Centerfield

Interesting problem. Considering how clan orientated and rabidly fundamentalist Muslim that area of the world is, I'm not sure there could be any real innocents in the same building. The people who invited him into their house knew the risks.

If however you are willing to make the invalid (IMHO) assumption of innocent civilians present, such a strike will make a town of sympathizers into active members. I would have either sent in an assault team or waited for a better shot.

Part of the dillema is misrepresentation. Many of those "civilians" aren't innocents. Children of course are not responsible, but the adults in that house almost certainly weren't hostages, but AQ collaborators. And they are responsible for their children as well. It is impossible to avoid civilian casualties in wartime. Short of just refusing to fight at all. Surrender. If history is any guide, this means that YOUR civilians will then be the ones to die.

Moral purists demand "civilized" warfare, but there is no such thing as perfection, our enemies don't follow the "civilized" rules, and war isn't all that civilized in the first place. Saddam put anti-aircraft installations on hospital roofs, for example. Al Qaeda had no problem at all with targeting and killing thousands of American civilians. We will not target civilians, but it's impossible to avoid some civilian deaths if we are to fight at all. Especially against an enemy that hides among the civilian population.

We can talk about the moral calculus all we like, but the fact is that while we can work to minimize civilian deaths, we can not avoid them short of surrender and capitulation.

Cogitate on the logistics and politics of sending in assault teams, Bob, and you'll know why they didn't.

What Tully said.

War is so very different from calculus. Bottom line, like Tully said, is that innocents will die even if we don't mean them to or want them to. Regrettable things happan, but laying down our arms or fighting handicapped by the delicate sensibilities of armchair hand-wringers just isn't an option.

Setting aside the question of whether the civilians really are civilians or are innocent (which obviously changes the calculus), I think people here are too dismissive of the morality of this. Even if we aren't targeting them, if the foreseeable effect of our actions are that civilians are killed, this should be problematic both morally and pragmatically. No, Tully, I am not a moral purist, I recognize the need to take actions in the real world that are not pretty. But I think simply dismissing the question is pretty arrogant.

Even more so when you consider that these aren't American civilians, but Pakistanis (again, assuming that they are civilians). It's one thing for the US to say that we will sacrifice American civilians for a greater end. It's another to say we will sacrifice civilians in other countries. Do we have the right to sacrifice Pakistanis to (in theory) save American lives? If it's a war against Pakistan, probably so; if it's a war against groups within Pakistan that might have nothing to do with the Pakistani government or people, I think it's a lot more problematic.

And, frankly, I'm getting tired of the argument that our enemies are barbaric, therefore we shoud be barbaric. The fact that Osama bin Laden kills civilians doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about what our actions do. I believe in pragmatism, but there is such a thing as taking pragmatism too far. At the very least, can't we at least acknowledge that this is at least morally problematic, evenif we think it's necessary? Or does basically anything go? What happened to the "decent respect for the opinions of mankind?"

Marc, it's certainly a worthwhile question. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the answer is all that complex or that we need to spend months of handwringing, as a society, to debate it. The civilians killed in this instance, while technically "Pakistani" in fact live in remote areas that are not realistically within the control of the government of Pakistan, and they generally do not support the government of Pakistan. In other words, those killed were at least part of a group that has nothing to do with Pakistan or the Pakistani goverment. They were not random civilians in downtown Islamabad.

Keep in mind that we are hardly the only ones with moral culpability here. If we hid our armed forces within hospitals and schools and generally used innocent civilians as shields, that would be pretty bad, wouldn't it? We cannot allow men of evil will, intent on causing us grave harm, to escape capture or retribution by hiding among civilians... even when (unlike here) those civilians are completely innocent of collaboration with the evil.

In doing so, we are not resorting to barbarism. Barbarism would be if we killed Osama's family because of what Osama did. Barbarism would be if we levelled Tikrit or Fallujah simply because a few of the residents harbored terrorists or insurgents. Attacking a legitimate target who has decided himself to endanger civilians by hiding amongst them in reliance on his perception of our softness is not barbarism.

Marc,

Who's dismissing it? My point, and I think that of others as well, is that this is not a new question, that the calculus is as it is, and that our tactics are likely to be dictated by necessity moreso than the idealisitic sensibilities of those safe behind the lines.

