Defenders of this method blame the poor quality of the intelligence they have been getting about the locations of Al Queda leaders. When I heard them say this, I thought: “Okay. Sounds like you should have vetted your sources better; but now that you know how poor this intelligence is you will stop doing this, right?” Wrong. They think that because these drones sometimes kill a suspected Al Queda leader (usually along with his wife and six or seven children), the program is a success and should continue. On TV I watched retired General Barry McCaffrey (former Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) admit the statistics I cite above but nevertheless defend the Predator drone policy because the drone way of fighting is better than the one we had when he was young. When he was young, he said, he often had to shoot it out with the enemy from 20 yards away.

Summing up their view:

1. Military (or, at least, CIA) assassinations of suspected enemy leaders are okay. 2. When an assassination is okay, it is also okay to kill the victim’s whole immediate, if not extended, family, so long as it is less risky for us to do it that way. 3. Killing 49 (maybe more) civilians per Al Queda leader we manage to assassinate is acceptable. 4. What matters more than avoiding civilian casualties is making war easier and less dangerous for our soldiers – so that they don’t have to “shoot it out with the enemy at 20 yards away.”

I do not think that there is a true sentence in the last paragraph. But in this blog I will criticize only the last two, 3 and 4. I will criticize them together.

We ought to accept a principle that is suggested, if not endorsed, in Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (1977). I will call it the Free French principle:

When we judge how many civilian deaths to risk for the accomplishment of a military or law-enforcement goal, it should not matter what country we are in.

Walzer never says this; but it is the lesson that I take from a discussion in which he points out that during Allied bombing missions over occupied France during World War II, Free French pilots took greater risks for the sake of minimizing civilian casualties than did British and American pilots. The principle implies that the British and American pilots were wrong to care less about French civilians than the French pilots did.

The Predator drone policy violates the Free French principle in spades. There is no way that here in the U.S. we would tolerate, say, the F.B.I. killing 49 civilians in order to kill one suspected Al Queda leader – even though an Al Queda leader here would be far more dangerous to us than one in South Waziristan. We would not tolerate half, or even a quarter of that number of civilian casualties. I do not think that we would accept one civilian casualty, if the F.B.I. said, like General McCaffrey, that the main thing was that they avoided hardship and risk for themselves.

But why accept the Free French principal? I think that morality requires it, and I would love to talk about that.. But here I will not argue for that, directly. Instead, I will argue that if we do not accept it, then we are stupid.

We would be stupid not to accept it because we cannot win in Afghanistan, or anywhere, where we say, with our policies and actions, that their lives are less important than our lives. The Taliban are brutal, and most Afghanis would prefer that they were not in charge. But many Afghanis think that we are worse, and they are right if we are willing to kill 49 of them to get one suspected Al Queda leader. They may not know much about us; but I’ll bet that they can guess that we would not kill 49 American civilians for a chance at killing one suspected Al Queda leader. They sometimes see us take great risks to avoid American civilian casualties, and even “shoot it out with the enemy at 20 yards away," if that is what it takes to save Americans. So they know, from our methods of fighting in their country, and in neighboring Pakistan, that we don’t care much about them. With methods like the Predator drone program, we will lose in Afghanistan and Pakistan simply by being crueler and less concerned towards them than the Taliban.

If Obama plans to continue in Afghanistan with such Bush Administration methods as the Predator drone program, then we should get out now, since every life lost in our effort – American, Afghani, Pakistani – will certainly be lost in vain.

Having said that, I do not think that we have to lose in Afghanistan. But if we are going to win, we must value the lives of Afghanis in something like the way we value our own, and even our soldiers’, lives. As it stands now, even the Taliban appears to value Afghani lives more than we do. No wonder we are not winning.