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Posted by admin in Extrajudicial Killings by PPP Government, Pakistan's Hall of Shame, Pakistan-USA Relationship, THE BATTLE FOR PAKISTAN SERIES, US Drone Attacks, ZARDAR'S CORRUPTION on March 26th, 2013
Finally, the Backlash Against Drones Takes Flight
Rand Paul’s marathon 13-hour filibuster was not the end of the conversation on drones. Suddenly, drones are everywhere, and so is the backlash. Efforts to counter drones at home and abroad are growing in the courts, at places of worship, outside air force bases, inside the UN, at state legislatures, inside Congress–and having an effect on policy.
Throughout the US–and the world–people are beginning to wake up to the danger of spy and killer drones. Their actions are already having an impact in forcing the Administration to share memos with Congress, reduce the number of strikes and begin a process of taking drones out of the hands of the CIA.
Medea Benjamin is author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. Noor Mir is the Drone Campaign Coordinator at CODEPINK.
Posted by admin in " RIAZ THE SHAITAN OF PAKISTAN, BOOT THE SCOUNDRELS OR SHOWDAZ, CIA AGENT NAWAZ SHARIF, Corruption, Corruption in Islamic Countries, Destroyers of E.Pakistan, EXPATRIATE PAKISTANIS SPEAK-UP, Girah Cut, INVESTIGATIVE REPORT, LIAR POLITICIANS, Morosi Siyasat & Political Crooks, NAWAZ SHARIF, Nawaz Sharif US Agent, Nawaz Sharif Womanizer, PAKISTAN'S CORRUPT POLITICAL PARTIES:PPP, Pakistan's Ruling Elite Feudals Industrialists, PML (N) CORRUPTION, PPP 's Raja Rental Pervez Corruption, PPP Choor, THE BATTLE FOR PAKISTAN SERIES, ZARDAR'S CORRUPTION on March 24th, 2013
Pakistani Drug Lord Iqbal Baig has set-up shop in Lahore, specifically in the vicinity of Hall and Mall Road, in an area formerly called Lakshmi Mansion. He acquired these properties to build a Shopping Mall under blessing of Shahbaz Sharif, Nawaz Sharif, and Asif Zardari. Iqbal Baig is money laundering, by converting drug money into legitimate cash by buying properties in Lahore. He bought almost whole of Lakshmi Mansion and Hall Road properties. He is a known accomplice of Taliban and is clear and present danger to the global community including the US and Europe. He is the financier of Taliban and funnels money to every terrorist organization through money laundering in legitimate business enterprises. During the PPP government, he stayed under the radar and kept building assets to finance his patrons the Taliban. Pakistan’s ISI and US CIA should look into the activities of this dangerous criminal on par with Pablo Escobar. In 1995, Iqbal Baig, Pakistan’s most notorious drug lords was extradited to the United States, where he was charged with 100 counts of heroin and hashish smuggling. Iqbal Baig and Anwar Khattak were put on a U.S. government plane in 1995 night only hours after his appeals against extradition was turned down by the High Court in Rawalpindi.Baig and Khattak together ran one of Pakistan’s biggest heroin- and hashish-trafficking networks, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials. Both were imprisoned in Pakistan, where they had been convicted of drug smuggling.Baig and Khattak will face 102 counts of smuggling heroin and hashish into the United States. The trials are likely to take place either in Michigan or New York City, where the offenses allegedly occurred, a U.S. official said. Pakistan has been cooperating with the United States since 1993, when the Americans gave Pakistan a list of 17 suspected drug barons it wanted extradited. Seven were extradited in 1993; most others are in custody in Pakistan.
In lucid moments, Mohammed Ilyas has happy memories of life as a fisherman on one of Karachi’s deep-sea shark boats. But that was 10 years ago, before Mr. Ilyas began smoking the low-grade heroin he knows as “brown sugar,” and before home became a threadbare blanket tacked to a grimy Karachi wall as a windbreak.
Now, Mr. Ilyas’s addiction brings him to the same lonely spot each night, with a sliver of silver paper to hold the heroin bought with a day’s panhandling in the docks, and a lighted taper to heat the powder into the vapors he inhales. On either side, fellow addicts crouch in their own pitiful isolation, ignored by the police and passers-by.
