Skip to main content

Whither Pakistan?

The West might consider Pakistan an ally, but what is going on inside Pakistan is more than troubling (this is a democracy?) and what America, in particular, is doing to the country isn't reflective of an ally.   American drones killing local villager Pakistanis?     Steve Coll, writing in The New Yorker magazine, visits Pakistan and reports:

"Pakistan’s generals believe that one chronic problem is America’s drone-targeting policy. Many lethal drone strikes are not directed against a specific terrorist whose name is known and whose real-time location has been pinpointed. There are a few cases like that, but often the American drones strike more adaptively at what are known as “force protection” and “signature” targets.

A force-protection target can be a truck full of bearded men wearing turbans and holding rifles, driving toward the Afghan border. There are, as it happens, more than a few of these."

****

"As for force-protection targets, the Pakistanis ask why the American military can’t just track hostile trucks that might be heading for war in Afghanistan until they cross the border—and then strike them on Afghan soil.

Most analysts acknowledge that unilateral, cross-border drone strikes are destabilizing Pakistan. Yet Pakistan’s stability remains a putative goal of the American military campaign in Afghanistan. American troops must be in Afghanistan to help assure, through Al Qaeda’s defeat, the long-term stability of nuclear-armed Pakistan, but in order for the American troops to protect themselves, they must destabilize Pakistan. Is America destroying villages in order to save them again?"


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...
Post a Comment
Read more