The Princeton PhD
student Omar Bashir brings up an excellent point in his article, “How to
Improve the Drones Debate.” One of his six suggestions to improve the debate on
drone warfare is that participants must clarify and organize their ethical
objections. Prior to my participation in this course, I considered myself to be
against drone warfare. However, I never thought to consider the reasoning
behind my opposition. As an American citizen, I want to trust that the U.S.
government is making the right decision by using drones to target terrorists. Nevertheless,
I do not believe that it is warranted to kill innocent civilians in order to
achieve this goal. If drones are so accurate and have the ability to watch over
an area for days, why are there so many unnecessary casualties? The United
States will create more enemies from targeted killing with drones as the death
toll of civilians in Pakistan continues to rise.
The lack of
accurate statistics and biased media sources doesn’t help to persuade me of the
importance of using drone strikes. According to Charli Carpenter, it is very
difficult to find accurate reports on civilian casualties. Even though the
information comes from the same resources in Pakistan, the number of civilian
casualties varies depending on the media source. In her article, Carpenter
cites the statistic that the Pakistan Body Count reported 88 percent of all
drone strike casualties to be civilians, yet the New America Foundation claimed
that the rate of civilian casualties was only at 20 percent. How is it possible
for these two organizations to report different percentages of civilian
casualties given the same information? In his article, “Media, Drones and Rank
Propaganda” Glenn Greenwald discusses how American journalists choose to defend
government action, with little news coverage in opposition of governmental
actions. The majority of Americans choose to support the use of drone warfare
for the War on Terror as a result of the mainstream media’s one-sided
perspective.
Other than my
distrust with the information provided on the number of civilian casualties, I
am also concerned about the psychological impact of drones on the civilians who
are living in Pakistan. My roommate who I lived with while studying abroad in
London this past semester was from Pakistan. One night we had a conversation
about her experience with drone strikes. While she was fortunate to not have personally
lost any of her close family or friends, she knew of people whose villages had
been completely destroyed from drone warfare. I cannot imagine living in fear
every single day that I could be attacked at any moment. There must be some
other way to utilize drones without wrecking havoc on the daily lives of
ordinary civilians. I propose that drones only be used for surveillance in
order to pinpoint the specific location of the terrorist. Drones should only be
used as a method of killing if the target could be killed without risk to
innocent civilians’ lives. In my opinion, the negative impact of drone warfare
to society is not worth the apparent benefit to fighting the War on Terror.
I agree that it is incredibly unfortunate that drone strikes have had such a devastating impact in some of these villages. However, I also prescribe to the notion that they are much better and much more precise than the alternative: conventional military tactics.
ReplyDeleteA drone strike may have the ability to kill civilians, but is it be as many civilians as would be killed in a firefight with terrorists or insurgents?
I agree with Ramsey. The use of drone strikes has clearly generated a ton of problems for the United States, but I have yet to hear of another military tactic that could more efficiently eliminate threats without risking our own lives. I am not in favor of reliance on drone strikes, but considering the lack of viable alternatives, believe it is unfortunately the lesser of two evils.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the above two comments. I am in favor of drones, but I also realize that they are far from a perfect weapon. Civilians do accidentally get killed. However, civilians get killed during raids and firefights as well. Our technology is only going to get better, and improvements will be made to drones. Some time in the future I think they will be able to single out the target, or terrorist, and destroy only that without any collateral damage.
ReplyDeleteI agree that drones should be used for surveillance purposes, and only used for killing the target if there are no civilians around. I understand that drones are our future, but I believe we should improve the accuracy of the drones before we continue to use them for targeted killings.
ReplyDelete"I am in favor of drones, but I also realize that they are far from a perfect weapon." I thought that was an interesting statement. This notion of a "perfect weapon" is intriguing. I challenge anyone to actually find a perfect weapon, considering it is at heart, still a weapon and will kill like it is designed to do.
ReplyDelete