Drone strike victims to address US Congress

[The Comrade]

liar liar pants on fire


"The goal should have been the destruction of Al-Qaeda forces and the kill/capture of all persons implicated in the 9/11 attacks. Occupation was and is stupid, a waste of time with zero benefits.

Have the Afghans do it. It is their mess. All the Taliban had to do was hand over everybody involved. When they didn't, we occupied them. Either that or negotiate peacefully while closing off the borders so they couldn't get out.

None of this "compassionate" warfighting, which ends up killing more people than if we just treated war like what it is."


this is where the entire last three pages of this thread has come from.

[jimmyz]

[exploited]

[The Comrade]

[spacemonkey]

[exploited]

[The Comrade]

[exploited]

[broken robot]

Ex, the problem again as I first pointed out is that you're assuming there is a well-defined "enemy." You keep referring to "those guys who did 9/11", whether they're Al Qaeda, Taliban, whatever. And you act as if there is a straightforward solution, in this case "carpet bombing them" like Nazi Germany did to its insurgents.

The reason none of that makes sense is because, as I initially pointed out, the tribal regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan are composed of unstable shifting alliances among various local insurgent groups. There's a reason the US military has created a Human Terrain System program just to understand who's who, because popular rhetoric about a vague Islamist they-hate-our-freedom enemy doesn't suffice for the goals of actual military operations. "The Taliban" is just a convenient shorthand for a whole mess of factions each one duking it out, none of which may even agree ideologically.

There's a reason why the Pakistani army is completely infiltrated and why they have trouble policing their own internal boundaries, and it's not because they all share an Islamist politics. Rather the states in these countries are underdeveloped, weakened by political and economic dependency, and now dealing with factional disputes at all levels of the military and bureaucratic hierarchy. Throw in a global superpower pursuing a clumsy agenda of drone strikes--or even more alarmingly in your counter-example, bombing entire towns--and the level of conflict increases exponentially.

The question is, what does the US gain from this? Now you could argue there are actual honest to goodness "terrorists" hiding among the local insurgent forces--though it's still unclear what support these forces actually give to international groups like Al Qaeda, and there may be just as well divisions among them. Regardless, you can't just scale down from international conflict and terrorism to local power struggles without getting into messy politics that undermines the very goals and parameters of the official mission to seek out and find those who would attack the US.

So again wrapped up in the US's drone strike strategy are people's daily lives getting blown to smithereens as they deal both with competing insurgent factions and a global superpower that has been unable to extricate itself from the messy politics of the Af-Pak border. In addition to the US's own confusion over operational goals and procedures, the fact of the matter is the US is now directly responsible for civilian deaths. How will it be held accountable? One answer is that you have to get people from the regions themselves to attest to the human costs of the drone strikes in the hopes that our legislative and legal system will kick in and start to reign in an unrestricted program of targeted assassinations.

[The Comrade]