The ongoing US strategy to strike inside the Pakistani based territory-Fata _ the Pakistani government’s remonstrance and the people’s outrage notwithstanding,the US administration’s stand regarding the drone attack-policy_ has virtually exposed the clandestine US approach regarding drones that says that there is no valid justification of using the drone technology’s other that to protecting the US geo-strategic interests by means of applying the doctrine of ‘strategic realism and that of preventive realism’ that was previously adopted by the former Bush administration.
Many fairly argue that the White House policy of making use of the drone technology in Pakistan seems nothing but advocating the US government’s policy to privatize or corprotize the US’s war fare industry.The strategists do reject the thesis that the drone attacks cause less collateral damage as compared to the other techniques.The fact is that the drone attacks do harm the ''code of international law which protects the lives of the innocent civilians.
I don’t think the innocents killed by a drone will like the USA any better than those killed by some other means. Similarly, just because the projectile is shot from a drone does not mean the people killed are not innocent.
The drones are merely a mechanism for the US to pursue imperial hegemony without having the trouble of invading or declaring war on her client states in actuality.
It’s funny that this administration morally admonishes pouring water over their prisoners’ faces and the use of military tribunals, but if these same men were in the hinterlands of Yemen or Pakistan they’d have no problem dropping a Hellfire missile on them.
So take a typical aircraft. You have a joystick, from that joystick you have wires going to motors that power and control the surfaces of the aircraft. On one side the joystick connects with the pilot, on the other side it controls the aircraft.
Are these Predator “drones” any different? They still have a pilot, a joystick, and control surfaces all linked together to allow the pilot to control the aircraft. The difference is instead of having wires to a joystick in the cockpit, they use wireless connections to go to a joystick somewhere in Nevada.
Does that sound like a drone to you? All they did was make the connection longer and the pilot safer, this “drone” business is complete bullshit.
The region in which the United States military is launching drone assaults (i.e. Waziristan) is not even under the control of the Pakistani government (it would require a Pakistani military effort to even control the region) so it is not an attempt by the American government to control the Pakistani government. Facts can get in the way of a good story.
All that the drone means is that it is a remote controlled aircraft, no one is trying to assert that there are no pilots of the aircraft. No one is trying to assert what you are saying that they are.
How is it quite purposeful? Have you ever seen the commercials for the United States air force that show off drones? It is very clear from those commercials that the drones are remote controlled from a distance, even advocates of drones will reinforce the fact that there is still a pilot remote-controlling the drone. Furthermore, even the language used reinforces my point: a “drone” is not a robot, it does not control itself, rather a drone is remote controlled from a distance.
Honestly, I cannot see how your point is anything but, at best, wishful thinking.
No, the billions in “foreign aid” are enough to temper the obedience of Pakistan’s unpopular client central government. As far as I know Pakistan still claims sovereignty over Waziristan and other “rebel” provinces, so America coerces the government into using their own army to wage the ground war while American drones have supremacy to engage in air conflict without risk of casualties, all under the auspices of counter-terrorism. The de facto situation can get in the way of good neocon propaganda. [8-|]
I guess I had a bad understanding of the word drone. I always thought it was autonomous but I guess it does refer to RC (yes I just looked up “drone” in the dictionary).
I still think there is some unneeded confusion around the word, for example worker bees are called drones but would lean towards an autonomous definition in that case rather than a remote controlled one. Perhaps some purposeful Orwellian manipulation of the word has already happened.
Then there is some truth to an “autonomous” drone even with the military drones. They can be RC’d but they can also go on autopilot for hours or days and hold a position. If you had reason to be afraid of these dones, you would see one in the sky and wonder if anyone was watching or not. That is what I am getting at with the Orwellian twist of the word.
Soon we may see these drones patrolling our streets, I have heard they already have some in Houston.
Keep in mind that the aid is not necessarily to the current regime, but to the Pakistani government in general. Hence it is pretty hard to prove that it is used to buy-off the Pakistani vote.
Furthermore, while Musharref was not popular amongst the Pakistani people, he was popular amongst the military though and it was from the military (and not United States intervention) that he derived his legitimacy while he ruled, the current President is the widower of the popular Benazir Bhutto and did win a large majority of the necessary votes to win in 2008.
However, if you really want to prove that it is an “unpopular government” feel free to actually use empirical evidence to prove your point.
And this is where you show you have absolutely no knowledge of the situation you are speaking of. The reason that the Pakistanis are using their own army in Waziristan is that the area is controlled by tribal leaders giving sanctuary to terrorists who pose not only a problem for American interests in Afghanistan, but also pose a problem for Pakistan. For instance, Al Qaeda’s Baitullah Mehsud took responsibility for the suicide bombing which assassinated Benazir Bhutto. The Islamic terrorism, which is being cultivated in Waziristan under control of the tribes, is clearly also a problem for Pakistan.
Furthermore, while air-combat might be able to take out leaders, its effectiveness is low and it does not actually grapple with the primary problem: Waziristan is under the control of local tribes that are more than willing to give sanctuary to Islamic terrorism.
Remember, the de facto situation is the situation that actually matters. It does not matter that Pakistan claims sovereignty over Waziristan if it cannot effectively exercise it. While the drone attacks are a clear violation of Pakistani sovereignty (if they are done without Pakistani approval), it does not mean that Pakistan is a client state because of that.
