What do you think Pakistan would do if we stopped doing their bombing for them?
I've got issues with our drone program but I think a lot of people are really ignoring the 900 pound gorilla of this: if we stop, Pakistan and Yemen go back into ground wars against huge parts of their own people.
There's no getting around the ugliness of what we're doing: we're doing corrupt and awful governments' bombings for them. Worse yet, in doing that we kill innocent people. But what we get from that, why we're doing it, is that if we stop we think that the governments are going to send in their armies again. We get to control the targeting and the tempo, and US officials honestly do think we are killing fewer people than would die in the alternative. I italicize that because I don't even see this argument jeered on DU, I simply don't see it brought up at all.
Maybe they wouldn't send in their militaries (Yemen almost certainly would, but Pakistan I'm iffy about). But if Pakistan doesn't, Waziristan goes back to how it was in 2000: how many people die then? Contrafactuals are hard, but that's the point: it's not an easy question. It wasn't easy in 2003 and it's not in 2013.
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