Flit

Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan

NY Times:

Evidence is mounting that fraud in last weekend’s parliamentary election was so widespread that it could affect the results in a third of provinces, calling into question the credibility of a vote that was an important test of the American and Afghan effort to build a stable and legitimate government.

“You will get as many votes as you asked, just pay 72,000 Afghanis ($1,500),” said the election official, who identified himself as the head of the polling center.

Just a couple margin-notes on this: the Achakzais as a clan are as about as pro-Western a group of Afghans, generally speaking, as there are left in Afghanistan. Maruf and Arghistan Districts, where the fraud was reported, have been largely non-permissive to Western or reliable ANSF forces for most of the last few years, despite being fairly heavily populated. And the close identification of the "master of Spin Boldak," police chief Razziq, with the president's brother is, if not unexpected, certainly more out in the open in this instance than I've seen it heretofore.

Also this:

The US-led coalition force in Afghanistan has conceded that last week's parliamentary elections were far more violent than it first claimed and that the country was rocked by many more insurgent attacks than during last year's presidential election.

Margolis discredit watch: no, this probably won't be enough either

Eric Margolis was an old bugbear of mine: I used to call him "Wormtongue", as I recall, for his consistent defenses of those who wanted to kill Canadians, defenses which somehow were never so egregious as to keep him from being a frequent commentator on the national news, sitting alongside genuinely non-insane people like Andrew Coyne and Janice Stein.

I see from Adrian and Mark's site that he's descended, as might have been anticipated, into full-on 9/11 trutherism, as he has been reduced to selling his nutty freelance column to the Tehran Times. The question now will be whether this will finally be enough to keep his demented rantings off major Canadian news programs.

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war

I'd be much more impressed with certain American "conservatives" if they spent less time remembering the 9th anniversary of 9/11 and more time remembering the fifth anniversary of Camp Greyhound. Or if at least the latter had a Wikipedia entry yet, which I note it does not.

(The title's a quote from James Madison.)

Ominous

Some American soldiers have been charged in the murder of three Afghans in Maiwand District of Kandahar Province, as well as beating up another soldier who had reported they were smoking hashish, earlier this year.

Personal advice to another mentor

A colleague of mine was taking up an Afghan S2 (military intelligence) mentoring job: we talked for a while on the phone and in email, and the following is some of the general advice I offered.

If I had to sum it all up, I'd say, sometimes (although not always) in your prep it can help to try to put yourself in the mental frame of mind of a time-travelling Int O going back to visit a brigade S2 in Normandy, 1944 (or wherever), going back to help them defeat the Nazis a little faster. That's not meant as a put down to either Normandy vets or Afghans, btw: they're both better natural fighters than our average Canadian today, in all probability. What would you bring back with you? Organization? Procedures? They've got them, even if we might think they were 60 years behind the times. Technology? Not so much. If you could provide your 1944 counterpart with a conduit to bring a little more of the future tech (ISR, etc.) to their fight against the Germans, and showed you shared their cause a little, you'd win them over and probably do some good. PowerPoints on Canadian IPB [Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace] doctrine, not so much... and if you find yourself at any time acting like a Canadian management consultant, you're probably doing something wrong, at least in my humble opinion.

That's obviously not close to the whole answer, but it can be a useful mental model to play around with for some aspects of the job that helps avoid some of the more obvious errors.

The only other thing I'd say about Afghan mentoring, and this is something I never really could articulate until after it was over, was that the daily chai and conversation stuff was never really mentoring. It's just the petty diplomacy that leads to the mentoring later on. The bad mentors all get that wrong and focus on the day trips and the chess games. It's not VIP visits to each other's camp, or one-off planning sessions either.

This is doubly true for S2s, because their stock in trade is information sharing. So don't worry: you don't have to be the bridge yourself. You just have to be the bridge builder.

