and naively assume that you e.g. know the history of US-Pakistan relations, say in the 80’s.)

‘Fundamentally we are in a new era where all democratic states face threats from countries without the means to control their territory.’

‘ America is a plutocracy. Freedom House has long published a comprehensive international index of formal democracy, which the U.S. State Department found extremely convenient during the Cold War. If anyone today published a similarly careful and thorough index of effective democracy — a measure of the degree to which governments solicited and responded to public sentiment rather than money in the formation of law and policy — the United States would surely rank as low as many Communist tyrannies ranked on the Freedom House index.’

The drone killings seem to me an extension of the new model of war- Assassination. The fact that the US has moved from fighters to drones seems rather irrelevant in discussing if this war is justified. That drones cause less civilian death and are more effective for the task at hand should be seen as good if your supporting the US/UK alliance. If your supporting the Taliban/AQ alliance not so much.

Maybe the status of Kashmir has to change
——————

I know, when the hell is Pakistan going to stop occupying half of Kashmir? China has a piece too. Very few in the international community are willing to help India regain her patrimony. But, we shall overcome.

What exactly do drones do to minimize civilian casualties that manned aircraft couldn’t do (maybe better)?

How about giving everyone a bag with a million dollars in it and a plane ticket to anywhere?

Chris, your question about conditional arguments persuading people without evidence of the premise is surely partly supported by recent research showing that people believe a news story more often if accompanied by a photograph.

Even when the photograph presents no evidence for the truth of the story.

I just read a few initial comments and completely agree with Marc above. The question “are drone strikes morally justifiable?” considered in isolation from the larger political and historical context is artificial and trivial. Morally justified compared to what? Nuclear bombing? The proper object of moral inquiry and justification is not a mere tactic considered in isolation but rather all that a “conditional argument” brackets with the “IF.”

To me, the most interesting thing about drones is that there is no realistic defense against them but terrorism.

We should probably look at the introduction of drones as not altogether unlike the introduction of the crossbow. A certain element of “fair play” has been removed from war. I guess that is the best way to win. But expect an escalation of brutality from the other side.

To me, the most interesting thing about drones is that there is no realistic defense against them but terrorism.

Indeed. Our various armchair warriors’ arguments here all work, almost verbatim, as argument in support of 9/11-type attacks. If you live in Afghanistan, you face a very substantial risk of death at the hands of the United States government. Are you really supposed to forego the only tactics that give you some chance of striking back?

Strawser does reference this paper whose title follows my own preferred terminology. It contains the intriguing statement, at fn17, that existing UAVs and UCAVs rely, for at least some of their operations, on a human operator piloting them remotely via satellite data link.,/i> (emph. mine)

The AJ piece says, of Strawser’s academic paper, that the second [sic.] argument is that the use of drones is ethical, both because they reduce the risk to the “just war fighters” involved in operating them and, as important, lower the number of innocent civilians killed in strikes compared with other forms of attack. (emph mine).

But the paper cited in the AJ article is all about the obligation to protect one’s own combatants. The mention of civilians comes in an appended bit of objection/rebuttal business, the objection being that flying killer robots (FKRs) are less good at discriminating civilians from evil bastard who needs to be killed than their human equivalents would be (I admit I find it hard to do so in these cases too, and have to rely on the USG). The issue of failure of discrimination is addressed in the main body of argument, but only as a matter of technical efficiency.

In the little appendix, Strawser only says that FKRs must kill no more civilians than the equivalent manned vehicle (oh, and bellorum bellis bellis and all that – of course). All the ‘interestingly, they may actually be better’ stuff is, in the context of the paper itself, a bit of bonus contrarianism just thrown in and not relied on in any way – so in this context, he can get away with using quite inadequate evidence and still get through peer review/not have to put his name to rankly mendacious claims.

