The Predictable and Inevitable Blowback
Imagine that in this alternate universe, a foreign
military power begins flying remote-controlled warplanes over your town, using
on-board missiles to kill hundreds of your innocent neighbors.
Now imagine that when you read the newspaper about
this ongoing bloodbath, you learn that the foreign nation's top general is
nonchalantly telling reporters that his troops are also killing "an
amazing number" of your cultural brethren in an adjacent country. Imagine
further learning that this foreign power is expanding the drone attacks on your
community despite the attacks' well-known record of killing innocents. And
finally, imagine that when you turn on your television, you see the perpetrator
nation's tuxedo-clad leader cracking stand-up comedy jokes about drone
strikes—jokes that prompt guffaws from an audience of that nation's elite.
Ask yourself: How would you and your fellow citizens
respond? Would you call homegrown militias mounting a defense
"patriots" or would you call them "terrorists"? Would you
agree with your leaders when they angrily tell reporters that violent defiance
should be expected?
Fortunately, most Americans don't have to worry
about these queries in their own lives. But how we answer them in a
hypothetical thought experiment provides us insight into how Pakistanis are
likely feeling right now. Why? Because thanks to our continued drone assaults
on their country, Pakistanis now confront these issues every day. And if they
answer these questions as many of us undoubtedly would in a similar situation
-- well, that should trouble every American in this age of asymmetrical
warfare.
Though we don't like to call it mass murder, the U.S. government's undeclared drone war in Pakistan is
devolving into just that. As noted by a former counterinsurgency adviser to
Gen. David Petraeus and a former Army officer in Afghanistan, the operation has
become a haphazard massacre.
"Press reports suggest that over the last three
years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders," David
Kilcullen and Andrew Exum wrote in 2009. "But, according to Pakistani
sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for
every militant killed."
Making matters worse, Gen. Stanley McChrystal has,
indeed, told journalists that in Afghanistan,
U.S.
troops have "shot an amazing number of people" and "none has
proven to have been a real threat." Meanwhile, President Obama used his
internationally televised speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner to
jest about drone warfare—and the assembled Washington glitterati did, in fact,
reward him with approving laughs.
By eerie coincidence, that latter display of
monstrous insouciance occurred on the same night as the failed effort to raze Times Square. Though America reacted to that despicable
terrorism attempt with its routine spasms of cartoonish shock (why do they hate
us?!), the assailant's motive was anything but baffling. As law enforcement
officials soon reported, the accused bomber was probably trained and inspired
by Pakistani groups seeking revenge for U.S. drone strikes.
"This is a blowback," said Pakistan's
foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi. "This is a reaction. And you could
expect that ... let's not be naive."
Obviously, regardless of rationale, a
"reaction" that involves trying to incinerate civilians in Manhattan is abhorrent
and unacceptable. But so is Obama's move to intensify drone assaults that we
know are regularly incinerating innocent civilians in Pakistan. And
while Qureshi's statement about "expecting" blowback seems radical,
he's merely echoing the CIA's reminder that "possibilities of
blowback" arise when we conduct martial operations abroad.
We might remember that somehow-forgotten warning
come the next terrorist assault. No matter how surprised we may feel after that
inevitable (and inevitably deplorable) attack, the fact remains that until we
halt our own indiscriminately violent actions, we ought to expect equally indiscriminate
and equally violent reactions.
David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books "Hostile Takeover" and "The Uprising." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.
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David, I think your getting the hang of it but you have to widen your circle and take a look at what ground forces are doing as well Afghanistan and Pakistan's "Salvador Option" with the added twist of using the D-Company to terrorize India.
Stephen Lendman looks at 'Using Alleged Terrorism to Escalate War and Homeland Repression' giving added plausibility are what Webster Tarpley calls false-flag operations. Mr. Tarpley has also gone in depth on both Russia Today and KPFA Guns and Butter on this subject. He's also looked at the 'Great Game' and Obama's West Point Speech which I think is worth a mention here.