I'd just add to this that a lot of the problems with our mental models for mentoring host nation forces have to deal with the mass-media narratives we base our preconceptions on. The "caught between two cultures" story, whether it's Lawrence of Arabia, Pocahontas, Avatar or Dances With Wolves, is generally portrayed as a solo protagonist's struggle, because that makes for better drama: one person, struggling to toe a very fine line, choosing duty over love (or love over duty), etc. But in the real world, supporting a foreign army isn't like that at all: it's very much a collaborative effort. T.E. Lawrence's support to the Arab Revolt wasn't just one man as in the movie; the allies sent a large, polyglot team of advisers -- British soldiers and officers, Egyptians, French -- of which he was just the best known.

And the mentor himself isn't always at center stage, either: to take another example from Canadian history, the British-Indian collaboration of Brock and Tecumseh that resulted in the capture of Michigan Territory in 1812 and set American conquest plans back a year was the result of years of patient set-up work by Matthew Elliott and the rest of the British Indian Department: but when the two British and Indian leaders finally and famously met to seal their plans, those agents didn't need a seat at the table between them.

These are the sorts of successful real-life historical examples that really need to be collected and studied more thoroughly if we're ever going to get beyond some of the simplistic models of mentoring practice that we otherwise tend to internalize and have to have shaken out of us on deployment, myself included.

Dialog with a reader

I always find that whenever I bring up John Paul Vann, I get the best emails afterwards. I thought this interchange I had with another Afghan vet, one who's forgotten more about the Spin Boldak area of Kandahar province than most of us will ever know, was worth reprinting, and thankfully he agreed. It starts at Vann, and ends with as candid an insider assessment of the problems with Canadian military mentoring in Afghanistan (through the Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team) as I've ever read:

Reader: [Vann] may have advocated the knife for dealing with the VC-level political cadres, but he also earned his nickname of "Mr. B-52". Granted, this was at a time when the conflict had gone quite conventional, but given the ease and rapidity with which the North shifted through Mao's 3 phases of guerrilla warfare, I'm not sure [Vann] could have found a corresponding way to scale things back to the local level having plastered an area with 300 Arc Light strikes. I think by then he had spent too much time in Vietnam and had lost any kind of analytical detachment without gaining any deeper insight into Vietnamese political machinations. He may have thought he was working at the strategic level, but he was really just improvising at the operational level.

"Improvise, adapt and overcome" may suffice at the section level. It's a poor foundation for grand strategy.

Me: I think Vann's a fascinating, flawed figure... I'd love to see an alternate bio of the guy someday, to flesh out the one PoV we have from [Neil] Sheehan. You're right he was a brilliant improviser, but with these odd blind spots: specifically, refusing to accept the logic of his own conclusions whenever they clearly pointed to his idea being impossible. Hence his argument that the U.S. had to overturn South Vietnam with revolutionary agrarian reform as the only real counter to communist appeals. Surely the thought must have passed his mind that if the only possible way to beat the Communists would be for the Vietnamese to adopt their agenda wholesale, their victory in some form couldn't be far off... but he never publicly seems to have admitted that.

And I love Sheehan's story about how he seemed to honestly believe that he just needed to give that one good briefing to the Joint Chiefs to turn the whole thing around, and was turned away from it at the boardroom door.

I would actually argue that ARVN combat advisors in the early 1960s like Vann were more effective, in groups and singly, than their ANSF mentor counterparts are now, and that one of the upshots of loss in Vietnam was imbuing those more successful methods with an aura of defeat-based disdain. It will be interesting who our war's Vann-figure will be.

Reader: I'm not sure we will have a Vann-like figure. [Mentoring] may, on paper, be our main effort, but we pay lip service to the concept of a main effort, and the [Canadian] OMLT has always been a jerry-rigged organization with no corresponding professional reward. The Colonel who commands it, for example, does not get the credit of commanding a formation (as his Brigade-commander peers would get) at merit boards. There is thus no concerted effort to select 'streamers' for those positions. Battle Groups get first pick, and the OMLT and PRT make do with what's left over (for reg force) and whichever reservists happen to express an interest... not to mention scrambling for kit.