“What can I do, sir?” Mr. Ilyas asked on a recent evening, between pulls on the tube of rolled paper he uses as a pipe. “I would like to do something. I would like to be back with my family. But the brown sugar tastes too good.”
The tragedy for Pakistan set in much deeper 15 years ago, when Afghan warlords, thrown into turmoil by the Soviet military intervention in their country, stepped up the growing of opium poppies as other forms of commerce collapsed. The product, as opium gum, traveled down old trade routes into the deserts and mountains along Afghanistan’s border, where Pakistani frontiersmen, who grow tons of opium themselves, took the gum and ran it through refineries, producing the cheap “brown sugar” smoked by Mr. Ilyas, as well as heroin in its purer, more lucrative forms.
Over the years, as ever larger quantities of the narcotic began flowing into Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and other cities, the drug ate its way into the fiber of Pakistan. Political life was corrupted, to the point that one of the country’s most notorious drug barons, Ayub Afridi, sat as an elected member of Parliament from 1988 to 1990, dropping out only when an ordinance was passed barring any known drug trafficker from running in an election.
Drug barons have continued to exercise a pervasive political influence, discouraging decisive government action against them.
What’s more, the backwash from the Afghan conflict has brought a flow of weapons into Pakistan, creating a nexus between the drug barons and new generation of heavily armed gangs. In Karachi mainly, but also in other cities, these gangs have established a terror that is overwhelming the local authorities.
Along with Afghanistan, and to a much smaller extent India, Pakistan has become one of the world’s leading producers of heroin — and by some estimates, a larger producer now than the Golden Triangle countries of Southeast Asia.
With growing anxiety, Western nations, including the United States, have been looking at Pakistan in the way they have long looked at countries like Colombia and Thailand — as a place where narcotics trafficking, left to run rampant, has become a danger not only to the country itself but also to much of the world.
Pakistani leaders have made no secret of their belief that drug money was in some way linked to the March 8 attack that killed two Americans working at the United States Consulate in Karachi, and to the terrorist underground that supported Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a 27-year-old fugitive and suspected mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993. Mr. Yousef was arrested in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, in February.
These links are likely to be discussed when Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, arrives in the United States on April 5. For five years, the main stumbling block to improved ties has been Pakistan’s persistence with a covert program to develop nuclear weapons. But on this visit, Pakistan’s Prime Minister may find American leaders at least as concerned about Pakistan’s role as a center for drugs and terrorism.
When she recently met with American reporters in Islamabad, Ms. Bhutto offered a stark picture of Pakistan as a society where torrents of drugs and weapons have combined to undermine the basis for a civil society.
“We are a clean Government,” she said. “For the first time in our history, we are going to take action against drug barons, militants and terrorists.”
Western embassies that have pressed for years for a narcotics crackdown were encouraged three months ago when the Government froze $70 million in assets belonging to seven leading Pakistani drug lords, and took steps, for the first time in Pakistan, to curb money laundering by drug bosses. The Government also announced the biggest raid on a narcotics laboratory in North-West Frontier Province, site of many of the heroin refineries, seizing 132 tons of hashish and nearly half a ton of heroin.
Ms. Bhutto also promised to speed up action by Pakistani courts on United States requests for the extradition of six drug lords held in Pakistan, and for the arrest and extradition of two others, including Mr. Afridi, the former legislator.
Maj. Gen. Salahuddin Termizi, the country’s anti-drug chief, has won the confidence of Western narcotics experts. But few with experience in combatting the drug world in Pakistan are ready to congratulate Ms. Bhutto just yet.
[ In a crackdown on the eve of the Bhutto trip, two suspected drug barons, Mirza Iqbal Baig and Anwar Khattak, were flown to the United States on April 3. The extraditions were cited by General Termizi as further proof of Pakistan’s commitment to rolling back booming drug production and trafficking. General Termizi said on April 4 that Pakistan had smashed the bulk of its heroin factories and arrested all but 2 of 12 leading drug barons. ]
Top army officers have been accused in the past of conniving with the drug lords, to the extent of running heroin shipments to Karachi aboard army-owned trucks.
