The United States government is killing people. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are all being pounded by missiles launched from US drones, and though the missiles are ostensibly targeted against terrorists, it seems possible that hundreds of civilians have been killed in the crossfire. Neither party’s nominee will debate this issue. That’s a terrible shame – the drone campaign is a morally fraught policy that merits a full-throated public debate. The innocents killed by the strikes demand it.

In that sense, then, Conor Friedersdorf’s massively viral essay focusing on the drone war and other don’t-call-it War on Terror policies is a welcome spotlight on some critically ignored issues. It’s unfortunate, then, that the piece itself and the underlying thinking it represents are disappointing.

Conor believes the drone campaign is indefensible; it kills without appreciable benefit. Anyone who supports it must be deluded:

At worst, this policy creates more terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy. And Democrats who believe that it is the most moral of all responsible policy alternatives are as misinformed and blinded by partisanship as any conservative ideologue.

As a consequence, he argues, one cannot in good faith support Obama or Romney for President; the former escalated drone strikes and the other would continue them. Together with other civil liberty violations, drone strikes ought be electoral “dealbreakers,” particularly for progressives. You’ve seen similar arguments before, but Conor’s variant has struck a nerve, so it’s worth using it as a proxy for the broader debate.

As it happens, both sides of his syllogism are wrong. It’s not obvious that drone strikes are indefensible and, even if they are morally wrong, they shouldn’t determine your vote alone.

Let’s start with the first half: Conor’s strident judgment about the drone program is belied by a wealth of credible evidence. Al-Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan depends on physical space in order to conduct its activities; having a location where senior leaders can train and socialize new recruits is critical to developing operatives capable of doing significant damage to high-value and/or Western targets. Given the precarious political and nuclear situation in Pakistan, it seems that degrading al-Qaeda in the Af-Pak region should be a paramount goal of American counterterrorism policy.

Targeted killings appear to be severely hampering al-Qaeda in Pakistan. Pir Zubair Shah, reporting from Pakistan, believes the strikes have weakened al-Qaeda “to a significant extent” and that they are “the only politically viable option for U.S. counterterrorism goals.” Shah is backed up by two studies finding that targeted campaigns against terrorist and insurgent leaderships have been effective in the past. The reason is relatively simple — targeted killings terrorists kill key leaders and make others afraid to risk open organization. There’s some evidence we’re seeing this effect in Pakistan already; another study found that drone strikes are lowering the frequency and lethality of militant violence.

This evidence also complicates Conor’s contention that drones are an unjustifiable assault on Pakistani civilians. Local surveys suggests that militant attacks, not drones, are viewed as the principal threat by people in the affected areas. Moreover, there’s some reason to believe that many fewer civilians and a concomitantly higher percent of Taliban/al-Qaeda are killed by drone strikes than Conor believes. If drone strikes really are less dangerous than local militants, and the costs of said militant attacks are being blunted by drones, the humanitarian calculus isn’t as simple as “drones kill civilians, ergo they’re unjustifiable.”

Put this together and you have a reasonable argument for the drone campaign along these lines:

There are high-value al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. If left unchecked, these terrorists might kill a significant number of American citizens. Campaigns targeted at leaders of terrorist organizations have had success the past and, while there’s reason to believe the US is hitting more than just leaders, the consequent blowback isn’t helping al-Qaeda enough to make up the damage. Moreover, drones are decreasing the frequency of militant attacks that kill civilians, which balances against their occasionally overstated harm. There are serious concerns about transparency and targeting procedures, but overall the status quo is morally preferable to simply ending the drone strikes.

Do I believe this case? I’m totally unsure. I find myself equally persuaded by arguments mounted by people like Conor and Kevin Gosztola as by the above. There’s good reason to believe the historical data on targeted strikes is incomplete and muky; the case for strikes is also much weaker outside Af-Pak. Even there, strikes might not defeat al-Qaeda given blowback and Pakistani policy. The civilian casualty count could be much higher than usually reported. Conor et al. may very well be right; I’m genuinely unsure as to which side gets the better of the argument.

But that’s the point; the drone issue is hard to resolve on the merits. We’re dealing with a highly classified program operating in what are essentially war zones about which the relevant data is uniquely muddled. Has Conor spent time in Pakistan? Falsified competing local reports? Does he have reason to believe Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal would be safe from a reconstituted al-Qaeda after strikes ceased?

