David Hambling at Wired’s Danger Room blog ventures a guess as to why so many people died in the newest drone-strike embarrasment. According to eye-witnesses, the drones dropped bombs instead of firing missiles, fueling Hambling’s hunch: …the Predator has now been joined by the much larger MQ-9 Reaper, which can carry a heavier payload, around [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Pakistan’
Mechanics of a Slaughter
Posted: June 24, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, airstrikes, civilian casualties, drones, Pakistan
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On Becoming What You Hate
Posted: June 23, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, airstrikes, civilian casualties, drones, Pakistan
Reports are surfacing that U.S. drone operators are firing initial missiles at targets, and then firing secondary missiles at crowds that gather. This is a tactic we’re used to seeing…from suicide bombers. On Thursday, US drones launched an attack on a compound in South Waziristan, and when locals rushed to the scene to rescue survivors, they [...]
Possible U.S.-Backed Military Coup in Pakistan?
Posted: May 4, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, nuclear weapons, Pakistan
A few weeks ago, Juan Cole wrote about the ludicrous nature of the hype about the threat posed by the Taliban to Pakistan: What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed [...]
“We are about to find out.”
Posted: April 25, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, Iraq, JFK, Obama, Pakistan
James Blight has a fantastic article up at The Chronicle of Higher Education. An excerpt: But proclivities and stated objectives aside, does Barack Obama have the right stuff necessary to avoid disastrous wars like those in Vietnam under LBJ and in Iraq under George W. Bush? While voters going to the polls on November 4 [...]
Time to Break the Silence on Afghanistan Escalation
Posted: April 6, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, Break the Silence, Get Afghanistan Right, Martin Luther King, Obama, Pakistan, Predator, Reaper
Forty-two years ago last Saturday, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood in the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City to indict his country’s war policies in Vietnam. Entitled “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break the Silence,” this seminal speech attacked the paralyzed apathy stifling his nation’s ability to yield to the clear moral imperative [...]
Dr. King, Drones and Widening War
Posted: April 5, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, counterinsurgency, Martin Luther King, nonviolence, P.W. Singer, Pakistan, Predator, Reaper, Wired for War
Message creep tracks mission creep. “The real problem is Pakistan!” Mechanized hunter-killer falcons wander out of the Graveyard and hurl hellfire. Afghanistan becomes “AfPak.” The strike areas grow. A widening gyre whose center cannot hold. April 4, 1967: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gives one of the most important and least remembered speeches of his [...]
Drop Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Part 6: Pakistan
Posted: March 26, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, COIN, counterinsurgency, India, nuclear weapons, Obama, Pakistan, Pashtun
Carve this in stone: the first rule in Afghanistan should be, “Do no harm in Pakistan.” The second rule in Afghanistan should be, “If the solution to your problem is ‘fixing’ Pakistan, you’re screwed.” Earlier in this series, we dealt with counterinsurgency doctrine’s assumption of a self-contained battle space. We saw how U.S. attempts to [...]
Escalating Strikes, Escalating Dissent
Posted: March 18, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, Christianity, civilian casualties, Jesus, nonviolence, Obama, Pakistan, Predator, Quetta, Rethink Afghanistan
When they shall paint our sockets gray And light us like a stinking fuse, Remember that once we could say, Yesterday we had a world to lose. –Stanley Kunitz, Statement, Poets Against the War Today, the New York Times reports that the Obama Administration may widen the use of unmanned aerial vehicle strikes to attempt [...]
Hammers and Nails in Pakistan
Posted: December 15, 2008 in UncategorizedTags: Jesus, nonviolence, Obama, Pakistan
“[W]e need a strategic partnership with all the parties in the region–Pakistan and India and the Afghan Government–to stamp out the kind of militant, violent, terrorist extremists that have set up base camps and that are operating in ways that threaten the security of everybody in the international community…[P]art of the kind of foreign policy [...]