And even if Pakistan were to live up to all of Ms. Bhutto’s promises, it would not tackle what has always been the core of the heroin problem: Afghanistan’s role as a secure hinterland for the traffickers. Years of efforts and millions of dollars have been spent by Western governments in an effort to persuade Afghan warlords to stop growing poppies and plant other crops, but poppy acreage has increased every year.
United States officials who have seen the blaze of white, red and pink poppies that cover much of Afghanistan each spring argue that little will be achieved until Washington shifts its spending priorities. The officials say spending $80 million of the State Department’s anti-narcotics budget on efforts to combat cocaine production in South America, and barely a tenth as much on all of Asia and Africa, means that efforts against heroin have to take a back seat.
Currently, the closest thing to a United States Government anti-narcotics program in Afghanistan is a $100,000 grant to Mercy Corps, an American volunteer agency that is trying to persuade communities in a small part of Helmand Province to substitute other cash crops for poppy-growing. Narcotics experts say that their work is hampered because Washington has no embassy in Kabul, the Afghan capital, and that the Clinton Administration has played virtually no part in efforts to negotiate peace between Afghan factions that have been fighting a civil war since Soviet troops withdrew.
When Mrs. Bhutto meets President Clinton, she seems likely to argue for an American responsibility to help Pakistan and Afghanistan deal with their narcotics problems. The argument is that Washington’s decision to channel billions of dollars in weapons and financial backing to the Afghan rebel groups in the 1980’s, without close scrutiny of the some of the Afghan leaders involved, contributed to a climate in which some of those leaders turned to heroin trafficking.
“We have been getting a bad name, and it is clear that our activity needs to be geared up,” Brig. Gen. Mohammed Aslam, deputy director of the new anti-narcotics force, said at his office in Rawalpindi.
But the general smiled when he was asked what part of the blame he attributed to the United States.
“I will only say this,” he said. “I believe that we in Pakistan are doing what we can to undo our part of the crime.”
NEW DELHI — Two days before Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto leaves for a U.S. visit, her government handed over two alleged heroin kingpins to the United States and a court opened the way for more quick extraditions.
Haji Mirza Mohammed Iqbal Baig, once reputedly the head of Pakistan’s largest drug syndicate, and his lieutenant, Mohammed Anwar Khattak, were flown to the United States on Sunday night aboard an American aircraft, said officials at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, the capital. The two Pakistanis’ names appear in more than 100 U.S. narcotics cases.
“There is a lot of evidence that these guys are big-time heroin dealers. We’re happy to bring them to justice,” a U.S. drug official in Islamabad said.
In Washington, Justice Department officials said the men were due to arrive Monday night in Hawaii and will be flown to Travis Air Force Base in Northern California’s Solano County before being transferred to New York for arraignment.
Baig and Khattak are wanted on various federal charges, including conspiracy to smuggle heroin into the United States. They had already been convicted by a Pakistani court in the 1985 seizure of more than 17 tons of hashish in the southwestern province of Baluchistan.
The drug dealers’ extradition, which the Clinton Administration had sought since 1993, is the latest of several tough-on-crime measures by Bhutto’s government that–by design or not–have especially pleased the United States.
On Feb. 7, Pakistani and U.S. agents joined forces in Islamabad to arrest Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the alleged mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing. He was flown to New York to stand trial.
Such actions will undoubtedly be cited by Bhutto, who leaves for the United States today, as proof of her determination to do her part in combatting the global narcotics trade and Islamic terrorism, two major U.S. security concerns.
Next Tuesday, Bhutto is scheduled to meet President Clinton at the White House. She has been seeking more U.S. help–including the lifting of a law that has barred most American aid to Pakistan since October, 1990, because of the Asian country’s nuclear weapons program.
Late last year, U.S. drug czar Lee P. Brown warned Bhutto that Pakistan could lose badly needed World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans unless the country, the world’s No. 3 opium producer, did more to stem narcotics production and trafficking.