Let me just say, I think Webster Tarpley, Raplh Schoenman, and Michael Parenti do a better job discrediting the establishment tied tri-fecta like the CounterPunch, The Nation, and Noam Chomsky that dismiss 'conspiracies' (people conspire all the time when they pursue their own interests). To say people don't conspire, is complete idiocy and a betrayal to the people.
The first American counter-insurgency operation employed Ute manhunters against the Navajo. JFK's unconventional warfare, psywar, and counter-insurgency low-intensity warfare was first tested in Latin America and later exported into southeast-asia. I think what Tom Burghardt fleshes out of the Army Special Operations Forces FM 3-05.130, titled Unconventional Warfare is worth a read.
I have read about these drones being developed and used domestically, maybe that explains why the government forced digital TV on us? I think American exceptionalism is out the window with the ruling class capitalist criminals. The designed police state repression is tightening it's death grip on it's crumbling sovereignty. Just keep moving folks, nothing to see here.
Back to building a new silk-road
I've read Afghanistan has less than 100 CIA-ISI created al qaeda yet the Pentagon surges troops, corporate contractors, and Stanley Mcchrystals' government in a box. According to this fool we don't have an empire. The general should consider getting himself a Mother Jones Military Map and stock his bookshelf with William Blum's 'Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II' to get a better handle of his job. He'd do a better job looking farther into these military intervention histories than peddling failed policies. A brief look at a tax graph would tell him we spend 63% of our taxes on the military. Up to $1 trillion if we count the black budgets, and the 16 intelligence agencies working hard creating our police state apparatus. The empire he's projecting has international governance with full-spectrum dominance. In the eyes of the state, he could be considered a traitor to US national sovereignty.
Osama Bin Ladin is a dead letter, he was pronounced killed a while back by Benazir Bhutto on Al Jazeera. I don't want to dismiss this could be mis-information leaked to her by her assasins but Obama has spent already close to $2 trillion on the AFPAK, Iraq wars. Like other rapists promising to pull-out shortly after penetration, the mut is ejaculating himself in the region. Tearing Pakistan's vaginal walls for economic shock therapy, forcing the UN-SNA to be deep throat-ed and neo-liberal privatization in the rectal for only $20 billion.
So what's the Shepard got to say about the Wisconsin State budget being in the red and the correlation of a $20 billion giveaway to a repressive Pakistan regime?
While the US president joked about the drones, the "War without Borders" Obama's ""Long War" was recently reaffirmed by the Vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Corps General James Cartwright. Again, Milwaukee and Wisconsin media has betrayed the people and left them clueless while "The Specter of Catastrophe returns".
It would be beautiful to see Milwaukee rise up like their Thai counterparts and chase their bureaucratic demons into helicopters and spark a social revolution.
I would have to say this is hypothetical. But, as a hypothetical, if I lived in a lawless region of a country A and I supported, funded and in many instances trained the attackers of a that hypothetical country B and supported their views as did my cousins across the border in hypothetical country C, and that if I harbored many of the leaders and fighters for decades of a hypothetical movement, in my towns, homes and occasionally schools and places of worship, I might, hypothetically, expect that the war could come to me and hypothetical country A (or C, or both).
Further, if I did live in this hypothetical country A with hypothetical unmanned planes attacking it and I was as ideologically strong a supporter of the movement against the hypothetical country B even with their planes and tanks and hypothetical weapons long before they ever began attacking me and mine and continued to be, I might not be as concerned with their hypothetical leader of hypothetical country B and his tux, but might look on with wonder, amusement and disdain as their hypothetical media debated the rightness or wrongness of attacking their enemies and I would probably praise my hypothetical God that I did not live in such a hypothetically messed up schizophrenic and self loathing place as hypothetical country B as I sure as hell would have no such misgivings if I had the hypothetical power to do so and would hypothetically be a lot less merciful if I were able.
Hypothetically speaking of course.