—

re: addendum. There is some similarity to the rhetorical device of ‘correctio’ (or metanoia), in which a bold claim is made then subsequently moderated or denied. Unobtrusive caveats which are there to protect a text on close reading but are effectively ignored by the general thrust of an argument are a closely related phenomenon, and the above section describes something similar. The status of the claim on a careful, literal reading of the text is that of a throwaway aside, but the quantity of verbiage expended on it and the appearance of making a serious point belie that reading. Also cf. the mad assumptions of neoclassical economics, which have blended into the background so that categorical claims can be made as though not dependent on such assumptions. Acknowledgment that these are unrealistic, along with a sheaf of disjointed research based on relaxing some of them (which research is thus not readily integrable into the dominant paradigm) is available in the bottom drawer to fend off criticism should it prove necessary.

In modern psychology, the foot in the door phenomenon is closely related. First a modest claim is made to gain assent, then the claim is ramped up, in slippery slope or sorites fashion.

Also, a classic study from the 90s, You Can’t Not Believe Everything You Read, might be relevant.

In the case of Stawser’s conditionals, it’s worth noting that these are made in what looks like the indicative mood, most obviously interpreted as material conditionals. The status of material conds with false antecedents is the topic of some philosophical debate – the classical and intuitionistic approaches would find that such a conditional comes out true as a whole, regardless of the truth or falsity of the consequent. But when the conversational or pragmatuic import of such statements is considered, such a conditional may have very low assertibility, or fail to be ‘robust’. For example, ‘if he’s an expert, I’m a Dutchman’ is intended to support modus tollens – denying an obviously false consequent is intended to convey the falsity of the antecedent. But it is not intended to support modus ponens: it is not robust to the truth of the antecedent. If it turns out that he is indeed an expert, one is not supposed to conclude that I am in fact a Dutchman.

Strawser seems to clumsily attempt an acknowledgement of something along these lines in his Graun piece: As with all conditional claims, if the antecedent is false, then the entire claim is invalidated.

This is not his general approach though – in the paper, he repeatedly says things like: It could, of course, very well turn out that OP is only vacuously true because the antecedent is false.

And immediately after that, he adds This paper will not primarily be arguing for or against the truth of OP’s antecedent, but instead assume it is true and argue that the normative consequent follows. Which caveat is (a) couched in relatively obscure terms (b) itself caveated with the term ‘primarily’ {c} makes explicit that we are talking about an assumption of truth – with the conversational implicature that such an assumption is reasonable – and (d) is premised on the preceding statement that the whole conditional is true in either case.

P.s. to js.:
The specific problem against which drones are directed (or misdirected, depending on one’s view) is not “fundamentalist Muslim militancy in Pakistan” but the presence of groups in the Pakistan border regions which have been carrying out attacks in Afghanistan and using their bases in Pakistan to do that w relative impunity. The Pakistan govt has been unwilling to move against them for reasons I mentioned above. Undoubtedly drones cause civilian casualties — I am sure that, among other things, innocent people (including children and adolescents) have been killed b.c. they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time — and undoubtedly the drone strikes have thereby created some new militants. The strikes have also killed a number of people who were completely legitimate targets.

Andrew Cady: not so. One could attack the operating bases from which the drones take off, use electronic warfare, shoot down the drones, or send commandos deep into Utah with orders to completely destroy the buildings used for drone operations and kill everyone inside. Killing civilians has nothing to do with any of these.

This line of argument inevitably eventually devolves into that ‘stick rule’ attributed to Socrates.

“Drones are more intuitively acceptable than older forms of targeted killing!”

“Sure; that’s what makes them worse. They make state assassination seem palatable and reasonable, by cosmetically improving on something that manages to be even more idiotic and repugnant. Sending in drones is bad, sending in tanks is bad, the word ‘worse’ doesn’t even need to enter into it.”

“Gasp! How can you say that? Drones are more targeted and focused! This means they result in fewer incidental casualties! That’s better!”

“The state could pursue an assassination strategy that results in zero incidental casualties. One such strategy is: don’t assassinate people. If they’re unwilling to accept that course of action and feel some sort of assassination is absolutely necessary to advance their goals, well, uh, they should consider what this implies that their most disgruntled citizens should do in protest. After all, assassinating the politicians who endorse and enable an assassination program would result in far fewer incidental casualties over the long haul.”

