Moral equivalence in drones

The question is, if no drones then what?

In America, there is a sad case of intellectual policing; the casual use of the word ‘Holocaust’ can get one condemnation from various Jewish groups. This can happen when comparing the plight of the Palestinians to the rounding up period in the Holocaust, or if one sees the former conflict between the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda in that light.

In a book by Norman Finkelstein, a very compelling explanation, though weak in parts, for this is offered. Some Jewish organisations have taken to owning the legacy of the Holocaust, denying it public domain without their sanction. What this means in practice is condemning anyone who seeks to show any tragedy as a moral equivalent of that awful event in history, and to show that it was an unparalleled horror, as if all other outrages are somehow less.

The last of these issues is especially contentious. In effect, this idea states with finite certainty that there is no moral equivalent of Jewish suffering in that period. That is wrong, all suffering is painful, and one cannot seek to show that all suffering is less by comparison. Denying moral equivalents or creating them is inherently a futile exercise — all suffering is individual.

I find the central idea of this problem interesting because in our discourse in Pakistan, the idea of moral equivalents is writ large, so much so that it hurts dialogue. As a columnist, I often see this first-hand in reader emails. For example, any serious discussion on Mukhtaran Mai will be met with sidetracking objections: “What about Aafia Siddiqui? What about…?”.

The idea behind this kind of rhetorical counterargument is simple; there exist moral equivalents that the columnist has ignored and is hence untrustworthy or biased. That may certainly be true, but what it does is, it prevents any single issue from being discussed on its own merits. In the press at least, this must be the most common logical fallacy, next to incorrect causality.

This is why we now come to the drones. To be against the drones in principle is admirable. All human life is sacred, and irrespective of the numbers of civilian to actual terrorists killed, a foreign country is killing our citizens. It is not entirely dissimilar to the situation we found ourselves in, in the case of Raymond Davis. The man deserved some kind of punishment in Pakistan for his actions. The idea of diplomatic immunity is abused in such situations.

But herein lies the problem. Individual ideals of morality are not the equivalent of the morality of countries. It is a sad fact of life that morality has very little to do with issues of statecraft, but rather it has to do with interests. This can easily be explained by a very simple dilemma anyone in government could come across: With a limited budget, how would one decide the allocation of resources to health when we know any one decision will not save everyone’s life?

So if one decided to put most of the money into basic health units, it would mean less for those with rarer diseases and conditions, necessarily advancing their demise. Tough, but that’s how it works.

So the question then is, if no drones then what? The status quo, allowing terrorists to kill more citizens than the drones themselves (as Farrukh Saleem recently demonstrated in a recent article)?

That needs to be answered if a dharna is to be more than an exercise in public relations. Will the armed forces have the necessary will to do a job that needs to be done and root out the destabilising forces? In fact, will they up-end their own handiwork? That’s the only real way the Americans will back off.

On a question of personal morality, opposing the drones is also the right thing to do. But on a political level, it means larger questions need to be addressed. Simply saying no is the easiest way out, and it is probably also the most destructive because it allows a lifeline to those who seek to destroy Pakistan. Otherwise we end up denying a basic problem, which is that indigenous extremism exists, or, taken to an extreme, that it has a legitimate cause. We lose clarity when we take the simple course of being naysayers. And with populists, that’s often a conscious decision in the face of an unsuspecting public.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 3^rd, 2011.