Someone can disagree with Conor on these questions without being a dupe. The drone campaign might well be morally wrong, but it isn’t obviously so. Reasonable people with shared values can disagree without, as Conor says, being “misinformed and blinded by partisanship.” Drones are the topic of a particularly difficult debate; disagreement isn’t irrational or blasphemous.

This brings me to my second point: given the opacity of the drone debate, there’s no reason it should outweigh other, clearer issues that might incline one towards an Obama vote. Consider the following :

– Lack of health care kills up to 45,000 Americans per year. Romney wants to repeal the most significant effort to limit these preventable deaths in American history and doesn’t appear have a real policy alternative, let alone a legislatively viable one.

– Climate change could take 100 million lives around the globe; Romney belongs to a party that denies the reality of climate change and mocks the issue himself while Obama has taken modest but important steps toward addressing it.

These are just two examples of Obama-Romney differences separated from drones by a world of evidentiary difference. The overwhelming consensuses among climate scientists and health experts are that warming and lack of insurance are real problems with very high costs in human lives — thousands, potentially millions of lives are at risk, many more than are taken by drones. Unlike the murky issues surrounding the drone war, these facts are well-established by relevant reporting and research. Conor has said he’d be willing to vote for Obama if half the world were at stake; just where does he draw the line?

There’s a caveat here — Conor may not think Obamacare will effectively expand access to health insurance or that regulating CO2 is a cost-effective response to climate change. And fair enough; he’s a libertarian. But Conor’s piece was addressed to people on the left; his goal was to explain, on their terms, why Obama’s drone and civil liberties record should be a dealbreaker. Such people tend to believe — rightly, I might add — that the evidence clearly shows that Obama has made significant (albeit incomplete and reversible) progress on health and climate relative to the status quo or Romney.

Conor says this audience should ignore the hundreds of thousands of lives that they’re convinced would be imperiled by a Romney victory and stay at home because of a debatably justifiable program with a much lower cost in lives. In essence, an issue that’s difficult on the merits for progressives should outweigh all of their other core priorities!

In a later piece, Conor clarified that the point of his original polemic was to “spur readers to confront the problematic policies and attitudes that have taken hold here since the September 11 terrorist attacks.” That’s commendable; as I’ve said, we need be having a conversation that takes Conor’s concerns about drones much more seriously. Inasmuch as that’s what he’s done, I applaud him and the piece. But you can’t fully separate goal from content here, and the substance of Conor’s actual argument blinds his readers to the substantive debate surrounding the drone program and whitewashes the real cost in lives attendant in adopting his priorities. Politics by its nature demands terrible tradeoffs; Conor’s Kantian voting scheme makes the issues he cares about seem simple and the issues he doesn’t disappear. This isn’t about “lesser evils;” it’s about accomplishing the greatest amount of good we can, starting with minimizing the amount of unnecessary death in the world. The fact that we can’t save every life doesn’t mean we shouldn’t save some.

Progressive foreign policy group the Truman National Security Project today released a new ad that features several 9/11-era veterans questioning whether Mitt Romney is qualified to be commander-in-chief.

The one minute video first highlights Romney’s various foreign policy fumbles throughout the campaign, including his confusing Afghanistan policy, his failure to mention the war there and commemorate U.S. troops in his RNC speech, and his campaign’s reluctance to talk about national security. “You have shown us from London to Libya that you are over your head,” an Army vet says, with the ad closing with three other vets saying they don’t trust Romney to lead the military. Watch it:

Apart from Romney’s foreign policy missteps, veterans should have cause for concern. Romney hasn’t laid out any concrete plan for how he would tackle veteran unemployment or any other issues the nation’s military members face after serving in war.

Drew Sloan, a West Point graduate who served combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, appeared in the ad and spoke at the Truman Project’s launch event. “Neither of us really want to make this kind of video,” Sloan said, referring to a fellow vet that also took part in the project. But, Sloan added, “Mitt Romney is not qualified to be commander-in-chief,” citing the fact that Romney appeared to go to great lengths to avoid service in Vietnam in the 1960s and has now surrounded himself with those who took the United States to war in Iraq.