*
U.S. drug officials have praised what has happened since. On March 23, more than 2,000 paramilitary troops staged an unprecedented drug raid in the remote, lawless Khyber region bordering Afghanistan. They seized 6.3 tons of highly refined heroin, as much as Pakistan normally confiscates in a year.
Baig and Khattak had been served notice earlier this year that they could be extradited to the United States. Pakistan’s law allows citizens in such a position to file a petition in court opposing extradition.
On Sunday, their petitions were rejected and they were quickly put on a plane for the United States.
Special correspondent Jennifer Griffin in Islamabad contributed to this report.
Drug barons' extradition challenged in SC
-------------------------------------------------------------------
*From Nasir Malik
ISLAMABAD, April 4: The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Wednesday
about the admissibility ) of three petitions filed by the wives of
alleged drug lords Mirza Iqbal Baig and Anwar Khattak against the Lahore
High Court decision that cleared the way for their extradition to the
United States.
The Lahore High Court on Sunday allowed the extradition of seven drug
barons, including Baig and Khattak. The two were immediately flown to
the United States in a US military plane.
Though apparently the petitions will make little difference for Baig
and Khattak who have already been sent abroad, they can affect the
remaining five accused who are in Adiala Jail.
One of the five accused, Nasrullah Hanjera has applied to the Supreme
Court to grant an order blocking his possible extradition.
Khawaja Haris, lawyer for the accused, has maintained in his petitions
that the extraditions are in isolation of Section 5 (2) of Extradition
Act 1972 which bars extradition until an accused has been acquitted or
completed a sentence in his own country.
Interior Minister Naseerullah Babar told reporters on Monday that the
alleged drug barons were handed over to the US authorities after
completing all legal requirements.
But constitutional experts say the government acted in haste by
immediately parcelling the two accused thus denying them of their
constitutional right to appeal before the Supreme Court. They also point
out that the extradition was also contrary to Article 4 of the
Extradition Agreement signed between the two countries.
Article 4 says: The extradition shall not take place if the person aimed
has already been tried, discharged or punished or is still under trial
in the territories of the high contracting party (applied to in this
case Pakistan) for the crime or offence for which his extradition is
demanded. If the person claimed would be under examination or under
punishment his extradition shall be deferred until the conclusion of the
trial or the full execution of any punishment awarded to him."
Haris told reporters that Baig and Khattak were still serving their
five-year jail term awarded to them by a Karachi magistrate. Besides,
two cases were also pending against them.
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Posted by admin in " RIAZ THE SHAITAN OF PAKISTAN, "BAHRIA TOWN, Asif Zardari Crook Par Excellance, BOOT THE SCOUNDRELS OR SHOWDAZ, EXPATRIATE PAKISTANIS SPEAK-UP, Extrajudicial Killings by PPP Government, Girah Cut, Pakistan's Hall of Shame, Pakistan's Ruling Elite Feudals Industrialists, PPP Choor, ZARDAR'S CORRUPTION on March 22nd, 2013
A list of questions posed by Mr. Akram Sheikh to Asif Zardari, regarding the planned assassination of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. These questions are very probing and timely and if left unanswered will directly implicate Asif Zardari in Benazir’s death. Mr. Akram Shaikh has has raised some good and valid questions for everyone to ponder over
1. With the NRO still around, striking down all corruption cases, and having become president of PPP and also having sole control over all of Benazir’s property and assets, is there anyone in the world who has benefited more from late Benazir’s death than Mr. Zardari?
2. Does it not make him Suspect Number One for her murder, especially when he is also facing various murder charges, including that for murder of Mir Murtaza Bhutto?
3. Mr. Zardari is already implicated in a murder case. Benazir knew about the workers’ and her party leaders’ reservations about Mr. Zardari.
4. Why did she not consult or even share this decision with the Central Executive Committee (CEC) of the party?
5. And if not the CEC, is there any person in the whole world who can testify that she shared with him or her, the decision that, after her death, Mr. Asif Zardari will to lead the party?
6. If Benazir was so careful to write a will, then what was so secret about it? She should have taken the CEC into confidence or announce it at a rally, to protect Mr. Zardari from any later claims that the will is fake.