“So what you’re saying is you could care less if we continue with massive wars that kill thousands rather than drone attacks that only kill dozens. Are you willing to commit to that?”

“Just to be clear, in any scenario where we find the latter any slightest bit more acceptable because it’s better than the former, we’re also finding domestic assassination acceptable. Are you willing to commit to that?”

“No, I’m just asking you to find the former comparatively acceptable.”

“I refuse. The whole notion of ‘comparatively acceptable’ is so idiotic and repugnant that I can’t believe you’re adopting it. You can take any state action whatsoever and note it’s ‘comparatively acceptable’ to something even worse atrocity that the state has committed or considered committing. I could stand here and hit you with a stick for hours, and then point out it’s comparatively acceptable to me cutting off your arms. Does that mean anything? Does it prompt you to be any more accepting of my whacking you with a stick policy?”

“Well, I’d prefer it to you maiming me, obviously.”

“Well, if you’re willing to let that comparison be meaningful and relevant, then you’re stipulating that it’s alright for me to believe that my only options here are beating you or maiming you, so I guess I’d better get started with the beating. After all, I’d really hate to have to maim you.”

chris @146
Sure, the Taliban doesn’t have the means to try those things

While drones have no doubt been used against the Taliban, I don’t think the latter has been the main target. In Pakistan, the main target has been the Haqqani network and related groups. In Yemen, AQAP. Doesn’t alter chris’s point, but “Taliban” is not a synonym for “all groups vs which the US is using drones,” since these groups are somewhat distinct even when, in effect, allied.

«[…] it presupposes the use of military force against terrorists is illegitimate. That’s a tough position to hold.»

I do not think so. In fact it is the position that military force is needed that need justification.

Well, shit, my earlier point was pretty casually dismissed. I still don’t see how unless you’re seriously willing to take the position that plotting to kill innocent people isn’t criminal behavior or that attempting to stop people who are plotting to kill innocent people is itself morally impermissible.

Since I can’t see anyone seriously taking either of those positions, I think objections to drone use has to come from one of two directions. First, you think the strikes are directed toward the wrong people, who are in fact innocent. That may be the case. I have no idea, which may be another good objection, that it leaves us in the position of not really knowing whether the people our government is targeting to kill are really guilty of anything. However, that is the case regardless of whether drones or some other means is used to target these people.

The other direction is that drones make assassination the new normal, which is an argument I’m very sympathetic to. Reducing the monetary cost and also putting the operator at no risk certainly makes it easier to kill people, but then again, so does every other advance in defense and police technology. That hardly seems like a good argument that we shouldn’t develop or use better body armor, more accurate long-range rifles, intercontinental cruise missiles and smart bombs, or anything else that makes killing more discriminate and less risky.

But back to the main point, I just don’t see how you can look at the current use of drones as anything other than police action. You can consider it illegitimate police action, but that isn’t the same as saying it isn’t police action. Drones are a tool used to stop people who are engaged in criminal conspiracies. How you can take this simple statement of the way they are actually used as me arguing we should assassinate American criminals rather than prosecute them, I don’t know, but that’s at least the right way to frame the debate.

We have at least four options in how to actually deal with terror groups in foreign nations that don’t themselves police or prosecute the behavior. The first is to ignore them. The second is to attempt to arrest them and afford them due process rights. The third is to arrest them and not afford them due process rights. The fourth is simply to kill them, with drones being the cheapest way to do it.

It’s pretty clear to me why Obama has chosen the fourth. Doing the first would make it very easy for his political opponents to accuse him of being soft on terror and weak on defense, plus he may very well consider these people to be a legitimate threat, if not to actual domestic lives, then to foreign military objectives he still hopes to achieve. He won’t do the second or third because Bush tried those and they were too hard, cost too much, and are extremely risky.

But again, to be extremely clear, saying I understand why Obama would do this isn’t the same as saying it’s my personal first choice. I think option #1 is the best option: do nothing. Bolster domestic efforts and stop these people from carrying out any plots within the U.S. and I’m happy. I don’t really care if the Haqqani network destabilizes Afghanistan. I don’t think it would be stable if we completely removed Pakistan from the map. So please, at least argue with me on the basis of what I actually support, not some ridiculous assertion that I think we should assassinate all American criminals.