“The ad will run on television in Ohio – a key battleground state in the Presidential election – starting today,” said a Truman statement, adding that it “is part of a significant buy which will also run online in Florida, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Ohio.”

In an interview with 60 Minutes, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan warned that the attacks by Afghan soldiers on coalition forces will not be ending anytime soon. Speaking with Laura Logan, General John Allen said that he was “mad as hell” about the deaths of allied soldiers at the hands of Afghans — so-called “green on blue” attacks in military parlance:

ALLEN: You know, we’re — we’re willing to sacrifice a lot for this campaign. But we’re not willing to be murdered for it.

General Allen also compared green on blue attacks to the use of improvised explosive devices (IED) in the Iraq War, labeling these insider attacks as the “signature attack” of the Afghanistan conflict. Watch the interview here:

Allen’s statements reflect the allied frustration with the current situation in Afghanistan. A recent halt in training operations between U.S. forces and the Afghan National Army as a result of the insider attacks has not fully been lifted. The airing of the 60 Minutes interview comes as American forces recorded the 2,000th death in Afghanistan since the war began almost eleven years ago. In all, more than 50 allied troops have been killed in green on blue attacks so far this year.

The surge in Afghans turning on trainers and mentors has prompted NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rassmussen to float the possibility that members of the alliance may withdraw their military forces from Afghanistan earlier than agreed upon. Such a move would impact current planning for the end of U.S. combat operations by 2013 and a full withdrawal of NATO forces by 2014.

Top Mitt Romney foreign policy surrogate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said today that he would have pulled out U.S. troops from Afghanistan “a lot earlier” than the 2014 timeline President Obama has announced “if I had seen a scenario such as this that is unwinding.”

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning, McCain’s stance on Afghanistan was a confusing muddle — similar to that of Romney and his campaign aides. First McCain attacked Obama’s timeline. Moments later he said that, as president, he would have pulled U.S. troops out sooner and just minutes after that, McCain said the U.S. needs more troops and supplies:

SCARBOROUGH: We’ve been there for over a decade, how much longer can we stay there. You know the American people only put up with foreign occupations for so long and wars, how much longer would a President McCain have us stay there.

MCCAIN: I would have a long time ago set certain goals to be achieved associated with timing and not saying that all we’re doing is leaving. And if I had seen a scenario such as this that is unwinding, I would have gotten out a lot earlier to tell you the truth. This is inevitable that the Taliban is coming back, IED’s continue to flow from Pakistan and look, it is unraveling. You are having the worst kind of morale situation you could possibly have and that is your allies that you can’t trust. …

GEIST: What would you do today. Why would another year, another five years, another 10 years change in Afghanistan?

MCCAIN: I would make a decision as to whether we would have sufficient number of troops, listening to my military leadership to remain there to carry out an environment where the Afghan military are capable of carrying out those responsibilities and if that is not politically possible or militarily possible then I would make plans for withdrawing earlier —

GEIST: So then you believe that a few more years there would change the dynamic of the security?

MCCAIN: Not a few more years. Additional troops, additional supplies, additional kinds of efforts that were succeeding, that were succeeding and are not now.

Watch the clip:

Last month McCain floated the idea of withdrawing from Afghanistan more rapidly than President Obama currently plans, a surprising statement given that the Arizona Republican has repeatedly attacked the White House’s withdrawal plan. McCain then quickly walked back those comments saying a more rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan “would be the wost possible course of action.”

But McCain’s back and forth is emblematic of the Republicans and the Romney campaign’s confusion on Afghanistan — on the one hand seeming to want to placate the neocons and on the other, trying to side with the rest of the country.

As the last of the “surge” troops leave Afghanistan, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called for Mitt Romney to back an extended presence in Afghanistan. President Obama plans to bring all American troops home from Afghanistan by 2014. But Graham said that Romney should say he wants to keep U.S. troops there past that deadline.

The Hill reports:

They should, instead, pursue a war plan focused on “what we leave behind” in the country, not just ending the war as soon as possible, according to Graham.

“It’s about getting it right,” the South Carolina Republican said. Getting it right, he added, almost certainly means keeping U.S. forces in country past the administration’s deadline.

“On the first day of a Romney administration,” the presumed president-elect needed to call a meeting of the top U.S. commanders in Afghanistan and chart a different strategic course for the country, Graham said. “And if [they] need to change the timetable in Afghanistan, that is what we will do.”

