There is much ferment in Pakistan over the recent missile attack, alleged to have been carried out by a CIA drone, on the village of Damadula on the Afghan border.
There are serious moral shortcomings on both the Pakistani and American sides.
Firstly comes that in Pakistan there are many people, not necessarily a majority, but many people nonetheless, who sympathize with Islamic extremists. Even if these people had no violent designs against non-Muslim countries (which they do have), their lack of respect for the rights of women and gay people would still demand an outcry from the international community.
The Pakistani government, actually, has 70,000 troops in the tribal areas of the north countermanding the efforts of extremists and their sympathizers.
If there were not a single extremist sympathizer in all of Pakistan, then no extremist would have a safe haven there, and neither the CIA nor any other organization would ever have cause to launch an attack in the country’s territory.
How hard is that to understand? If you are going to declare yourself the mortal enemy of another people, as the extremists have done vis-à-vis the U.S., then they should not be surprised, and have no right to be outraged when the other people take measures to defend themselves. Unlike Saddam Hussein who, though despotic, was not plotting against the U.S., the Islamist extremists running around in the north of Pakistan are, by their own admission, plotting against the U.S. and most other non-Muslim countries.
Americans never did anything to Pakistanis which would justify any Pakistani contributing to any terrorist attack against any American person or American interest anywhere; ergo, all Pakistanis should abandon whatever militant Islamic sympathies they might have.
There have been conflicting reports about exactly who was killed in this latest border attack. Some sources claim that as many as 5 al-Qaeda operatives were eliminated while other sources say that all the victims were Pashtun villagers with no connections to terrorists.
A final and definitive accounting of just who was killed must be had before anyone can make a reliable moral argument here. Yet it can be argued that any U.S. strike involving a civilian casualty, or multiple civilian casualties, is counter to U.S. security interests. For starters, by the very definition of being innocent, no innocent person should ever be harmed in the bringing-to-justice of a guilty one. But beyond that, harming innocents can only fan the flames of anti-U.S. hatred.