I can remember a time when Obama was careful to say that the only condition under which he would conduct military ops in Pakistan without their consent would be if he had solid intelligence of Osama bin Laden’s location, and they were unwilling to do anything about it.
Then, literally two days into his presidency, he went and killed a bunch of Pakistanis, including three children. Presumably he knew where Osama’s cave was, and those damn towelheads wouldn’t do anything about it.
And presumably the five drone bombings since then were also gunning for Osama.
In fact, there’s quite a body count piling up of people who, if they were still able to make wishes, would wish that Obama would just frickin’ learn to aim, already.
Osama must be getting scared of living near the borders, because now Obama’s team is thinking about taking the fight into the interior.
Several administration and military officials stressed that they continued to prod the Pakistani military to take the lead in a more aggressive campaign to root out Taliban and Qaeda fighters who are attacking American forces in Afghanistan and increasingly destabilizing nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Cuz, you know, this continued campaign of America bombing Pakistani territory is having absolutely no effect on Pakistan’s political stability. No sirree.
See, that was on Al Jazeera Qaeda network, so just take whatever they just said and believe the opposite. Because they hate us for our press freedoms.
Yes, thankfully, as a paladin among nations, our intentions are pure. The only possible reason we could have for mucking about in Balochistan would be to get Bin Laden.
…A solution to these problems can be found by creating an independent corridor to the Arabian Sea in Balochistan. This corridor, together with the occupation of Afghanistan, would also ensure US access to Central Asian crude oil, the raison d’etre of the so-called war on terror.
(These are not the drones you are looking for…)
To conclude, then, there are good reasons to believe that a US-Israel-India axis is in pursuit of a coordinated plan to balkanise militarily consequential Muslim states (next Pakistan, then Iran — the order reversed by Musharraf’s weak military policies); ‘secure’ Pakistan’s nuclear weapons; support Baloch irredentism not only to open a corridor both for logistic support of its troops in Afghanistan and for export of Central Asian crude oil, but also to weaken Iran and Pakistan in the long-term; coerce the Pakistan Army into a civil war (advocating suppression of the Taliban by force in Pakistan, while admitting the failure of exactly this policy in Afghanistan); and further consolidate its hold over civilian leadership by creating the kind of financial dependency that would allow it to control ‘democratic’ elections, and to annul their results if they were unfavourable (as Israel did with Hamas).
I have no idea what that was about. Or why WIIIAI would say: “By the way, when are people going to start describing our military activities in Pakistan as a war and maybe, I don’t know, discussing whether it’s a good idea?”
He just doesn’t get it. Obama is the peace president.
My fortune cookie: “Drastic means are not as necessary as you think.”
I’ve been trying to work out an ethical account of pure pacifism for a while. If we concede that it’s necessary to have the ability as a group, to murder every person in the world (and several other worlds besides) in order to prevent someone else from murdering us—and perhaps that concedes too much, but let’s go with it—then the next obvious question is: what do you do with that ability? What is ethically allowable?
The answer seems pretty simple to me: you may protect life by standing in front of bullets. Metaphorically. And literally. But it’s not immediately clear that any other use of violence is ethically sanctioned. In fact, it seems that no other use of violence can be sanctioned, because at that point you exceed the charter of this (not actually so) hypothetical institution, whose purpose is solely to keep you alive.
There’s more there, of course: we are assuming a hermetically sealed, spherical, frictionless society. In an actual society, having a really big hammer means that the rest of society begins to resemble a really big hammer—a fact which has not gone unnoticed by, um, anyone—and this has all manner of consequences, up to and including brown children beginning to resemble nails.
Which only helps to explain why, exactly, we are so very far from, “protect life by standing in front of bullets,” though I hope it may indicate very slightly some way we can get back there, and maybe further.
We can also continue to talk, make noise, and educate. My point with sharing that study of empathy is that human beings really really don’t like violence when they believe it’s happening to other people that they count as human beings. Even the normally violent ones. Simply by continuing to make efforts to educate people who don’t know about the violence yet, or if they do, fail to make the emotional connection yet, I think we can make a real difference at reducing violence in the world through pacific means.