Maybe you stop anything that carries the slightest risk of killing innocent people on foreign soil of countries you are not at war with?
This supposed us vs the evil terrorist mentality is used on all levels of force to treat other lives destroyed in the process as subpar and of little value.
What would your argument look like if a Pakistani drone killed a wanted murderer in your neighborhood taking down a family of five with two kids in the process?
If you're saying we cannot sit back and not get involved in this because we have a terrorist problem - let me remind you that we had/have Bin Laden and the Taliban (funded in the 80's), Isis (funded anti-Assad groups), instability in Iraq and Syria precisely thanks to US intervention in those regions.
Of course the existence of these groups is great for politicians and the military-industrial complex, since the former get to avoid issues at home and expand government powers and the later reap financial windfalls.
Surely this cuts both ways. Terrorists over in Syria and Yemen have a very limited capability to harm us. They can be effectively banned from planes once they're identified. They have no long range missile capability. (There's a problem of shortrange missiles being fired from Pakistan into Afghanistan, though). So the whole thing resembles colonial policing: the small group of westerners trying to balance power among the local factions for their own political advantage.
(Anyone going to suggest that drones should have been used in Northern Ireland? Or that when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found he should have been taken out with an airstrike in suburban Boston? No?)
There's no grey area in my mind here. It's disgusting to me that people could think its OK to accept killing civilians including children as collateral damage in occasional strikes, despite surely they are doing their best to avoid/minimise this. Even if stopping these strikes increases the risk to myself and my family I feel this is risk a moral society must accept. To do otherwise makes us terrorists too.
To imply that because some "target" that is a member of a community is intentionally surrounding themselves with civilians for some sort of protection is a little disingenuous in my opinion.
You ask "are you willing to send troops on the ground and live with US casualties?" No. No I'm not willing. Because it isn't necessary. I want to be shown this new kind of war has some material benefit. I see no evidence for that.
How many innocent lives will be lost if we do nothing?
This leak isn't a big deal because everyone knows that waging war like this has collateral damage. So no one is surprised that innocent people get killed in military actions.
I think it would take a lot for people to care about this.
The answer to this might surprise you. Is the whole strategy working or is it just making the whole region from Libya to Pakistan to Turkey less politically stable and more violent? It's not an easy question to answer, but we've been doing it your way since 2001 and the situation has got worse. I'd like to propose the radical strategy of "not killing people" and see how it works out.
People only accept "collateral damage" until it has a human face. The picture of the dead boy on a Greek beach turned around attitudes to the refugee crisis.
I feel like this is hard to quantify. The thing is we are going to continue exploiting these regions and generally doing things that the people of these regions don't like.
We can't really have a live and let live policy where we keep fucking people over so I feel like that is kind of off the table. On the other hand, there haven't been any attacks on our soil or even high impact attacks really since we started blowing people up with robots.
If there was another high profile attack it would result in an intensely hawkish political environment where we would lose more civil rights and most likely blow up another country like Iraq. That would really kill a lot of people. So if blowing away a bunch of people in countries that barely have sovereignty keeps things in check then it isn't really the worst plan.
It is really not worth talking about idealistic ideas about: A) not fucking over people B) not doing anything
option B is way too politically dangerous for our leaders anyway, and it is obvious that A isn't going to happen. I think the best we can hope for is improvements in targeting for the assassination of people with interests that are opposed to US interests.
More innocent lives were lost in Iraq after we intervened than before. So my estimate would be: Fewer.
I think that's what got people riled up about drones. More than anything it is a symbol of our foreign policy, and the individual lengths as a nation we will go through to "get what we want."
Who's responsibility is it to determine and separate the supporters from the innocent? The attacker's push is to label them enemy, while the defender would label as innocent. It's impossibly hard to do this at a distance, so therefore, are you willing to send troops on the ground and live with US casualties? Or are you willing to let the terrorist go and risk increased turmoil in the region?
Let's remember this is an extremely difficult task and job, and in the current state of affairs, I don't think there is a right answer.