Jane Mayer writes in The New Yorker about The risks of the CIA’s Predator drones and “targeted international killings by the state” — which are, it would appear, totally different from hunting down pirates, killing captured spies, etc.
Mencius Moldbug takes this as an opportunity to mention “a relevant little bit of inconvenient history” — Pink’s War:
Jane Mayer, meet Wing Commander Richard Charles Montagu Pink. Which of these people knows more about how to subdue the troublous Pathans? If you wanted to solve the problem, whose advice would you take? And what do ya think Wing Commander Pink would have done with a Predator or two?
He reiterates a point Porphyrogenitus made recently — and goes a few steps further, I suppose:
Reprisal, including reprisal by bombardment, is a perfectly legitimate tactic under classical international law. Moreover, reciprocity holds; the laws of war do not protect those who choose not to observe them. Eg: savage Pathan hill-tribes.The result is that civilization wins, savagery loses, and wars end. Insurgency is ineffective and basically unknown under these rules, which I suspect would put Margaret [a commenter who called using a Predator drone predatory] out of a job. Instead, people die, and keep dying. And she eats. She is not alone in this.
[...]
You don’t even need a pith helmet and a lisp to understand how a civilized nation can subdue and govern savages and barbarians. You can stay on our side of the Atlantic and our century, and look at the US experience in the Philippines or Haiti. You can read any pre-1945 field manual from the US military. PC-COIN basically consists of taking every known axiom about how to solve the problem properly, and reversing it. Instead of constantly demonstrating strength, for instance, it constantly demonstrates weakness. This masquerades as counterintuitive, which masquerades as smart. Indeed, one cannot defend it without being pretty damned smart.And it’s not even the willingness to bomb villages from the air, or whatever, that generates victory. Since we have way better gear than Wing Commander Pink, we can be way more subtle. All that is needed is that USG demonstrate to the Afghan people that it has chosen to rule them by force and without their consent, as a result of their actions in harboring Osama, KSM and their nasty friends. Seal the border, register and tax the population, impose indirect rule. Find some modern equivalent of Lord Cromer to run the whole thing.
Instead, we create the ultimate in passive-aggressive goverment. We whine and wheedle and curtsy before the savage tribe, pay it welfare for its misdeeds, apologize at every possible opportunity. At the same time, we hunt it with Predators. It’s like a bad episode of “The Dog Whisperer,” with the Pashtoons instead of the dog. Couldn’t we get Cesar Millan to run Afghanistan for a while? His skin is about the right color, and he could hardly do worse.