Dismissing it means declaring that the concerns voiced do not merit consideration. But I don't see that above. I think they DO merit consideration, and that it's the sort of consideration that many have undertaken, and indeed that our decisionmakers should and must undertake if we are to retain our humanity. I don't have reason to believe that those conducting the war have not undertaken such considerations. As you imply in admitting that the calculus varies, undertaking such considerations just is NOT any sort of guarantee against tragic loss of life.

Where, really, is the evidence that such considerations have not been undertaken, and that we have blithely adopted a policy of careless or even callous disregard for civilians who live or have been placed in harm's way? I don't see it.

So while I agree oith you that this issue merits concern, I don't agree that it's being dismissed, or see evidence that it has been dismissed. Now, those who oppose our efforts don't face much of a challenge in mounting immediate-surface-appeal support for theirhypothesis that we are merely callous barbarians, because all they believe they have to do is keep a body count of of dead and wounded civilians, and claim that this proves their case. The question is, should raw numbers be taken as sufficient evidence of our callous disregard, or is this more likely evidence that war is composed of deeply tragic circumstance? Absent more evidence than this, I am comfortable thinking that we scrupulopusly avoid targeting civilians and that we do our best to avoid putting them in harm's way so long as we don't have to avoid crucial military objectives.

I agree with you that the argument that we must match our enemies' barbarism is a crappy and indeed morally bankrupt argument.

Pat,

I don't disagree. All I'm saying is that we shouldn't simply dismiss the issue of civilian deaths simply by saying the other guys are worse. And, even if, as you say and I think is probably correct, the other side is hiding among the general population, that doesn't absolve us of responsibility for civilian deaths (even though the prime onus might well be on the militants). There might well be situations where we have to let the militants escape rather than risk the consequences of killing innocent civilians. I guess you would call that "softness" but I don't see how you can simply ignore the moral issue of civilian casualties. It's easy to sit back here and say that; you might not think the same way if it was your family at risk--even if it was the terrorists that had put them at risk. I don't think we have the right to simply ignore those considerations, especially in someone else's country.

I agree that such matters can be highly situational, with the morality (to the extent that morality can exist in war) varying depending on a host of factors, from the certainty of the intelligence to the "innocentness" of the civilians. And I certainly agree that all those factors should be considered each time a decision to ues deadly force such as was recently done in Pakistan is made. I would note that from everything I've read of the CIA's review process for making these case-by-case decisions, they do in fact take all these factors into account, with higher level approval and deeper review and justification required when there is a significant risk of civilian casualties.

I don't see where I "dismissed" the deaths of innocent civilians. Nor do I see where I said that because our enemy is barbaric, that we must be barbaric. I pointed out the reality--you cannot fight a war without civilians getting killed. Whether you are trying to kill them or not. And if you decide to not "make war" so as to avoid killing civilians, when you have an enemy actively trying to kill you that doesn't give a hoot about the morality of "collateral damage," then you sentence your civilians and soldiers to die. You're killing your own, if not directly.

We can try to avoid the killing of innocents. But if we insist on going to any lengths to avoid it, then we must stop fighting. Surrender. There is no other way to accomplish it when fighting an enemy that hides within the civilian population. And if we simply want to go to great lengths to avoid killing civilians, we will waste the lives of one hell of a lot of good American soldiers in the process, and the lives of other civilians (both ours and our allis) because those lengths will require either forgoing opportunities that weaken the enemy and save the lives of our soldiers and civilians by shortening the war, or because we spend lots of soldier's lives sending them on tough missions with their hands somewhat tied, missions that could have been accomplished with a Predator and a few Hellfires. And still, innocents will die.

If we had sent a special forces team into those houses to kill the AQ attendees, they would have either killed innocents in the process, or taken heavy casualties themselves by having to be ultra-careful about "collateral damage." And by the time an assault could have been mounted and delivered, the targets could well (probably) have been gone. Not to mention the difficulties of extraction, and the inevitable political/diplomatic fallout. You don't avoid that by using troopers instead of UAV's. It remains. It might even be worse.

How many US soldiers are you willing to sacrifice to save the life of the wife or child of an AQ member? Whose patriarch has placed them in danger by bringing "the boys" home for brunch? How many American or Iraqi civilians is it OK to have blown into bits because the enemy hides behind human shields, and disregards the safety of their own families?

No easy answer there, and certainly no mathematical one. No simplistic categorizations. Just the fact that war is a damn bloody business. We can not target civilians, because it goes against our morals. We can do our best (or rather, the commanders in the field can) to minimize civilian casualties, but often only by trading the lives of our own. But there is simply no way to avoid civilian casualties entirely.

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