By Mary Ellen O’Connell

The United States is using combat drones — remotely piloted missile aircraft — to target terrorist leaders in the volatile border area of Pakistan and Afghanistan. This continues despite the high number of civilians killed. Credible estimates find that, between 2006 and early 2009, about 700 civilians were killed in the course of targeting 14 individuals — a ratio of 50 people killed to each one targeted.¹

Counterterrorism expert David Kilcullen wrote in The New York Times that killing leaders of terrorist groups has only a short-term impact on repressing terrorist violence, while every civilian killed in such actions “represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement …” ²

In June 2009, Gen. Stanley McChrystal restricted the use of airstrikes in Afghanistan because of the high number of civilian deaths. He ordered that “[t]he restrictions … be especially tight in attacking houses and compounds where insurgents are believed to have taken cover.” 

U.S. Army soldiers on an early-morning patrol mission near Forward Operating Base Baylough, Zabul, Afghanistan, in March 2009. Photo credit: U.S. Army (Flickr).

By David Cortright

This article includes video content. (4:00)

The goal of defeating Al Qaeda and preventing global terrorist strikes is a just cause. But current U.S. war policies in Afghanistan will not achieve that goal. In fact, they may make matters worse. U.S. policy in the region is based on the assumption that war is a necessary and appropriate means of defeating Al Qaeda-based terrorism. The United States also assumes that the Taliban is equivalent to Al Qaeda, and therefore it is a legitimate target for a multi-year counterinsurgency war. These assumptions are questionable — strategically and ethically.

By Michael Desch

The United States’ military response to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan following 9/11 was morally justified. It was an act of self-defense against a dangerous Taliban regime in cahoots with the perpetrators of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But this necessary war to topple the Taliban and destroy Al Qaeda has been taken to unnecessary extremes, raising doubts about the wisdom of the Obama Administration’s escalation of the war there now.

The United States should not have been surprised by the Al Qaeda attacks; Osama bin Laden and his colleagues made little secret of the grievances they harbored against the United States. Their 1998 fatwa listed their casus belli as the presence of large numbers of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia — the home of two of Islam’s holy sites, Mecca and Medina — and the long record of nearly unquestioning U.S. support for the State of Israel, which occupies Islam’s third holiest site, the Harem al-Sharif in Jerusalem.