On a side note, on the question of whether drones reduce collateral death relative to manned aircraft, the answer is without a doubt yes. Drones can linger over and surveil a target for days, waiting for the best time to strike. They also have the advantage of being much, much cheaper than manned aircraft. Lack of operator risk is not the only advantage. To be clear, nobody in Yemen has any realistic chance of shooting an A-10 out of the sky, either.

A lot of fascinating discussion about the philosophy of using drone strikes. Has anyone actually seen ( personally) a drone strike? Understand why they are used in practicality? Surely this has to matter…

Drones ARE PRIMAILY a tool of surveillance. Only when the INTELLIGENCE service noticed that they could hook up a missile to this pervasive INTELLIGENCE asset, did they become strikers.

Current operations tends to align with ongoing surveillance operations. The strike shortens the action time peuod between identification of some “threat” to action. Historically, the time between intelligence on a target and the ability to act was comparitively long. Now, not necessarily so much

But why use them at all? Because they are easier to risk than US troops. Period.

Those in favor of drone strikes won’t be quite so happy when a foreign “criminal” is killed on US soil by a foreign drone. Not a police action… When you scrutinize the ease of employing a drone strike, I don’t get a sense of much restraint at all. I have the shot… Take it.

Finally drone strikes and the relayed policy of assassination fail to appreciate that the “cut off the head of the snake” theory doesn’t seem to hold.

Adam @153

I’d say two things in response:
A side point: Bush didn’t give any due process to any captured/arrested ‘enemy combatant’ until the Sup Ct forced him (and Congress) to do so. And even so it hasn’t amounted to all that much.

Main point: Your preferred option #1 does have something to recommend it; I’m not positive it would be my preferred option, though it might be. But it’s somewhat beside the point, since the current situation is that there is a war going on in Afghanistan in which the US is heavily involved. US soldiers continue to be killed: the number so far this month is 15, I believe. Other NATO soldiers are being killed. Afghans continue to die in larger numbers. Most Afghan civilians — not all, but most — are being killed by the Taliban and allies, whether inadvertently or deliberately. Thus the question or problem is not whether the Haqqani network “destabilizes Afghanistan”. The problem is: there is a war going on in Afghanistan, groups based in Pakistan have been participating in this war and killing people, including Afghan civilians and NATO soldiers, and have been using their bases in Pakistan as a way to fight in Afghanistan while avoiding (to some extent) the costs they would incur if they were based in Afghanistan, all while the Pakistan govt has mostly looked the other way.

Would everything in Afghanistan be fine if the Pakistani havens didn’t exist? Of course everything wouldn’t be fine. There would still be a destructive war going on. There would still be a weak and corrupt central government. But that doesn’t mean removing the havens, or more realistically harming the groups operating from them, makes no difference. This is not necessarily to say the current level of drone strikes is justified, or that drones on balance have done more good than harm: I think it may well be the other way around. I can’t imagine how frightening and alienating it must be to have these things constantly hovering above the area where one lives, even if one is not directly targeted. So I am not at all an enthusiast of drones. My point is only that the context in which they are being used has to be taken into account. On that general statement, at least, we probably agree.

A clarification to my earlier comment: Of course, we can and should judge tactics from a moral point of view (and the use of drones is a purely tactical course of action). My argument is NOT that once the decision to wage war has been made the choice of tactics is only a question of efficacy and not morality. However, while we can reasonably make an analytic distinction between the narrower context of choosing tactics and the larger moral-political context for the purpose of judging their efficacy, we cannot do the same for the purpose of judging their morality.

The question of the morality of a given tactic among a range of alternatives is addressed by a simple conditional argument: IF the given tactic achieves the same purpose with killing less people compared to the alternatives THEN it is morally justifiable. This means that the issue of moral justification really hinges on the said purpose, which takes us back into the more tangled political context. It also means that, theoretically speaking, the proper range of comparison for a given tactic includes courses of action that could achieve the said purpose without killing anyone.