Romney has so far avoided laying out a specific foreign policy plan, and an adviser said in May that the candidate would not “engage these issues until he is in office.” And while Romney has said he’ll stick with Obama’s withdraw plan, his Afghanistan plan has been muddled at best. Most recently, leading Republicans criticized him for failing to mention Afghanistan or the troops in his convention speech. However, distancing himself from Obama’s timetable is not only ill-conceived policy, but could hurt him politically as well; half the country wants Obama to speed up the withdrawal of troops. Taking this position would also put Romney at odds with most Republicans, who have mostly backed off supporting the war.

Republican chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Rep. C.W. Bill Young (FL) told the Tampa Bay Times editorial board on Monday that he can no longer support the American war in Afghanistan:

“I think we should remove ourselves from Afghanistan as quickly as we can,” Young, R-Indian Shores, said during a meeting with the Times editorial board Monday. “I just think we’re killing kids that don’t need to die.” … “It’s a real mess,” he said.

Young — the longest serving Republican in the House — said the death of a local Army Ranger in Afghanistan last month pushed him to change his mind. Young said the Ranger, Staff Sergeant Matthew S. Sitton, wrote him a letter before he died “and told me some things I found hard to believe”:

Young said he did not want to detail all of Sitton’s criticisms, but he listed two. In the letter, Sitton told Young about “being forced to go on patrol on foot through fields that they knew were mined with no explanation for why they were patrolling on foot,” the congressman said.

Sitton also explained that local streams and rivers were contaminated by pollution, creating a strong risk of bacterial and fungal infection, Young said. Yet when a flood soaked their uniforms, Young said, “they were required to continue patrols without changing their clothes.”

Young said Sitton predicted his own death, “and what he said would happen happened.” He stepped on an improvised explosive device and was killed, leaving behind his wife, Sarah, and their 9-month-old son, Brodey.

Americans’ support for the war in Afghanistan, including from Republicans, is at an all-time low. A recent poll found that 60 percent of Americans said the U.S. should not be involved there and a poll from May found that only 27 percent support the war. A majority of Republicans in a poll from April said the war has not been worth the effort.

While some House Republicans, such as Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), have been vocal in their opposition to the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Young said many privately tell him they no longer support it. “[T}hey tend not to want to go public” about it, he said.

Between calls from leading Republicans to get ready for war with Iran, remain in Afghanistan and Iraq, and intervening militarily in Syria, it’s no surprise that some on the left might label the GOP’s approach to foreign policy “bomb everyone tomorrow.” But when a Republican Senator says the same thing, it’s worth sitting up and taking notice. On Monday, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) did exactly that.

When asked about Republican political failures on CBS This Morning, Paul argued that the dominant GOP approach to foreign policy was turning off voters that might otherwise be inclined to support the party. His choice of language in describing this phenomenon was unusually harsh:

We shouldn’t be everywhere all the time. We should have a more defensive foreign policy, a less aggressive foreign policy. I think that would go over much better in New England than the typical ‘we need to bomb everybody tomorrow’ policy you hear from some Republicans…there were many Republicans that said let’s stay [in Afghanistan] forever, there are still some in the Senate who want to for 100 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Watch it:

The party’s general tenor appears to be well reflected in its presidential nominee. Mitt Romney is surrounded by a coterie of hyper-hawkish advisers who have pushed the candidate’s positions in a more aggressive direction with respect to the use of military force. Two prominent scholars of international relations referred to Romney’s “core world view” as “a global assessment distorted by ideological excess, pledged to wield power in a way that will leave the nation weakened and isolated, and demonstrated a failure to appreciate the key linkages between strength at home and influence abroad.”

In an interview with Fox News this afternoon, Mitt Romney shot back at critics who complained that he didn’t mention Afghanistan or praise U.S. troops in his convention speech last week, arguing that he focused on issues that are “important.”

Fox News’s Brett Baier told Romney that “several speakers” at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte this week criticized the GOP presidential nominee for the omissions (actually it was right-wing foreign policy leader Bill Kristol who started the attacks) and asked him if he had any regrets. “I only regret you’re repeating it day in and day out,” Romney said, adding that his speech focused on things that are important:

BAIER: To hear several speakers in Charlotte … they were essentially saying that you don’t care about the U.S. military because you didn’t mention U.S. troops and the war in Afghanistan in your nomination acceptance speech. … Do you regret opening up this line of attack, now a recurring attack, by leaving out that issue in the speech.

