20,000 Pakistanis Protest Drones Over Weekend; Five Killed By One Yesterday
The United States gives its implied answer to the 20,000 or so Pakistanis who protested drone strikes in the town of Tank over the weekend: another drone strike that killed five.
The protestors, including Americans from Code Pink, retreated to Islamabad yesterday.
Stanford Law School and the New York University School of Law issued an interesting study last month on the U.S. use of drones in Pakistan, concluding that "in light of significant evidence of harmful impacts to Pakistani civilians and to US interests, current policies to address terrorism through targeted killings and drone strikes must be carefully re-evaluated."
Reason on drones in Pakistan.
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Is it mean of me to want to tell them “If you want us to stop killing Muslims with drones, the next time you hear some idiot planning to attack American interests or persons SCRAG HIS ASS.”?
Yeah, because I’m sure that would be your reaction if the situation was reversed.
It would be mine.
Yeah, right…
And if Obama decided tomorrow that he was going to declare holy war on China and start World War III, you wouldn’t say anything?
Bad analogy. The govt of Paki never declared holy war on us.
First off, “Paki” is a derogatory term. Like, ‘Kike, Wop, Spic, Polack’, etc.
And are you the same guy who brushed off little details like, “Pakistan, who illegally developed and distributed nuclear weapons under the radar throughout the 1990s”… or “Pakistan, who hosted the world’s most wanted terrorist in the same city as their pre-eminient military acadamy”…or, “Pakistan, who for a year+ refused to arrest men directly associated with the mass killings in Dubai… and then refused to charge them with anything….” or, “Pakistan, whose government ministers offer $100,000 bounties on the heads of American citizens, and don’t even receive the slightest criticism from their peers…”
Pakistan, where religious zealots shoot 14yr old girls for wanting to go to school.
Those poor, innocent pakistanis. I’m sure you can’t sleep at night fretting over the injustice of their treatment by the rest of the world.
It’s not a hypothetical. How many innocent Muslims did persons in or from the US kill, directly or indirectly, before 9/11?
How many of the persons responsible did you attempt to scrag their asses?
How many then? Give us a figure. Tell us their names, how they died and where.
If within the US there was a group of lunatics who planned terrorist attacks on some big country like China or Russia and the government refused to stop them and caused said China or Russia to bomb the US, I would be pretty pissed off that the government didn’t do anything to stop said lunatics from operating within the country.
Or they could actually go after the individuals responsible. Crazy concept I know.
You didn’t say what your attitude toward Russia and China would be.
Sorry, if you say you’d be peachy keen with Russia and China’s actions in that scenario I just don’t believe you.
I would be pretty pissed off that the government didn’t do anything to stop said lunatics from operating within the country.
So while your kid is there lying in a pool of blood next to missile fragments with the Made In America logo your first thought is anger at your own government?
Like if the KKK had tried to take over Mexico or something. America would have been responsible for those guys.
I’m with you John.
Maybe if the drone attacks weren’t killing fifty or so innocents for every terrorist, they wouldn’t have reason to march.
First, I have yet to see any evidence the kill ratio is that bad. And second, they would still have plenty of reason to march. Why do you assume they are upset about the innocent people who are killed? Perhaps they are upset about the Taliban and Al Quada.
Perhaps they are upset about the Taliban and Al Quada.
I doubt that. Regardless I’m not getting into an argument with Mr I’ll Defend Absolutely Anything Our Sacred Military Does.
No thanks.
Why do you doubt that? Bin Ladin was a really popular guy in Pakistan. Do you think he managed to hide out there for so long because the people there didn’t like him? A lot of people in the world and particularly in Pakistan think Al quada is just great. And they love the idea of having an Islamic society and killing the infidel. Where do you think Al Quada gets its members?
And I am not deferring to the military. I am asking you where that statistic came from besides out of your ass.
Whether we drone them or not, they’re going to go apeshit over every little thing they hear about.
Droning them just gives them an easy, concrete target to focus their rage on.
That is ALL that it does, regardless of the ratio of ‘innocents’ to ‘terrorists’.
Pretty much. They are assholes who live in a shit hole country and with blame everyone but themselves for the place being such a shit hole.
Which is why I’m confused that we’re still expending ammo. Well not really confused, but rhetorically.