I've heard tell the 1 Para, who were in Ireland while their sister battalions headed to the Falklands, had shirts made up reading "Yes I'm a Para. No I wasn't in the Falklands. Thank you for asking." I suspect that one of our Afghan legacies will be "Yes, I was in Afghanistan. No, I wasn't in the Battlegroup. Thank you for asking."

Final note from me: I agree with pretty much everything my correspondent has written, above. Part of the reason I'm still writing here over a year since I came back is the feeling I get that no one else is writing this down, and Canada's latest little experiment in military advising/mentoring is going to be forgotten like all the other ones were. Every time an OMLT team comes home, it scatters to the four winds, all lessons largely lost. There are no real out-briefs to the lessons learned centres, and there's little attempt made to send back people with mentoring experience on second or subsequent tours, or identify those who did well and get them training up the next team.

Beyond Canada, military mentoring seems, bafflingly, to remain a near-afterthought in Afghanistan, as well. If Tim Lynch and others are right, there hasn't been nearly enough movement on the key shortcomings in this regard that were identified in McChrystal's strategic review. That should be extremely worrisome to anyone who still wants to see this through.

They're surging too, you know

From the New York Times, a useful statistic:

NATO late last year estimated Taliban strength at 25,000 fighters, an increase of 25 percent over the previous year.

Today's essential Afghan reading: people who know what they're talking about

Tim Lynch, at FRI, once again:

As the summer started I was optimistic regarding the chances that we would see some indications that we are gaining ground in Afghanistan but that has not happened. Incident rates are skyrocketing which in and of itself is not a negative thing if it is our side who are instigating the incidents but that is not the case. While ISAF is conducting more raids and presence patrols they do not seem to have learned anything when it comes to pulling these operations off while managing the perceptions and attitudes of the population we are supposed to be protecting.

Lynch goes on about the problems with ISAF night raids, which he describes in a measured tone as "unproductive." Some of the comments are pretty good, too. More key quotes about mentoring from the article and its comments, and another blog Afghan hands should be reading, below the fold.

Lynch on higher command paralysis:

Make no mistake we are still in a shooting war and in a shooting war a commander has three forms of currency he must spend; money, blood and time. The various insurgent groups are spending blood – we are spending tons of money and time. The problem is that the Taliban has a vast surplus of fighters while we are running out of both money and time. ISAF is hamstrung for two reasons; the first is risk aversion and lack of initiative. The bloated staffs which expand exponentially are completely focused on the unimportant. If powerpoint briefs could bring the Taliban to bay (and they could if we could inflict a few on them daily – they are worse than water torture) then we would be already be home. Anyone who has been anywhere near the ISAF HQ in Kabul speaks of a dysfunctional culture so bizarre that Hollywood could never do it justice.

The headquarters comments reminded me of another good reader comment I read from another site, from NoddyH at the end of this piece, on how the Human Terrain System seems to be getting deemphasized in Afghanistan:

Brigades don’t know shit most of the time.

At this stage, HTS seems like it’s often used as another fig leaf for brigades to pretend they don’t have to delegate most day-to-day COIN decisions to infantry companies and battalions.

The point about this being a company-level fight is spot-on, and largely unrecognized, I find. I always saw contractor programs like the HTS as expedients for a lack of social science-trained soldiers in the military intelligence branches of Western armies. We don't have the anthropologists, sociologists, etc. in the ranks, so we have to contract out. Fine: the problem is that those assets aren't going to be tactically nimble enough in many cases to get out on the trace where they're needed, and stay out. Not saying they're not brave people, it's just that in a combat outpost with 100 men or less, every gun can count sometimes. Now some of this could be helped by having junior mil-int staff at the company level, trained and with the time to coordinate at least some of the HTS intelligence requirements for high-risk areas. But if we don't take pains to keep the civvy anthropologists and the intelligence-trained soldiers reading off the same page at every level, I don't see how the system could ever be expected to perform as was hoped for.

