Kill raises questions of morality

Four Afghani men were killed on April 28 2009 by missiles delivered from a pilotless US drone aircraft on the orders of an Australian army officer. An internal inquiry was required given concerns the four men could have been farmers, concluded the action to kill was legal and it was very likely the men were Taliban insurgents laying explosives.

However legality is not the same as morality. History is littered with numerous examples of legal acts which are inherently immoral such as slavery, colonisation, the stolen generation, oppression of free speech and imprisonment of refugees. Is the kill chain another immoral legal act?

Some may think the rules of ethics change during war where survival, self preservation and legitimate targetting of the enemy can come down to reactive decisions made under extreme stress. But this is not the scenario in this case. Rather this chain of decisions was made by army personnel observing the four Afghani men (who may have been civilians and outside the rules of war) for three hours using remote aircraft equipped with cameras.

One of the pilotless aircraft was equipped with missiles and sensors to locate and bomb targets. The army observers and decision makers are hundreds, sometimes thousands of kilometres from the target. The Afghani men were in the fields at night without lighting and appeared to be laying a wire which would be used to detonate a roadside bomb. Some doubt was established given water allocation practices in the area sometimes require farmers to work at night.

The kill chain was a three-hour decision process involving army officers, lawyers and commanders, and included the assessment of civilian casualties. The chain ended with two bombs delivered from remote aircraft and the death of four Afghan men who were most likely Taliban insurgents laying roadside bombs.

There is a clear trade off here. The safety of Western troops is increased by using unpiloted drone aircraft, however, the risk of falsely identifying civilians as enemy targets and killing them is increased. We justify this trade off by the need to protect our soldiers.

What is not clear is whether an alternative more ethical path exists. Given the location of the suspected bomb was known, soldiers could have been sent to clear the road and check if there was a bomb, or the roadside bomb could be destroyed from the air. Of course the opportunity to kill four possible enemy combatants would be lost.

In this case the decision to kill is not about protecting the lives of travellers on that road as there were other ways of achieving this; it’s about the opportunity to strike the enemy. The general rule here is ‘when it is very likely a person is an enemy they can be killed, even if their actions at the time can be neutralised without killing’. Our moral view of this depends on our values. What do we value more highly, the occasional loss of innocent (Afghani) lives or the lost opportunity to kill possible enemy combatants?

The moral authority of the war in Iraq was lost long before it became evident that our actions, together with our allies, directly led to the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. To avoid repeating this in Afghanistan the moral rule could be ‘don’t kill anyone who is not an immediate threat and who could be an innocent farmer’.

Geoff Lamberton is a senior lecturer in ethics and sustainability at Southern Cross University.