Although the corporate owned mainstream media in America habitually refers to the conflict in Afghanistan as the War in Afghanistan, a more accurate description would be to refer to as the Afghanistan-Pakistan war or the Af-Pak War, as most foreign policy experts refer to the nine-year-old conflict. Similar to the Vietnam War, which the Af-Pak War recently surpassed in length, the conflict in Afghanistan has spilled over into a neighboring country that will undoubtedly result in similar disastrous consequences. While the war in Vietnam started by the United States helped create the Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia which was responsible for one of the worst mass killings of the 20th Century , only history will reveal what kind of blowback will result in the American involvement in Pakistan’s Swat region.
A recent article by Fatima Bhutto, an Afghan-born Pakistani poet and writer, helps put the Af-Pak war in more context and the likely future blowback it will create.
According to the recent cache of State Department cables released by Wikileaks, his position and those of his colleagues in government haven’t wavered. In 2008, for example, Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani enthusiastically told American Ambassador Anne Paterson that he “didn’t care” if drone strikes were launched against his country as long as the “right people” were targeted. (They weren’t.) “We’ll protest in the National Assembly,” Gilani added cynically, “and then ignore it.”
In fact, protests by the National Assembly have been few and far between and yet, by the end of November, Pakistani territory had been targeted by American unmanned Predator and Reaper missile strikes more than 100 times this year alone. CIA drone strikes have, in fact, been a feature of the American war in Pakistan since 2004. In 2008, after Barack Obama won the presidency in the U.S. and Zardari ascended to Pakistan's highest office, the strikes escalated and soon began occurring almost weekly, later nearly daily, and so became a permanent feature of life for those living in the tribal borderlands of northern Pakistan.
Barack Obama ordered his first drone strike against Pakistan just 72 hours after being sworn in as president. It seems a suitably macabre fact that, according to a U.N. report on “targeted killings” (that is, assassinations) published in 2010, George W. Bush employed drone strikes 45 times in his eight years as President. In Obama’s first year in office, the drones were sent in 53 times. In the six years that drone strikes have been used in the fight against Pakistan, researchers at the New America Foundation estimate that between 1,283 and 1,971 people have been killed.
While the dead are regularly identified as “militants” or “suspected militants” in newspaper stories and on the TV news, they almost never have names, nor are their identities confirmed or faces shown. Their histories are always vague. The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) took a careful look at nine drone strikes from the last two years and concluded that they had resulted in the deaths of 30 civilians, including 14 women and children. (Perhaps, of course, superior American military intelligence classified them as “militants in training.”) Based on this study, an average rate of error can be calculated: 3.33 civilians mistakenly killed in each drone attack. The dead, Pakistanis will assure you, are largely unnamed, faceless, unindicted, and un-convicted civilians.
Pakistanis are considered irrelevant, however, and collateral damage, as it turns out, doesn’t seem to worry anyone in the governing elite.
The Pakistani media has welcomed the release of the State Department documents because much that reporters and pundits have long claimed (and which Washington has long denied) has now been confirmed: that, for instance, the mercenary private contractor Blackwater (now known as Xe Services) has been operating in Pakistan at the behest of the Americans, that the country’s military high command has given the green light for drone strikes on its own people, and that the infamously corrupt government of President Zardari has turned the country over to the Americans in exchange for money.
Please visit TomDispatch for the complete article by Fatima Bhutto.
It is perhaps a good thing that most Americans remain ignorant and continue watching sports and television shows like Dancing with the Stars. If Americans were awoken from their voyeuristic media induced coma, they would be frightened senseless learning how close Islamic militants are to getting a nuclear weapon in Pakistan.
Fatima Bhutto, an Afghan-born Pakistani poet and writer, is most recently the author of Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (Nation Books, 2010). Her work has appeared in the New Statesman, the Daily Beast, and the Guardian, among other places. Her father, Murtaza Bhutto, son of Pakistan's former President and Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and an elected member of parliament, was killed by the police in 1996 in Karachi during the premiership of his sister, Benazir Bhutto. Fatima lives and writes in Karachi, Pakistan.
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