America's Drone Campaign Is Both Moral And Effective

Bug splats. That’s what the American operators of drones, sitting in safety thousands of miles away, call the casualties of a drone attack in Pakistan or Yemen. Why bug splats? Because that’s what a human body zapped by a drone looks like on those Americans’ video screens. Thousands of those splats were in fact innocent bystanders unfortunate enough to be nearby the “target”. We call this warfare but it isn’t: it’s assassination. Drones allow political and military leaders, unhampered by public or legal scrutiny, to eliminate anyone they want killed. But moral and legal arguments aside, what do drones actually achieve? A drone strike is a sure way to inflame a community against the West and throw it into the arms of the local militants. In sum, drones are not just illegal and immoral. They are counterproductive. That’s the cry we hear as we learn more about America’s drone programme. But do the gentle souls who condemn drones have a better strategy for dealing with the militants operating within the borders of states that want rid of them? In this kind of situation where you’re not fighting a regular army, targeting enemy ringleaders is an imperative. And drones, it turns out, are more effective than troops in hunting down the bad guys and cause far fewer civilian deaths than conventional warfare. In many cases they are actually welcomed by the local population who are only too happy to see the militants come under attack. Thanks to drones, jihadis now know there is nowhere to hide. No one is saying they are pretty: violence and death are always abominable. But in an imperfect and often violent world, the use of drones is moral and effective. In this debate from February 2013, author and broadcaster David Aaronovitch and writer and columnist Douglas Murray proposed the motion. It was opposed by Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield, and Civil Rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. The debate was chaired by Jeremy O'Grady, Editor-in-chief of The Week magazine.