I am getting to that point myself. It is like people on the right pissing and moaning about how Iraq is falling apart. Tough shit. We gave Iraq eight years and thousands of American lives. If they can’t get their act together and want to continue killing each other, they can have fun. But one thing is for sure, they won’t be building any WNDs or invading their neighbors anytime soon. And if Iran wants to spend the time and effort and make them into a satellite state, I wish them luck.
Afghanistan is getting to the same point. Just make it clear that if they are dumb enough to let someone plan another 9-11 there, we won’t come back next time looking to nation build.
Yes, John, Iraq should be grateful that we invaded them and killed tens of thousands of innocent people there. There’s no gratitude any more.
Your statement here is especially bizarre since you were one of the huge proponents of “giving” them more years and lives back in 2005 or so.
I would say that a HUGE part of the problem is that we don’t have any insight into these metrics. I mean, are we killing people based off of positive photo ID, or is this the old Nam strategy of “anyone could be Charlie, so everyone we kill must be Charlie”.
“How do you kill women? Children?”
“Easy. You just don’t lead them as much.”
Requiring photo ID would limit poor and minority Iraqis access, so we can’t do that.
If only those 20,000 could direct half as much energy toward killing and expelling Taliban/AQ/Haqaani terrorists from their country, then there’d be nothing to drone.
PS: there is a problem with the HandR blog. When I click the logo to give the list of columns I get a blank page saying only “partial/content/blog/body”.
With the drones’ current civilian casualty rate, if there were 400 terrorists in that march and the drones were sent to kill them, all 20,000 people would have been killed.
Citation?
They don’t really have an army, so the civilian casualty rate is like 100%.
And I have the same problem cyto.
Wow, so battling armed gangs and terrorist cells takes half as much energy as making signs and chanting for a day?
You’d think our armed forces would’ve purified Afghanistan in a couple hours! And forget about inner city crime in our own country.
Hey?! Sometimes you have to make banners too!
I didn’t realize that it was in the Objectivist repertoire to assign responsibility to a collective group based on what another unaffiliated group does.
Go ask Peikoff for a ruling. We’ll wait.
Sanction of the victim.
Just like the guy with the poem with no E’s in it.
http://news.yahoo.com/panetta-…..27741.html
US sending forces to the Jordanian Syrian border. Good thing we elected the peace candidate in 08.
“100+ military planners and other personnel who stayed on in Jordan after attending an annual exercise in May, and several dozen more have flown in since.”
Holy per diem batman.
Also, they’re just planners, and that always works out, right?
That is who you send in first. You send in planners to look at the terrain, the ports, the roads, the airports and so forth. What exactly does anyone think they are planning if not how to put an Armored Corps into Syria?
“And this is where we’ll meet the Turks as they pillage through from the North.”
It is also good campaign weather in Syria this time of year.
Really we just need a Desert Fox to roll in and make quick business of it before Nov 3, so a whole weekend news cycle can feast in it before the election.
“You, Ghitan of Aleppo.”
“Sherif?”
“Where do we ride?”
“Damascus, sherif.”
“Aye, but for what?”
“Sherif, for OFA!”
Lawrence of Arabia = best movie of all time.
but the OFA reference eludes me… Wikipedia suggests:
– Occipital Face Area
– Ontario Federation of Agriculture, a farmer lobbying organization
– Orthopedic Foundation for Animals, a non-profit organization for researching diseases of animals
– Optical Fiber Amplifier
– Optimal Flexible Architecture, a standard for naming files and folders in an Oracle database
– Old Faujians Association, an ex-cadet association for the Cadet College in Bangladesh
– Ogdensburg Free Academy, a middle/high school in northern New York
– Omilos Filon Astronomias, a group of amateur astronomers in Thessaloniki, Greece
– Organizing for America, an American political group affiliated with the Democratic Party
– Obama for America, the general election campaign which elected Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States in 2008
I can only assume it has to do with Obama. He’s close to Lawrence. An egomaniac who likes blowing things up in the middle east.
What? Planners are HQ scrubs. You send in loggies and IPB guys first.
‘Course that’s probably what these guys are, journos aren’t exactly useful when it comes to military details.
But I was thinking more early sixties-ish. More Asian.
Planners are HQ scrubs. You send in loggies and IPB guys first.
What do you think planners are if not loggies and IPB guys? Who do you think works in a headquarters?
Planners are people that work in the 3,4 or 5 shop of a Batallion or Higher (or equivalent for the other forces).