Going back to the first piece, Lynch offers his useful advice in the comments on what's going wrong with ANSF mentoring:

You know guys the problem with dumping on the ANA and ANP at this stage of the game is that if they are all not worth a shit then we are responsible for that. As early as 2005 there were stories about the DS INL police training program being a multi million dollar disaster yet to this day that program still runs and still turns out a questionable product. We provide no mentoring or supervision of police in the field which I find unbelievable given that we know it is the only way to increase performance. With the Kabul bank going tits up and all the problems with the central government we are going to be forced to start working at the regional level. If we mimic the Marines who established a local training academy and are doing the administration and pay too – duplicate that and my bet is the security forces would improve dramatically. But of course the problem is we are out of time and money …. probably going to need that bigger boat...

The lack of live-in police mentors was identified as a crippling problem years ago, but remains unaddressed in many areas. Also:

If my [mentor] friends had their way there would be no separate FOB and no tenant commands using that FOB – they would live with the ANA conducting missions generated by the ANA chain of command. They don’t do that – they must submit a separate CONOPs when they leave base to a parallel chain of command which is slow, cumbersome, and focused exclusively on risk aversion for the troops assigned to mentor ANA. The ANA has good units and bad ones too like any military. Their “good units” are not that good compared to the American military baseline and there are many reasons for that. The biggest reason is that we have not conducted the mentoring part of the job in the way we did successfully in past because our “mentors” do not live and work with their charges. Ask some Marines who have recently been here about the ANA. They seem to be working very well with them in Helmand and that is due to the Marines taking in their ANA charges and treating them like members of the same team.

This is as hugely important a point as it was two years ago. My big hopes on the McChrystal strategy review last summer were that this would be recognized and promptly addressed: the language of the review documents certainly seemed to indicate it would be. But it's fair to say at this point it has not been addressed anywhere nearly aggressively enough.

Finally, if you haven't been reading Kandahar Diary, you should be. It's another Private Security Contractor, in charge of getting fuel down Highway 1 to Helmand, who knows what he's talking about. Talking about local Kandahar area militias like the KAU masquerading as road security paramilitaries and "security contractors":

These, and other warlords, regularly extort ‘special payments’ or ‘security payments’ (call them what you will) from HNT contractors to ensure convoys move through their areas safely and largely unhindered. It is widely known that the protection racket also extends to the Taliban who use the warlords as their ‘collectors’ – adding to the already massive sum the insurgents rake in every year from its links to opium production and drug running. It is no coincidence that those HNT contractors who refuse to pay the protection money suffer the greatest number of incidents along the route – these incidents being, according to a large body of evidence, initiated by the warlords’ own people or by the insurgents at the warlord’s behest.

As to the deleterious effect PSCs are having on ISAF’s COIN strategy, it doesn’t take a policy wonk from some Washington-based think tank to work out the reason. When the central plank to any successful COIN strategy is winning the confidence, trust and loyalty of the local populace, it is hardly going to be a ‘good thing’ when armed thugs known to be escorting convoys for the security forces (and, vicariously, the government), smacked out on hash and heroin, fire indiscriminately into villages as they pass, pull over civilians and the very tanker drivers they are charged to protect and extort cash and generally act in all sorts of illegal and unsavoury ways with apparent impunity. The very existence of these local PSCs, and the warlords who have established a parallel security apparatus to that of the legitimate government, is counter-intuitive to what ISAF are trying to achieve here.

In his most recent entry, he describes how one of his convoys escaped an ambush in Kandahar City, only to be shot up by an ANA unit. It's interesting to hear a contractor's point of view on the area around Howz-e Madad, which seems to have turned into even more of an ambush alley this summer.

More on killer UAVs

There's been a couple good pieces on the ethics of using UAVs recently, better than that Ron Rosenbaum failure I wrote about earlier. Dominic Tierney's is the one that most merits additional comment.

The reliance on robots can make the United States appear both overbearing and vulnerable--just the combination to inspire resistance. Goliath bullies David with advanced technology. But Goliath's strength belies a fatal weakness--his craven fear of death.