Well, shit, my earlier point was pretty casually dismissed.

I don’t think a workable solution to your problem involves writing inflammatory paragraphs that catastrophically misrepresent what people have already said in response to you, couched in insulting positioning rhetoric and laden with ‘troll tells’ (the derogatory use of the word ‘seriously’ for example). What are you wanting to get out of the more through and less ‘casual’ discussion of your point that you are attempting to initiate? Or was that follow-up comment just meant to burn the place down while you walk away looking all cool?

etc: I think after 9/11 we would be fighting a war. There was widespread support for expelling the Taliban and al-Queda from Afghanistan. What is injust about shooting a bankrobber in the back is just as injust when he is shot in the front. When force is required, why should the police give a scoundrel the opportunity to pull one over on them?

We helped create Al Qaeda.
And they were at their weakest about one month after 9-11. The world was in shock; they had almost no friends. Within 3 years we made them millions. They’ve faded again, but now we’re fomenting sectarian war throughout the region, on the side of Saudi Arabia and Israel.
What could go wrong?

You all need to get out more. Too much time in the library is not healthy.

to etc.:

Someone who asserts that Saudi Arabia and Israel are “united” (comment #82 above) [you didn’t say the govts have certain convergent interests, you said united]; and that “we’re [i.e. the US?] fomenting sectarian war throughout the region, on the side of Saudi Arabia and Israel” (comment #163) is hardly in a good position to tell others that they are out of touch with reality. If Saudi Arabia and Israel are united, why doesn’t, e.g., Saudi Arabia propose that Israel be given observer status to attend the next meeting of the Arab League (oh, it has? sorry, my oversight). Why didn’t Saudi Arabia walk out of UNESCO when the PA was seated as a full member there (sorry, I also missed that).

http://mondoweiss.net/2011/05/the-only-democracy-israel-has-urged-us-to-intervene-to-prop-up-saudi-monarchy.html
Cut and paste below.
english.al-akhbar.com/node/4839

There’s more if you want it.

When force is required, why should the police give a scoundrel the opportunity to pull one over on them?

Watson, dear, you’ve fallen prey here to the exact error that the original post was about.

You point out nothing. You assume.

This all reminds me so very much of the arguments about bombing, napalm and defoliants in Vietnam all those years ago. The weirdness, the horror.

Haven’t followed discussion above…

To win the election Obama defined the Taliban rather than the Baathist party as his constitutive other, the Schmittian enemy in contradistinction to which he defined American identity.
With the nativists and birthers breathing down his neck, each drone strike was meant to Americanize Barack Hussein Obama and, in a way, America too in the sense of giving it an identity along the friend/enemy axis. I do not say this entirely as a criticism. At any rate, Obama is trapped by politics to prosecute the war against the Taliban, but he has already begun to step away from it. First came the offer to give a place to Afghani Taliban in a coalition government. Second was the attempt to specify the enemy not as the Taliban but the Taliban only insofar as it was a proxy of the Haqqani network.
But this creates problems. The ISI seems to trust the Haqqani network only to secure its interests in Afghanistan, and the concern is that if the Pakistani military cannot succeed in Afghanistan given its failure in Kashmir and the existential questions that raises about Pakistan itself, it will face increasingly violent attacks from jihadis at home as well as from within the military.
But the international community cannot be happy about giving the Haqqani-controlled Taliban power within Afghanistan as that will turn a country the size of France into a safe haven for terrorists from around the world and undermine its sovereignty.
It seems clear that any sovereign or autonomous government in Afghanistan will not be acceptable to the ISI as such a government would find it rational to seek out diplomatic and economic relations with India.

Exposure to conditional arguments, even without exposure to evidence for the antecedent, should, rationally increase belief (the exact proof is left to the reader/less tired Scriven)

An extension of the point that propositions carry more rhetorical weight than questions: presentation, oratory, poetry, etc.

See also, leading questions in court procedure.

So what happens if these guys are moving around HEU or VX gas or something? I don’t know what they are doing. Maybe the U.S. is just picking people out of a hat to waste hellfire missiles for all I know. It would seem to make a huge amount of difference.