The people on the ground would be enacting some sort of plan. Or gathering data to send back. I don’t think we’ve planned from the battle-field (other than at the tactical level) for a few wars now.
I don’t know where that stupid hyphen came from.
The four shop. That would be the supply people. And yes, the guys on the ground are planners. The plans shops needs its information from somewhere. And they also need to work with the host country.
Supply? You must be old school. It’s logistics and that includes logistics plans now. Which actually drives most ops now, what with the budgets and all.
And the guys that work with the host country would be the Host Nation Coordination Cell, which I’m pretty sure we already had in Jordan – and they would be HQ dudes, not leftovers from an exercise.
Especially considering how big CENTCOM and the CENTForces are (and how much they hate to deploy!). Nah, I’m pretty sure these guys on the ground are doing something that was already in a folder in Tampa six months ago.
Its a bunch of Ops planner guys and 90As from the Army and whatevertheheck their Air Farce equivalents are called.
Get ready for more Air National Guard call ups!
Air Farce??
members of the Chair Force are upset with your derogatory remarks. Their scarves twitch with rage.
They stopped calling them “Advisors” a few decades ago.
Also, no MACV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M…..d,_Vietnam
I dunno… I was an “advisor” to the Iraqi 14th DIV and I worked CAATT (Coalition Army Advisor Training Team) in 2008.
Does Students for Liberty or International Society for Individual Liberty have any allied groups in Pakistan that we could e-mail with
messages of support from Americans who oppose U.S. imperialism and the two “newsworthy” candidates who are rattling sabers?
I am sure Pakistan is full of libertarians Romulus. You need to reach out to them. As a matter of fact, I would recommend you fly over and visit with them. Good luck with that.
Drone attacks in Pakistan are the fault of the Pakistani people. If they could only be like Mexico, there wouldn’t be any drone attacks against their crazy jihadists.
They were harboring bin Laden for Christ’s sake.
Collective guilt ftw!
“If they could only be like Mexico, there wouldn’t be any drone attacks against their crazy jihadists.”
Yeah, we’d only give weapons to armed thugs who murder and kidnap at will
That’d be much better though you have to admit.
Pakistan needs to fix itself. It’s responsible for all the terrorists its Madrases are turning out.
Is Pakistan as a whole a moral agent now?
Yeah, just like Germany was for Nazism and America for white supremacy and the KKK.
Yeah I don’t think you’re going to fit in well here
I cannot tell if we are being put on or my sarcasm meter needs tuning or we have someone, as you say, might not be in the place they think they are.
If he were serious he wouldn’t have brought up Mexico. Forget fastball right down the middle, that was a tee-ball setup.
Germany wasn’t morally responsible for Nazis?
Pakistan is responsible for supporting the Taliban and churning out jihadists from it’s Koran schools?
isn’t
Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers were responsible for the Nazis. The country of Germany wasn’t. A country isn’t a person or a being. It can’t have moral agency or responsibility. And as much as you people want to make fighting terrorism analogous to fighting WWII, they’re not. These guys don’t have an army, they don’t wear uniforms, they don’t have capitals, and most of them don’t live at bases. And do you really think that a large percentage of the thousands of people killed in drone attacks would have eventually been involved in terror attacks on US soil? Cause that’s the only logical conclusion of the “fight them over there so we don’t fight them here” crowd
Germany and Germans were responsible for Nazi Germany. The White Rose Society took responsibility for it didn’t they?
Drone attacks are going on in Pakistan because there are U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan who are being attacked by people coming from Pakistan. Why are you ignorant of this?
Germans who were Nazis or supported Nazis were responsible. Not every German. Or do you consider an infant German born in 1938 responsible for the Holocaust?
What the fuck are our troops doing in Afghanistan? 9/11 was eleven years ago. Bin Laden is dead. And if some random guy who lives by me kills US soldiers, I’m not responsible. They have no more obligations than someone who lives by a murderer here in the US has. If these guys are actually that dangerous, send in guys to capture or kill them. We did it with bin Laden didn’t we? The fact that you don’t think that’s a good option is a pretty good hint that maybe this war isn’t worth fighting
The German child was innocent, just not his parents and that causes some problems for the child. There is nothing that can be done about that. Not to mention many German children were in the Hitler Youth.
You got it. Our troops are in Afghanistan because of 9/11. Thanks to the Pakistan and Pakistani supported Taliban who wouldn’t turn over bin Laden.