He goes on to quote Rami Khouri on how the very impersonality of Israeli weapons was a rallying cry for Lebanese. And I have no doubt this is so.

I do think it's worth pointing out, however, that this is in no way an indictment of UAVs like the Predator alone. We work hard to strike our enemies before they can strike us; long-distance death is the forte of every Western military; but the fact there's sometimes a UAV in the loop is really irrelevant, and probably undetectable to the recipient.

Generally, insurgents and the civilians around them don't know what hit them. The actions of a Predator firing a Hellfire missile or an Apache helicopter gunship firing the same missile from beyond human visual range, or at night, are not just indistinguishable to the target: ordnance delivered by fighters or bombers, or artillery from the FOB down the road, or an AC-130 gunship are all pretty much the same. Loud explosions, out of nowhere. I read Afghan reports in theatre of air strikes that I knew were actually artillery shells. Even insurgent IEDs, if they detonated accidentally, or weren't clearly directed at a likely insurgent target, were filed away by the locals as more air strikes. For that matter, I recall a Canadian tank killing some people at well over a mile with a 120mm main gun round. I'm sure they never saw their killers or knew anything about the specific type of weapon.

The point here being is that the indictment that long-range attacks are unseemly in a counterinsurgent fight doesn't just apply to UAVs, but to every single other alternative we have to UAVs as well, pretty much. In this respect, UAVs are neither better nor worse than the other options.

It's a minor point, but this also extends to the "Predator porn" that so excised Rosenbaum. The visual imagery format that he feels so dehumanizes us is common to all kinds of long-distance attacks. If you weren't briefed beforehand on the contents, or were a visual telemetry expert, could you really tell the difference between this and this? But one was by a UAV with the pilot watching a view screen in Nevada, and the other by a pilot watching a view screen in his cockpit several kilometres at least from the target. Is that not a distinction without a difference?

No UAVs were involved in the making of this well-known footage, from an AC-130 gunship a nice safe distance from its target at night, either. Does that mean some set of eyes (Western or local) would really regard those events as differently placed on a moral plane somehow?

What people are really doing here is assigning our distaste and doubt concerning effectiveness about our whole long-distance, technologically superior military methods to one specific technology. And that's a little misleading. I too am disturbed by the thought there will some day be autonomous warbots, although I'm sure they're not as far off as we'd like to think... as soon as some enemy starts shooting them down regularly, UAVs will undoubtedly become much more nimble and independent in their responses. And I too have concerns as a citizen about keeping a clear, bright, legal line between military "targetting" and CIA "assassination", especially when the same drone could be helping Canadians keep a road clear of IED-layers one night and be hunting a Pakistani or even American citizen in Waziristan the next. I too am open to the argument that the widespread use of UAVs in Pakistan without coordination with Pakistan's own government could be self-defeating in the long run.

But I really see this long-distance, war-by-TV thing as really an issue that is best decoupled from UAVs proper, as it's been around a lot longer than UAVs, and will continue even if we got rid of them tomorrow. To pick on Rosenbaum, he really needed to explain, as a diehard hater of the Nazis, why UAV "drone porn" is evil, and Hawker Typhoon "guncamera porn" like this, of Typhoons taking apart the Germans in Normandy in 1944 is not. Both are, on the surface, aerial platforms killing pretty much with impunity, aren't they?

I'm not saying there isn't a valid concern, here, but it seems a concern really grounded more in utility than morality, and also one that has been long acknowledged by counterinsurgent theorists everywhere: that methods of long-distance killing developed to give an edge in high-intensity warfare against a comparably technologically advanced opponent can seem cruel and disproportionate in a COIN environment. Western awareness of this problem goes back to Dyer's intent to use automatic weapons at Amritsar*, if not farther back. But John Paul Vann said it best back in the mid-1960s, I think:

This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I'm afraid we can't do it that way. The worst is an airplane. The next worst is artillery. Barring a knife, the best is a rifle — you know who you're killing.

