generalspeaking

Does Might Make Right, or is Might Right?

The outrage of the government of Pakistan against the invasion of their airspace and their territory by foreign troops seems strange, coming from a nation that continually insists its best interests parallel those of the United States, in committing to the collective desire to vanquish the forces of odiously brutal Islamist terrorism. Much depends on that alliance, as far as the United States is concerned, that it has an ally in the region allowing it to use its territory as a transit point to Afghanistan where the Afghan Taliban had persecuted and oppressed the country.

It was the Taliban friendship with al-Qaeda and its then-leader Osama bin Laden, a natural-enough cooperation since bin Laden had been among those conscripted by the Americans to be trained and armed cooperatively by the U.S. and Pakistan to wage a war against the Ayfghan occupation of the Soviet Union. But that was then, 'way back then, and this is the present, where the Afghan Taliban's predations on the population of Afghanistan has now been mirrored by the advent of a Pakistan Taliban.

The mutual cooperation between al-Qaeda and the Taliban of both countries persists, to the chagrin of the Americans still attempting to root the Islamists out of the region, long past the time when their leader had been eliminated at his compound in Pakistan's Abbottabad, a presence there of long-standing, but which the Pakistan military and the government claimed to have had no knowledge whatever of, despite the nearby presence of a senior military installation.

The surreptitious assault by American Navy SEALS on Pakistani soil without alerting the Pakistan government infuriated Pakistan, claiming itself to have been insulted beyond endurance. No need to explain how the world's most wanted terrorist could live quietly and without fear of detection in an area visited by senior military officers, and inhabited by many other moneyed Pakistanis, but manufactured rage over sovereignty disrespected reigned supreme.

Since that time the United States has made use of silent, deadly, and fairly accurate drone strikes to dispatch from the North Waziristan tribal areas of the Hindu Kush mountain range, an area inaccessible to Pakistan troops, Islamic militants known to be members of al-Qaeda, or members of the Taliban who have attacked U.S. and NATO troops over the border in Afghanistan.

While the Government of Pakistan has bitterly complained over U.S. border intrusions with the drones, it is for public consumption. The drone raids have the silently official permission of the Government of Pakistan.

Pakistanis are enraged over the very idea that a foreign government exercises free reign to send its deadly killing machines into their airspace, into the sovereignty of their country, abusing its international rights, and killing civilians in its efforts to destroy the lives of Islamist terrorists. They are beyond infuriated by the fact that innocent civilians going about their daily work can suddenly be killed through no fault of their own other than that they happen to be in the wrong place at the right time.

Now, the government of Pakistan has issued a report claiming that 3% of the people killed through U.S. drone strikes since 2008 in Pakistan were civilians. This represents a figure that appears to be quite low, in defiance of past official calculations and estimates emanating from independent organizations. But the data provided by the Pakistani Ministry of Defence to their Senate, claims that from a total of 317 attacks 2,160 militant Islamists were killed, and 67 civilians.

The figures are out of whack with those arrived at by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, the Washington-based New America Foundation and Amnesty International. But it does serve to validate claims by the United States that its CIA-operated drone program remains a key weapon against al-Qaeda and Taliban militants who continue to stage cross-border attacks against American troops in Afghanistan.

Labels: Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Conflict, Islamists, Pakistan, Taliban, United States

posted by Pieface @ Friday, November 01, 2013