7. Keeping secret the contents of the will must have been a huge burden for Mr. Zardari.
9. Why has Mr. Zardari not made the whole document, the will, public?
Mr. Akram Sheikh is a prominent Pakistani lawyer.
Posted by admin in " RIAZ THE SHAITAN OF PAKISTAN, Asif Zardari Crook Par Excellance, Bhutto-Zardari Feudal Family Corruption, BOOT THE SCOUNDRELS OR SHOWDAZ, Corruption, Corruption, Corruption in Islamic Countries, EXPATRIATE PAKISTANIS SPEAK-UP, Girah Cut, Hypocrites in Islam, Jahiliya "Jihadis"Illiterate Fanatics, Letters to Pakistan Think Tank, Letters to the Editor, LIAR POLITICIANS, Looters and Scam Artists, Morosi Siyasat & Political Crooks, NAWAZ SHARIF, PAKISTAN'S CORRUPT POLITICAL PARTIES:PPP, Pakistan's Ruling Elite Feudals Industrialists, PML (N) CORRUPTION, PPP Choor, ZARDAR'S CORRUPTION on March 21st, 2013
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LETTER TO EDITOR
March 20th, 2013
MNA Disqualified
Lahore High Court (LHC) on Tuesday declared PML-N MNA Khadim Hussain Wattoo ineligible for having fake degree, Geo News reported. Khadim Hussain was elected Member National Assembly (MNA) on PML-N ticket from Bahawalpur. LHC passed the judgement on a petition filed in August 2010 by Mr. Nawaz Cheema who had contended that Muhammad Akhter Khadim alias Khadim Hussain Wattoo had always cheated election commission by submitting bogus degrees and adopting dishonest practices in elections from 1985 to 2008.
The MNA has been unseated at a time when the NA itself has been dissolved for completing its tenure. One wonders if the NA had still some more life the ‘honourable’ MNA would have kept enjoying his untouchable status and stature! Anyway, now the question arises that would the salaries and various other expenses incurred on the perks and privileges of the ‘honourable’ member of most august house of the country for the period that he was its mighty member be recovered from him with interest or not? Not only that, the matter of one’s proffering a fake and false degree without having honestly passed a certain examination is not an ordinary act of perjury!! It is a well thought out and planned premeditated crime and committed willfully and with the full knowledge of its perpetrator. Such a scourge of the society must not be left lightly. He must be punished severely to the utmost and made a horrible example to act as a deterre nt for the others.
Col. Riaz Jafri (Retd)
Rawalpindi 46000
Pakistan
E.mail: [email protected]
Posted by admin in ARCHIVES ARTICLE, BABIES KILLED IN DRONE ATTACKS, Extrajudicial Killings by PPP Government, Pakistan Security and Defence: Enemy & Threats (Internal & External), Pakistan-A Nation of Hope, PPP 's Raja Rental Pervez Corruption, THE BATTLE FOR PAKISTAN SERIES, ZARDAR'S CORRUPTION on March 20th, 2013
Leading up to the NATO Conference in Chicago last Friday, the U.S. was hopeful that President Zardari of Pakistan would announce the reopening of U.S. military supply routes in Pakistan, according to an article published in the Guardian of London on May 21, but their hopes were dashed. Zardari, who was invited at the last minute for a trilateral conference with U.S. President Obama and Afghan President Karzai, said, in a bilateral meeting with Hillary Clinton, that he would open the supply routes, but first the U.S. would have to apologize for killing 24 Pakistani soldiers during an air attack on a military base on the Afghan border last December and commit to ending Drone strikes inside Pakistan. President Obama did not give a private audience to the Pakistani President. In fact, it appears that American officials were not shy about expressing their displeasure with Pakistan at the Conference.
“Obama, at the opening of the second day of the NATO summit Monday morning, demonstrated his displeasure with the Pakistan government by singling out for mention the Central Asia countries and Russia that have stepped in to replace the Pakistan supply route. He made no mention of Pakistan, even though Zardari was in the room at the time. To ram home the point, the US defense secretary, Leon Panetta, also held a meeting at the NATO summit with senior ministers from Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Panetta expressed his “deep appreciation” for their support.”
