An uninvited Pakistani funeral guest...
I am hardly a pacifist. Wars can be necessary, and I am usually supportive of American uses of military power abroad. Nor do I believe that civilians, of our nation or others, can claim ethical immunity from the perils of armed conflict. Wars are waged between peoples, not governments, and the people whose governments make war or provoke it are accountable. Citizens of warring countries cannot be fairly called “innocent,” unless they are actively opposing the war and working to bringing it to a peaceful end. I believe that Truman was right to drop the first atom bomb.
Still, for a nation to intentionally target civilians in warfare, or to recklessly endanger them for a questionable military purpose, is indefensible. For a nation to do so in another nation with which it is not at war is…murder. And this, it appears, is what the United States is doing in Pakistan.
Glenn Greenwald, a human rights commentator at Salon.com, has written a disturbing account of current U.S. drone operations in Pakistan, citing a thorough and apparently objective investigation that reports:
“The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed. The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a “targeted, focused effort” that “has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties”. . . . A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts. Although the drone attacks were started under the Bush administration in 2004, they have been stepped up enormously under Obama. There have been 260 attacks by unmanned Predators or Reapers in Pakistan by Obama’s administration – averaging one every four days.”
What the report tells us is, as Greenwald succinctly says, “(The) U.S. first kills people with drones, then fires on the rescuers and others who arrive at the scene where the new corpses and injured victims lie.” The theory is that when you kill a bad guy, the odds are that bad guys are the ones most likely to show up at his funeral or to try to recover his body. Nice theory, but it is still disturbingly close to targeting Red Cross workers and mourners, both of which are war crimes. The United States is not at war with Pakistan. It may, with a little bit of stretch, ethically target terrorists and Taliban who are hiding out in that barely governed country, but killing citizens is unacceptable, and targeting them, which is what dropping bombs on funerals does, crosses from unethical into the realm of evil.
As Greenwald writes, “Whatever else is true, it seems highly likely that Barack Obama is the first Nobel Peace laureate who, after receiving his award, presided over the deliberate targeting of rescuers and funeral mourners of his victims.”
Ah, yes.
Hope and Change.
Ethics Alarms 
No shit. You actually quote Glenn Greenwald! God bless you. (Like I said before, Jack, I believe you have a good heart… forget about Stella’s assertion that you’re a paud shill.)
Believe it or not, I admire Glenn Greenwald, who has a great heart, and an even better mind.
Wow! Jack, I knew Stella was wrong when she said you were a shill. I am vindicated.
That, Jeff, is what’s great about Jack Marshall’s blogging. You don’t have to agree with his politics to get something out of it. He has his biases, as do we all, but they follow after his reason, not vice versa. It’s an increasingly rare virtue, it seems.
I think you and Greenwald are wrong this time.
On the matter of U.S. forces targeting combatants in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Greenwald comes off like Howard Beale in the movie Network. Paraphrasing the “voice of God,” conveyed to Beale by Arthur Jensen: The world is a war zone. (applied to the particular war at issue here)
Thinking of warfare in terms of “declared” war and laws of war; innocents and civilians; “rescuers” and “mourners;” collateral damage; murder, and war crimes, and applying those terms particularly to the acts of war the United States is currently committing (and preventing) in Pakistan and Afghanistan, is to think of things that do not exist – a view of war so clearly irrelevant (never mind narrow and rigid), it’s delusional. If you agree with even just one of the nuclear attacks on Japan, you concede my point. In effect, you raise the question of whether “precision strike” and improvised explosive operations, given their obvious limited effectiveness, are merely cowardly and/or otherwise pathetically convenient alternatives to WMDs.
Of course, the U.S. has no WMDs. (That is actually a more credible statement than Iran’s Ahmedinejad saying that there are no homosexuals in Iran.) The U.S. has some weapons that might function like WMDs, if the U.S. were to use them, which it will not do. The U.S. has shown such reluctance to use WMDs, and has eschewed using them for so long, having used them only twice in 1945, the world can now rest assured that the U.S. has no WMDs. Reluctance proves lack of will, eventually. Lack of will negates capability, every time. A self-idled, self-paralyzed United States has nowhere to go but down. The Yanks’ bluffs have been called; the U.S. is disarming and retreating, while countries like Iran are arming-up and venturing forth with relentlessly increasing audacity – and more than negligible success. I know: that all an aside, irrelevant to ethics.
What are you talking about? Of course the US has WMDs. The US is one of the very few countries that can be trusted with WMDs….I thought. If we accept the kinds of tactics you are shrugging off, then we can’t be.
If you are saying that things are so complicated and chaotic, the US is justified in abandoning all principles of human rights and dignity, you could not be more wrong.
There are tough utilitarian trade-offs in wartime, true enough. The first A-Bomb was a major one, but also a clear call: a mainland invasion would have cost more American AND Japanese lives, or, at least, there was good reason to believe so. How you get from a one-time unique decision like that to intentionally targeting rescuers and mourners in nation we are not fighting is beyond me. Without rules, there are no limits. Without limits, there can be no standards and no restraint. Why not just incinerate the whole country, then? Why not nuke Afghanistan?
I have no problem with drone warfare. I have a problem with such wanton disregard for non-combatants that we use traditional white-flag, cease-fire events to flush out our enemies. The US has to either fight wars on a higher ethical plane, or give up on its founding documents for all time. The whole world is NOT a war zone, and it up to the US to keep it that way, not to make it more dangerous than it already is.
I look at things like this, then I watch the news and see Syrians asking where we are? They say “We are dying here trying to free ourselves from a dictator, where is the U.N, where is the United States?” It really makes me feel terrible as a voice inside me says “sending Predator drones to kill some people at a funeral.”