*For the record, Dyer only used rifles in the infamous 1919 massacre, but said, to much condemnation at the time, that he would have used his car-mounted machine guns if he could have gotten them into the Jallianwallah Bagh.

Things that please me: webcomix edition

I always feel a little bad about reading web comics... the better ones have given me so much happiness over the years, but it's like free ice cream... I really don't say how I'm incentivizing the creators very effectively. That's why whenever I see a print book of a good webcomic, I try to pick it up.

The flip side is our weekend newspaper's funnies, which are really awful and have been for years. The Comics Curmudgeon has that beat down so I won't wax poetic on how awful they are. But it's fair to say the only old standard I can stand is Doonesbury, which I also read online.

I wish someone in the newspaper industry would offer some of the better web comics guys a better deal. If I had to pick my three recommendations, they'd be Penny Arcade, xkcd, and one I recently had pointed out to me, Questionable Content, which, with its strong characters and patient episodic story development, would be perfect for some kind of expansion beyond the web. The latter two don't even have books out, which is a crying shame if you ask me. I'd buy them.

Overflight

Twenty-two years ago, in the first week of September, I moved to Toronto. I remember sitting at a cafe at Bay and Charles with my dad, and watching the jets overhead warming up for the big Air Show. I don't really ever go to air shows, but every year hearing those planes over the downtown, wherever I happened to be working or walking around this time of year, brought back those feelings of being young, in a big city, ready for anything.

I heard the jets again just now, banking over the downtown... but now they're telling me it's finally come time to move on. Sure, I'll miss this city: every Canadian should live here for a couple years. But everyone here should probably move somewhere else, too, at least for a little while. Me, I've stayed too long already. See ya, Toronto.

Things that please me: email edition

I agree: the new Priority Inbox feature in Gmail and Google Apps-based mail is pretty nifty. I also appreciate the creative use of the word "woohoo!"

Worst Afghan article of the month: Ron Rosenbaum

Ron "Explaining Hitler" Rosenbaum starts off the month of bad Afghan articles early on UAVs. This is going to take a while... more below the fold.

After blathering on in a disjointed fashion about his personal distaste for war-by-UAV, Rosenbaum gets to his argument against. It's shockingly weak.

...drone slaughter—whether or not it's a war crime—is counterproductive, creating generations of potential terrorists from the families of the innocent victims of careless carnage...

Surely this is at least as true of any weapons system the West could use, now or in the future. So why is it an argument against drones?

But here [in AfPak] all the options are infeasible or bad.

Ron Rosenbaum has tried nothing and he's all out of ideas.

It's hard not to feel less than triumphant knowing that these men, whoever they were, were being cremated before our eyes by men and women who work in air-conditioned bases...

The "manliness" argument again, I suppose. Why exactly does air-conditioning interfere with triumphalism?

...if you believe the often inaccurate after-action reports that are always claiming they got the "No. 3 Taliban commander in the province" or some such unverifiable boast)...

How do you establish something is inaccurate if it's unverifiable? Seems to me it's one or the other.

...they kill a lot of innocent civilians as well.

As does any other weapons system used in war... air strikes and artillery, both historically often rather less discriminate in their usage than UAVs, come to mind.

You may have missed this item in the New York Times from May 29: "The American military on Saturday released a scathing report on the deaths of 23 Afghan civilians, saying that 'inaccurate and unprofessional' reporting by Predator drone operators helped lead to an airstrike in February on a group of innocent men, women and children."

To be clear, that incident was actually an attack helicopter strike. The Predator was just providing "eyes on" for a special forces unit on the ground that called for support, as the Times article makes clear. I'm really not clear what Rosenbaum's preferred alternative is, here. NOT look at something before you shoot it? Always wait until any possible enemy is in small arms range?

There's no algorithm that synchs up the degree of target importance, the certainty of intelligence that's based on, and potential civilian casualties from the attack. It's a question that's impossible to answer with precision. Which suggests that when murdering civilians is involved, you don't do it at all.