This is a sharp rebuke, given the level of ongoing support that Pakistan has provided to the U.S./NATO war in Afghanistan, which has lasted more than 10 years. Mr. Zardari was apparently under some serious pressure to capitulate. According to an Article in the Christian Science Monitor on May 22, there were high hopes for a deal when he attended the NATO meeting. It appears, however, that he offered to reopen the routes, without demanding the cessation of the Drone Strikes, at a price about 20x higher than what the U.S./NATO had been paying before the routes were closed, an offer unlikely to be accepted . Meanwhile, back in Pakistan, according to any number of sources, Prime Minister Gilani has been convicted by the powerful Supreme Court of Pakistan for refusing to reopen an old corruption case against President Zardari. Their government is in a very vulnerable position.
This is not a happy circumstance in a country where the civilian government has frequently been removed by a military coup, and Mr. Zardari’s father in law was actually executed by Zia al Haq, the military dictator, supported by the U.S., who removed him from office. From the viewpoint of the Pakistani government, this is a defeat any way you look at it. If even the reputedly corrupt Asif Zardari cannot bring himself to reopen the supply routes while the drone strikes continue to wreak havoc on the civilian population of North Waziristan, and cause upheaval in the general population of Pakistan, then it might be time to revisit the policy. However, the self proclaimed Masters of the Universe do not see it that way. This is their world and they will have their way. Violence, humiliation and oppression are their tools of choice. The lives of individuals have no meaning for them, and their mantra of freedom and democracy is meant to drown out the cries of the impoverished and brutalized masses of their victims. As you may imagine, an insult to a already debased opponent was hardly an adequate response to the refusal of a chattel to provide the expected services. So, that wasn’t the end of the affair.
Even as the beleaguered President of Pakistan was being shown the good will of the U.S. Government and their NATO allies along with their contempt for his country and the people who live there, a successful Drone Strike that targeted an Egyptian Jihadist named Saeed al-Masri, or Yazid, killed half a dozen men and 3 small children. “The Face of Collateral Damage”, an article by Jefferson Morley onSalon.com provides the details and a photo of one of the children, a small girl named Fatima. Fatima was not a member of Yazid’s family (not that that should matter) but the child of an associate who had already been killed along with his wives and other children in a previous drone strike on his vehicle. Fatima was killed in the compound where she lived in the village of Mohammed Khel in North Waziristan not far from the other villages listed below. Apparently this strike was not counted with the ones listed below because there was an actual ‘militant’ targeted. Despite the deaths of several children, it didn’t play into the global accounting.
Beginning the same day the conference closed, on May 21, 22 and 24, 3 separate U.S. Drone Strikes in North Waziristan killed 20 people and wounded many more. On the Monday the 21st of May, a compound (in our frame of reference, that would be a home) in the town of Mirinshah was hit with 2 Hellfire missiles, resulting in 4 deaths and a number of injuries. On Tuesday, a Mosque in a nearby village was struck by 2 Hellfire missiles during morning prayers, resulting in 10 fatalities and more injuries. On Thursday, a bakery in another village in the region was struck with Hellfire missiles, resulting in 5 fatalities. My Google Drone Alert was flooded with these events for the entire week. Headlines in India, Pakistan, Russia, China, the U.S., U.K. and Canada echoed “Drone Attack Kills 10″, “US Drone Strike ‘Kills 5′ in North Waziristan” , “5 Killed in Pakistan Drone Strike” ,, “Drone Attack in North Waziristan Kills 5″ and on and on. These were so called Signature Strikes so they did not target any identified individual.
Local people said that those killed in these strikes were ‘villagers’. Across the international press, the victims were referred to variously, as ‘militants’, ‘suspected militants’ and ‘people’. Some of the U.S. press presented them as ‘suspected’ militants and ‘supporters’ of terrorists. Even after looking at all those articles, I don’t know their names. I don’t believe the people who called the strikes know who they were. ABC News referred to the victims as militants in every case, and helpfully provided a Google terrain map with a single marker designated ‘Pakistan’. At least I can name the towns, and provide maps showing the locations of the strikes. The town struck on Monday was Mirinshah, a significant town in the region. The Mosque struck on Tuesday was in the village of Mir Ali, about 15 miles East of Mirinshah, and on Thursday the Bakery was struck on Thursday in the village of Khassokhel, not far from Mir Ali.