What other purpose is it for? Do you think it’s a coincidence that places like Egypt, Pakistan, Israel, Jordan etc. top the list for U.S. foreign aid? It’s all part of a muddled Pax Americana neo-imperialism strategy.
I’m sorry, the swathes of Pakistani territory embroiled in a civil war don’t count?
Look, I understand and actually agree with your outlook on the situation, and I don’t mean to quibble over silly details, however, the great bulk of the conflict in Pakistan and Afghanistan has more to do with feuding tribes and their distrust of centralized government and less to do with a handful of international terrorists. America is only dropping itself in the middle of what is, essentially, civil strife. External powers have been embroiled in this region before and they have left it in just the same way as they found it.
The neocon delusion of “nation building”, while noble, is just colonialism by another name; a pure imperialist farce. The local players know this because the Soviet Union tried it, the British Empire tried it etc. etc. They’ve seen 'em come and they’ve seen 'em go. You ever stop to think that one of their primary reasons for hatred of the interfering regime is that it props up the very centralized authority they, quite reasonably, despise?
America knows it’s not really fighting terrorists, that’s like chasing your own shadow. What they want is a regional hegemony under the umbrella of US-backed central regimes so the energy resources of places like the Caspian Sea basin can be tapped away from Russian and Chinese influence. The fact that there a couple dozen international terrorists in the vicinity of all this is just a convenient feat for propaganda and military recruitment.
It could be done simply to equip the current regime, an action American analysts have decided to be beneficial to American interests in the region. American foreign policy has had a hard time ensuring that the factions and regimes that it equips remain on its side, for a lack of a better term, thus showing that American aid does not create client states, but that the states that receive American aid are still capable to decide their own destiny. American aid in the Middle East in the last couple decades has resulted in the equiping of factions and governments that would later go against American interests in the region (e.g. Iran and Iraq in the Iran-Iraq-War and the Mujahideen).
American foreign policy has also never really ever created client states outside of its hemisphere in a true imperalistic sense, rather it has been more than content to simply what were once conquered nations practice self-determination while maintaining military bases there. Even in the sphere American policy has been very active in, NATO, nations are not kept in the alliance under fear of invasion (France under de Gaulle left the alliance in 1958 and no invasion or sanctions followed against them).
Honestly, I do not believe there is evidence at all to refer to America’s current foreign policy as neo-imperalist (even the governments of Afghanistan dna Iraq are relatively free to make their own decisions), but feel free to prove me wrong.
For one things, it not really a civil war, but really just an extension of sour historical relations between the the tribal people of Waziristan and their southern neighbors. But honestly, they were never really part of Pakistan to begin with, but the company that the tribes have been keeping is most definitely a security problem for the Pakistani government. After all, I would call having a popular presidential candidate assassinated a breach of security, and a just cause for seeking the neutralization of the guilty party.
Its quite historically dishonest to equivocate what the British Empire and Soviet Union have done in the region with what the United States has done. Unlike the former two, the latter has only come into the region in order to overthrow the Taliban, and have left the Afghani people essentially free to create their own government. While it is certainly interventionism, it is not imperialism in any meaningful sense of the term.
The Taliban that is fighting against American forces never opposed the centralized Taliban regime that enforced Sharia law upon Afghanistan. Propping up that the motivation for the insurgency in Afghanistan is opposition to a centralized regime is blind to the fact that the forces running the insurgency were once a centralized regime themselves.
I’ve heard this asserted so many times with no substantiation whatsoever, so make my day and prove it.
Of course this is ignoring the reason that the United States military is in Afghanistan in the first place!
And do you think that honestly proves imperialist intentions? I’ve never said that the Afghanis were absolutely free in creating their own government, and it would be absolutely illogical for American policy to once again let the Taliban run in the elections.
I felt it was funny, because you contrasted the United States with the Soviet Union. Eric Margolis who is an expert on Afghanistan and who was a Cold War warrior and is therefore no Sovietophile has said that the US sponsored elections in Afghanistan are less free than those the Soviets had organized in the 1980s.
Generally I do not think intentions count for much. The Soviets thought of their intervention as a defensive move against the enroaching US and additionaly felt it was desirable because they, by now only lukewarm Communists, thought the Afghan government too ambitious, radical and brutal (in short too Communistic) and set out to replace it with a more moderate faction. Sounds fairly amiable, but we know how it played out on the ground.
What did the Americans not do that the Soviets did? I’m curious to know it what ways the Americans are imposing a less free regime upon Afghanistan as did the Soviets.
Intentions are very important because in analyzing history not only must one keep in mind the actions done, but also the motivations behind those actions.
Actually, the government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan had actually requested Soviet support (after signing a treaty in 1978 that enabled them to call on Soviet support) so the Soviet Union’s intervention there was to actually prop-up the Afghan government against internal rebellions rather than to create. I know nothing of this attempt by the Soviet government to replace the Afghan government, and I sense it never really happened, but feel free to correct me.
It was probably not your intention but this is a loaded question. I did not say anything about which regime was freer. I challenged the statement that today the Afghans are more free to pick the regime they want than they were in the 1980s.
According to Margolis the Soviets permitted people opposed to their presence to run in the elections. They made it difficult for them to win, but they were permitted to participate. The Americans on the contrary barred people from running who are opposed to their presence. So it would seem that Afghans today have less, not more, room to elect the sort of government they want.
In the first hours of the invasion elite Soviet units raided the presidential palace under orders to execute the head of state. He was killed in the raid along with 200 of his guards.