ROMNEY: I only regret you’re repeating it day in and day out. When you give a speech you don’t go through a laundry list, you talk about the things that you think are important and I described in my speech, my commitment to a strong military unlike the president’s decision to cut our military. And I didn’t use the word troops, I used the word military. I think they refer to the same thing.

Watch the clip:

The war in Afghanistan and the sacrifices made by U.S. troops weren’t important enough for Romney to talk about them in his speech? His speech did mention the military, but only to say that he wants to “preserve” a strong military (incidentally so does Obama). But Kristol’s criticism was not that Romney didn’t mention the military but that he did not pay tribute to U.S. troops who fought or are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But what is Romney’s “commitment to a strong military”? He plans to increase military spending by $2.1 trillion over the next ten years (which the military does not need) without offering a plan to pay for it. That doesn’t sound too much like a strong commitment to the economy.

Weekly Standard editor and influential right-wing foreign policy voice Bill Kristol criticized Mitt Romney for ignoring the war in Afghanistan and the military in his speech to the Republican National Convention last night. In a short, scathing piece Kristol put up on the Standard’s website shortly after the speech, the neocon don scolded Romney for not uttering “a word of appreciation” to American troops fighting in Afghanistan:

The United States has some 68,000 troops fighting in Afghanistan. Over two thousand Americans have died in the more than ten years of that war, a war Mitt Romney has supported. Yet in his speech accepting his party’s nomination to be commander in chief, Mitt Romney said not a word about the war in Afghanistan. Nor did he utter a word of appreciation to the troops fighting there, or to those who have fought there. Nor for that matter were there thanks for those who fought in Iraq, another conflict that went unmentioned.

Leave aside the question of the political wisdom of Romney’s silence, and the opportunities it opens up for President Obama next week. What about the civic propriety of a presidential nominee failing even to mention, in his acceptance speech, a war we’re fighting and our young men and women who are fighting it? Has it ever happened that we’ve been at war and a presidential nominee has ignored, in this kind of major and formal speech, the war and our warriors?

Perhaps Romney didn’t mention Afghanistan because he has no plan. Back in July, the then-presumptive GOP presidential nominee had a chance talk about his Afghanistan policy in a major foreign policy speech but Romney offered no specifics, saying his goal would be to withdraw U.S. troops by 2014 — which is exactly what President Obama is going to do. In fact, Romney’s own advisers don’t know what Romney’s Afghanistan policy is.

And maybe Romney ignored the military and veterans in his speech last night because he has no plan to address those issues either. “We haven’t … heard any specific plans yet from Governor Romney or his campaign,” a VFW official said recently.

One of Mitt Romney’s foreign policy advisers this morning in a conference call with reporters promised that the presumptive GOP presidential nominee would clearly articulate his Afghanistan policy in a major foreign policy speech today before the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Romney and his campaign surrogates have either been all over the map on Afghanistan or failed to contrast Romney’s policy from the Obama administration’s. But today didn’t turn out to be any different. In his speech this afternoon — which contained little substance and was full of oft-repeated untruths — Romney chose to side with much of what President Obama has already proposed:

I have been critical of the President’s decision to withdraw the surge troops during the fighting season, against the advice of the commanders on the ground. President Obama would have you believe that anyone who disagrees with his decisions is arguing for endless war. But the route to more war – and to potential attacks here at home – is a politically timed retreat.

As president, my goal in Afghanistan will be to complete a successful transition to Afghan security forces by the end of 2014. I will evaluate conditions on the ground and solicit the best advice of our military commanders. And I will affirm that my duty is not to my political prospects, but to the security of the nation.

President Obama has also said he plans to withdraw U.S. troops by the end of 2014. There is one slight difference in Romney’s plan. He would complete the withdrawal the surge troops in December of this year, instead of September.

“Unlike Barack Obama,” Romney adviser Alex Wong said on the call this morning, Romney “would look to a successful transition to the Afghan security forces based on the ground and the best advice from military commanders.”

Perhaps Wong meant “just like Barack Obama,” which can be said for a number of Romney’s foreign policy positions this campaign season.