The Western press coverage of these events provides the big picture. The Global Post, an internet news source has “Back to Back U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan Test Diplomatic Standoff Over Supply Lines”, and then “Drone Strikes Continue to Pound Pakistan’s Northwest”. Yes, I’ll say that’s a test of the diplomatic standoff. An ‘official’ is quoted in the article as saying the victims were Uzbeks and other foreigners. They give no evidence of how he would know. Speaking of officials, the day of the first strike, the Christian Science Monitor ran “Pakistani Official: Position to Soften on NATO Supply Line”, where they cite a Pakistani official and a prominent Pakistani journalist saying that Pakistan is going to have to bite the bullet because they can’t win this one. They indicate that the negotiations were derailed by Zardari’s request for higher transit fees. But the bottom line is that there is nothing to negotiate because the Pakistani people will no longer tolerate U.S. Drone attacks and the U.S. has no intention of discontinuing them. The next day, the headline was “US Drone Strike in Pakistan Highlights Divergent Interests if US, Pakistan”. I would say, the strike[s] highlight the near infinite disparity in power between the US and Pakistan; at least that is what the U.S. seems to be asserting.
The article elaborates the inconvenience that Pakistan has cause to the U.S. and NATO by closing the supply lines, and says that inviting President Zardari to the NATO Conference was a goodwill gesture. So, Zardari spent 17 hours or so on an airplane twice, so he could spend a few hours schmoozing with the folks who matter because they thought he was finally going to give in and violate the wishes of his domestic constituency by offering them what they want, but he spoiled the gesture by refusing to do so.
Two later pieces of news summarize the U.S. perspective on this situation. On Friday, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette ran “Drone Strikes Continue in Pakistan as Tensions Increase and Senate Panel Cuts Aid”. Punishment is being piled on punishment, insult added to injury, in an attempt to bring the Pakistani government to it’s knees. All that is left is Regime Change. Interestingly, if you look at the first few paragraphs of this article, it seems like that is where they are heading. And then, today in the New York Times, “Secret Kill List Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will”, 8 pages of arrogant, bluster, wherein we read such gems as:
“When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.”
and
“Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks. “
following a reference to “the president’s attempt to apply the “just war” theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict.”
Then we have:
“Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
and
“Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counter-terrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy. ” [You could have fooled me]
and yet
“In Pakistan, Mr. Obama had approved not only “personality” strikes aimed at named, high-value terrorists, but “Signature” strikes that targeted training camps and suspicious compounds in areas controlled by militants.” [What principle guides this decision?]
The Republicans ‘get it’:
“Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the intelligence committee. “They are not going to advertise that, but that’s what they are doing.”
Mr. President, I have to ask, “What Principles are reflected here? It would appear that Mr. Obama is playing God. Seduced by the power of the Presidency, and at the same time barred from constructive domestic action, President Obama has turned to the minute details of day to day issues of life and death for strangers on the far side of the planet who do not have it in their power to protect themselves from his personally structured version of state terrorism. And last week, his eminence apparently decided to teach the Pakistanis a lesson about defying the mighty powers of the American Olympians. Perhaps, Mr. Obama, you would deign to look down from your lofty post and say a few words of comfort to little Fatima and the dozens of others like her.
Judy Bello is currently a full time activist thanks to the harsh and unforgiving work environment in the Software Development Industry. Finally free to focus on her own interests in her home office, she is active with The Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars, and with Fellowship of Reconciliation Middle East Task Force and often posts on their blog at http://forusa.org. She has been to Iran twice with FOR Peace Delegations, and spent a month in the Kurdish city of Suleimaniya in 2009. Her personal blog, Towards a Global Perspective, is at http://blog.papillonweb.net and she is administers the Upstate anti-Drone Coalition website athttp://upstatedroneaction.org.
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