Now we’re just trying to maintain the Karzai government or some kind of government that can stand up to the Taliban so it doesn’t take the place over again and become another hang out place for al Qaeda.
If John doesn’t quit his job to devote himself full-time to fighting dangerous, heavily-armed people in his county to my liking, I get to gut his children like trout and burn his neighborhood to the ground.
That’s your logic, John. Do you still wonder why people think you’re such contemptible piece of filth?
The U.S. is burning neighborhoods to the ground and purposefully targeting children?
What?
If people were living in my neighborhood and conducting war against Canada, I really couldn’t blame the Canadians for coming down and bombing them. I don’t think the Canadians have a duty to die so I can live in peace.
Maybe you think they do. But I don’t.
This is actually a decent counter argument– detailing a scenario that’s not happening.
Is there any evidence at all that the people in rural Pakistan are successfully conducting a war on US Soil?
The notion that these thousands of people who have been killed all would have been involved in terror attacks on US soil at some point is absurd
You misread him. He said “county” not “country.”
People working at the Pentagon were killing innocent Muslims for decades before 9/11, you know.
Like where? Lebanon? Kuwait? Somalia? Bosnia? Kosovo?
Um, yeah. Throw in Iraq as well as Iran (overthrowing their government and supporting the Shah) and all the other countries whose dictators our government supported
That’s weird. In all these cases the U.S. was protecting Muslims.
Oh no we supported the Shah!
The U.S. was protecting moslems by installing authoritarian governments and arming them with the weapons they needed to brutally repress anyone threatening their capacity to plunder the population?
I’m interested in your ideas and would love to subscribe to your newsletter.
The U.S. “installed authoritarian governments”? Or was the U.S. just dealing with who was already in charge or picked a side by dealing with who was in charge?
You’re giving the U.S. too much credit I think.
As I said, I’m interested in your ideas and would love to subscribe to your newsletter, Lyle.
You’re right that the U.S. didn’t do anything. The US government did. That’s a distinction that too many people fail to make when it comes to foreign policy. The government isn’t society in foreign policy any more than it is in domestic policy. The US government overthrew Mossadegh and installed the Shah. That’s a fact. And then after he was overthrown, they armed Sadaam when he invaded Iran (and Iran too through the Contra affair) and fueled a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. And then after, they went to war with Sadaam, and then instituted draconian sanctions after the war. Madeleine Albright thought the price of 500,000 Iraqi children was “worth it” whatever that means. And then there’s been the events of the last decade. Over the years, they’ve given billions of dollars in aid, as well as weapons, to countless other dictators around the region, propping them up. These are all facts
Really? The death rate in Kosovo increased after NATO intervention. Doesn’t sound very protecting to me. And I know Somalians were thrilled to have us there. And the Lebanese. Are you serious?
If you’re going to trivialize supporting the shah, then don’t bitch about the current situation that is a direct result of that.
I could riff on my ancient Catholic upbringing and argue being Muslim makes not-innocent by definition and invoke original sin and all that. But then we could argue about whether or not we know the people we’re targeting are actually Muslim.
Forget turtles, it’s hair-splitting all the way down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D…..n_Pakistan
US Drone Strike statistic based on research by a team of journalists of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism:[3][16]
(as of October 10, 2012)
Total strikes: 347
Total reported killed: 2,572 ? 3,341
Civilians reported killed: 474 ? 884
Children reported killed: 176
Total reported injured: 1,232 ? 1,366
Strikes under the Bush Administration: 52
Strikes under the Obama Administration: 295
Estimated innocent casualty rate = ~25-30%
which makes sense. Jihadi terrorists have wives and kids.
I suspect that ratio is still better than the # of civilians the pakistani army killed in Waziristan when they last tried getting rid of these same fuckers. The pakistanis had a particular fondness for artillery (their army, despite having really garish uniforms and well groomed mustaches, really isnt famous for the tenacity of their assault troops)
John| 10.10.12 @ 1:48PM |#
If people were living in my neighborhood and conducting war against Canada, I really couldn’t blame the Canadians for coming down and bombing them
To be precise, I’m not sure you’d have much opportunity to do any blaming, what with the flaming pieces of your corpse being buried under rubble. You’d be identified as a collaborator. plus they’d find all this anti-canadian diatribe on your facebook page.
i support drone strikes of Code Pink. nuclear drone strikes. anyone within a mile of them has a good chance of also being a douchebag