Kenneth Anderson has an essay in Commentary called “The Case For Drones,” arguing that conservatives should accept drones as effective, moral, and basically awesome, and that any conservative who doesn’t is a kooky isolationist. I suppose some drone pushback from the neoconservative wing was expected after Rand Paul grabbed the spotlight for the libertarian wing a couple months ago, but I’m not sure I’m convinced by Anderson’s case.
To be fair, he makes some good arguments against the weaker, more tangential anti-drone claims, such as the hazards of remote impersonal killing (he asks how is it any less impersonal than an old-fashioned pilot dropping bombs on things he can’t see, and says we still need ground contacts for drone-able countries), or the slippery slope that killer drones will soon be circling London or Paris (he says we only need them in countries with weak governments that can’t control their insurgents). But those kinds of things were never my real problems with our drone policy. Regarding the heavier claims, my anti-drone bias remains skeptical.
Are Drone Strikes Effective?
Anderson argues against the claim that drone strikes are counterproductive because the resentment of civilian casualties creates more militants for every one we take out. In a response that seems bizarre to me, Anderson claims that “village-level resentments fueling recruitment… matters far less in terms of war fighting when the United States no longer has infantry in those places.”
Maybe I’m missing something, but I thought we were striking militants because they were planning attacks against the United States, not because they might attack our nearby soldiers. So, hey man, villagers might join al-Qaeda after we drone-kill their civilian relatives, but it doesn’t matter because we’re getting our troops out of there anyway and sending them back home, which is actually the place those new members are plotting to attack. What?
Anderson also seeks to downplay how much Pakistani citizens hate the drone strikes, apparently putting more trust in something a soldier “remarked” to him than the actual data, which he also misrepresents:
Do Gallup polls of the general Pakistani population indicate overwhelming resentment about drone strikes—or do they really suggest that more than half the country is unaware of a drone campaign at all? Recent polls found the latter to be the case.
There was a Pew poll indicating that “just over one-in- three Pakistanis (35%) have heard about the drone strikes,” but Anderson conveniently leaves out the rest of the details: “Nearly all (93%) of those who are familiar with the strikes say they are a bad thing.”
Instead, Anderson takes the time to make red-herring arguments against ever fearing blowback, because, hey, if George McClellan hadn’t been replaced because he was too concerned about blowback, “the Union would have lost the Civil War.” Ah, so we point out how different the global war on terror is from traditional warfare to defend the necessity of drone strikes, but we’ll draw random historical parallels to downplay the arguments against them. What?
If anything, I might argue that blowback is more likely from arbitrary targeted killings that drop out of the sky into normal life and accidentally kill civilians than it is from the sort of traditional bombing of countries at declared war. So I don’t think Anderson has made a convincing case that the drone strikes are not counterproductive.
You must be logged in to post a comment.