Actually there are very precise rules of engagement that serve that algorithmic purpose in military circles that Rosenbaum's talking about. Obviously no one wants to "murder civilians" but what we're really reading here is the precautionary principle applied to military action... if there's even a remote possibility of mistake leading to civilian death, it's an immoral act. These are the precepts one might find in a Superman comic, not a seasoned analyst of Naziism.

I've read arguments that drones offer more precision than other battlefield weapons, because drone porn gives the Predator joystick operators more time to examine the targets intimately and cross-reference intelligence. But what they really offer is more precise views of less precise targets. The "foes" in Afghanistan do not wear uniforms.

So drones are immoral and illegal because some of their current TARGETS aren't obeying the Geneva Conventions on wearing distinctive emblems? What?

I'm not saying all Taliban look alike, but the pious believers don't look very different from the "provincial commanders."

Why is "provincial commanders" in quotes? Does Rosenbaum not believe insurgents have a chain of command? His argument here is really unclear... is he saying it's also immoral when a weapon kills the *wrong* insurgent? What?

Rosenbaum then goes on about others' better-expressed objections to CIA involvement in overseas assassinations, prohibited by law, targeted killings of U.S. citizens overseas, and strikes inside Pakistan... all points that, while valid in their own right, have nothing to do with the most common use of UAVs... to support soldiers in Afghanistan.

But "proportionality" is also an issue. If you look at the drone-porn YouTube clips, you don't always see the bearded guys engaged in attacking U.S. forces. Maybe they're planning to, but proportionality requires that the use of lethal force by the imminence and danger of the threat, for which there is no evidence in the clips and likely only useless CIA intel to back it up.

There's a lot of assumptions in there. It really does seem too much to ask of a single video clip to provide airtight evidence of an insurgent's suitability for immediate death. Assuming all our intelligence is "useless" seems rather a stretch, too.

...indiscriminate—at the very least, carelessly executed—assassinations of a religious sect's members...

Taliban = religious sect? That's all they are? That's the only reason we're after them? Are you sure?

What is their crime: driving while bearded? Loitering while being Muslim? Are they violating the strict gun-control laws of Afghanistan?

Somewhere along the line this turned into an anti-Afghan war rant. Which is fine, but it has nothing to do with UAVs any more. Is Rosenbaum really saying those are some likely justifications by American commanders for the use of deadly force?

Are there no civilian Taliban, who, repellant as some of their practices are, nonetheless deserve protection from drone strikes?

Yes, we call them "Afghans." The real Taliban blow them up regularly. Unless we kill the real Taliban first. That's another kind of protection, surely.

Putative war crimes, repellant videos, porn mentality, the counterproductive creation of generations of terrorists: On grounds both moral and practical, the drone attacks must cease. Stop them now.

As shown, the war crime argument is pretty weak, the terrorist production argument not exclusive to UAVs. The rest of the objection seems largely... aesthetic. Rosenbaum feels the act of seeing what you are killing is unseemly. Which it may be... but it should go without saying that it will certainly be, if anything, more discriminate for anyone aiming to kill an enemy with any weapon in any war to try to get "eyes-on" first.

I could certainly see the argument that drone strikes in Pakistan are legally and morally shaky. If Rosenbaum had made that argument, he'd be within his rights. But he's not objecting to one specific violation of existing military and political conventions... he's objecting to any uses at all of a technology (UAVs) which is not by its nature any more indiscriminate or disproportionate than any alternatives. Through much of the piece what he's really saying is that war itself is evil. Check, got it. The difference is, if he'd just written the "war is evil" piece, without the timely hook of "drone-porn", no one would have wanted to publish his bleedingly obvious, simplistic little cri de coeur. So he had to drag UAVs into it somehow. But he simply couldn't close the deal, and explain convincingly why a specific technology that obviously churns his stomach even if it's demonstrably limiting U.S. casualties was so immoral that it should be banned forevermore. Which just goes to show he either didn't or couldn't think this one through. Pity. He used to be such a good writer.